Fear the abandoned car seat of suburbia. Fear it!

I got a good start on my Borges tonight before Fliptop Pegleg showed up. In the intervening period a Christian men's group was meeting to plan a "Men's Breakfast" event. One guy was clearly the alpha and leading the meeting, and he browbeat the others in a brisk, upbeat way about a shockingly long list of items that had to be prepared. He spoke rapidly about food, music, chairs. Periodically he'd come to a decision point and obtain consensus in a flash: "So we're looking at Wednesday for that, about 7. Is that okay for you Craig? Ryan? How about you, Bill?" The other men responded in respectful monosyllables. I wouldn't want to hang out with this guy but I bet that breakfast is going to be planned like the Invasion of Normandy.

They closed with the classic O.C. White Guy Evangelical Prayer, which is always slightly too long, full of catch phrases, and begins "Heavenly Father, you are awesome..." Alpha guy stayed for about an hour afterwards talking to another man. Again he was in charge, banging out paragraphs while looking intense and leaning forward; the other man nodded, agreed, chimed in occasionally.

Fliptop Pegleg arrived and ignored my book, sat down, made himself comfortable. The monologue wasn't as painful this time, because he was talking about diabetes. He has to be real about that stuff, and it leads him to talk about other real things. He told me his father died of diabetes and TB when FTPG himself was only six, in 1949. He saw his father the day before he died, but couldn't be in the same room; he got to talk to him from outside the hospital window on an outdoor bridge to another building.

I can't forget that he's unethical, creepy, probably criminal, and certainly unpleasant to be with, but it humanizes him a bit when he stops talking about video hardware or girls' butts.

When I got home tonight the neighbors had abandoned a child seat on their front driveway so I took some weird, horror-movie style night shots of it with my house in the background. Baby stuff is generically spooky.

Okay, this is pretty messed-up.

Russian Exorcism Audio Recording (660K Windows Media audio file).

Yerrrkkkghghhg BLAAARGGHGHG Hhhwwhughwgw ssssAAAATTAAAnnNnnn's SSttaaalllEeee NillAWAFERZ!!!!

It's kind of disturbing to the kind of person what would be disturbed by this kind of thing, so don't click unless you're not that kind of person who would find it kind of disturbing.

via outsider_music

Garrison Keillor is a dick

Faux folksy fuck flails at flip, frivolous fun.

via waxy.org links

Today's Los Angeles power outage

The Los Angeles Times article on today's big power outage in L.A. is mind-boggling.

The DWP says that workers cut one bundle of wires, and that this resulted in a cascading series of shorts and surges that took out half the city plus all of Burbank and chunks of Glendale as bits of the system protected themselves by shutting down. But the system "is not fragile", according to their big cheese. I just run the infrastructure for a big website, but if one cable cut could take down the site like that I would offer my resignation. You buy two cables, you see. Two!

Is it that difficult to prevent these cascading shutdowns? In 1996 an interstate power line failure caused half the West to go dark. One would think that the automatic overload prevention systems would have been worked on a bit in the last decade.

We don't need another Nero

1. Many thanks to explosivo for showing me Pandora. It's a make-your-own radio station that learns your preferences. It reminds me of the late lamented Firefly in its uncanny ability to find music you like given a set of known favorites. Very cool.
   
   
2. I hope against hope that Joshua Clark's "reporting" from NOLA (as reported by fengi is some kind of satire. But it's probably not.
   
   
3. KILL THE CLAW!
   
   
4. Via cruel.com the amazing news that abortion is often the result of failed sodomy. No idea what the mechanism is here, even after reading the article. I should have paid more attention in my Freedom Science classes.
   
   
5. Photoshop contest: If goths ruled the world. (via The Null Device.
   
   
6. Prostitutes decide to become marketers; punch line not necessary.
   
   
7. Just what we needed, burning bullets (via New Scientist and defensetechblog).
   
   
8. We will have now have shorter, stupider "reader-friendly" editions of the great books that idiots don't read anyway!

The 7'1" behemoth you adore on TV just had you arrested, meathead.

Every dumbass sports fan's nightmare: Busted for gaybashing by Shaq.


AIIIIRRBAAAAALLLLLLL

lower the brain!

Saw the psych doc today. We agreed that things were going better but could be improved. I no longer hit the bottom floor of depression and stay there for days and days; the worst low I've had in the last month was 12 hours or so. Anxiety has mostly been tamed, and my concentration is much better.

My main complaint still is that I get "tipped over" by triggering situations and then go straight down to the worst possible place and get stuck there. Any kind of confrontation will do it, as will any situation where I feel socially or personally rejected. The reaction is vastly disproportionate to the severity of the incident. It's been a lot more frequent (although not nearly as long-lasting) lately, probably because I'm working on that stuff with EMDR and other psychotherapeutic techniques.

So we're increasing the serotonin drug (Lexapro), which he says may increase my ability to "not give a damn" in his words. Giving it a month's try anyway.

Another odd brain pattern we discussed was my dissociations. When I'm feeling very bad emotionally, I alternate being flooded in anxiety and despair with a detached, anesthetized state. I have that distant "wrapped in cotton wool" feeling that I get with a fever, my senses are generally reduced, and social interaction is nearly impossible. At my worst I can cycle between these two a few times per hour even, although that's rare. Again, this has been worse lately because I have to deal with the uglies in psychotherapy. The therapist has noticed these anesthetized moments and sometimes will walk me out of it by having me go through my senses, notice colors of objects in the room, rub my hands, etc.

The doc said that sometimes low doses of neuroleptics (the drugs most often given to people who are having serious psychotic symptoms) can be very helpful, especially over a short difficult period. That was interesting to me, since the very very worst of those horrible/anesthetized cycling times made me wonder if I was "going crazy" at times. I think this was mostly because of the rapid change in mental state, and also coming out of dissociation feels almost like waking from a fugue. I remember at one point, long ago, being afraid to sleep because I thought I would wake up "crazy".

In any case there isn't much need for that right now, but it made me realize that I probably had seen over the wall into psychosis a few times. Glad I'm on this side.

St. Bernard and Plaquemines are screwed.

Oxfam has a report from the poor and isolated St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes in southern Louisiana.

The rural areas there are pretty much totally depopulated and everyone's livelihoods are destroyed. There were a lot of farmers and fishermen there, and that ain't happening. And, in general, the people in those parishes get screwed when government money is being handed out because they lose at the political game. Plus, as a bonus, the place is full of heavy chemical industries and refineries which got all stirred up and spread on those parishes like peanut butter. Householders are being told not to return home until they have tetanus and hep A and B inoculations.

Oxfam is trying to raise $2 million for both short- and long-term aid to St. Bernard and Plaquemines. Help if you can!