We got through about 3 songs before it died again, so I had to very quickly attach the opening band’s bass pickup to my instrument, which is about when a drink spilled on my head and my Ampeg went “poof” (that part’s my fault, and I have an extra amp to hold me over).

So today during lunch, I brought the busted pickup to my local instrument repair shop. Where, of course, it worked fine. I won’[t be so lucky at practice tonight, I can guarantee that.

“Oh Jesus-fucking-Christ,” I said, bolting upright in bed. It was 6:20 this morning, and the neighbor’s grandson was pitching one of his legendary psychotic fits. The banging on the wall suggested he was trying to dislodge whatever was in his skull through sheer force of impact. He was jumping up and down so hard, the floorboards on our side of the parti-wall were shaking. OHGODOHGODOHGODOHGOD PLEEEEEASE GET OUTTA MY HEAD GET OUT GET OUT! If we could hear him that clearly through a brick wall, I can only imagine what it was like for the people who are on the window side of my neighbor’s house. OH GOD OH GOD. SLAM SLAM BANG CRASH! SLAMMITY SLAM SLAM SLAM.

I rolled over in bed and muttered to Christina, “I think I’m going to call the cops”, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I decided not to.

Why? because less than a week ago, Philly cops responding to a call about an out-of-control teenager with mental health issues Tasered the kid until he died.

I feel bad for my neighbor: raising your grandchild as your son can’t be easy for anyone, and when it’s complicated by mental health issues, it’s even harder. I hate what’s going on next door (and i really hate that it wakes me up at 6-fucking-20 in the morning), but what’s gonna happen if I call the cops? The poor woman has enough on her hands without grieving for a dead kid (and i certainly don’t want the guilt of being the catalyst for that death on my shoulders). Furthermore, what kind of ill-will will it breed if I call one of the city’s mental health agencies on my neighbor?

It’s a real clusterfuck of a situation. I have a huge load of brain-intensive activities tonight too, which require me to be intellectually sharp. I’m on 5 hours of sleep or less because of the maniac next door, and I’m not sure if there’s even a solution.

I think everybody knows I’m pretty critical of the Obama administration, including this week’s “buck up/get over it” comments, but after a brief tour around the blogosphere today, I’m beginning to side with Joe Biden: jesus fucking christ, STOP WITH THE FUCKING WHINING.

I’m not even going to link to these people. Cenk Uyger’s raging about “scapegoating the base”. The comments at firedoglake, a site I actually enjoy, have been nothing but whining for days now. Oh did i say “days”, i meant months, to the point where i read the articles and ignore the rest.

Susie Madrak gets props for her well-earned hippie punching question, but that has led to the pixelated equivalent of reams of whining: Mithras whines about Susie, Susie whines about Mithras, Booman whines about both of them, and then whines to me about being negative, while I in return whine at him about his mancrush on Obama. And don’t get me started on my own fucking whining: if whining could heat my house, I’d tell the gas company to go pound sand.

In the meantime, Jane Hamsher whines about how the shitty health insurance reforms are shitty and calls out John Cole from balloon-juice. Not to be outwhined, Cole retorts, whinily, that Jane is not only mischaracterizing him, she’s also a whiner. Dougj, who writes about economics at balloon-juice, makes fun of the Cole-Hamsher whinefest by posting a video clip from the 1980s sitcom “Cheers”, in which Sam and Diane scream at each other before realizing they’re in-love and start making out. The response to the video by balloon-juice commenters is, unsurprisingly, more whining about how sexist the video is.

Frankly, the only blogger who has a right to whine at this point is atrios, and yes he’s getting in on the act too (albeit without being as whiny as everyone else, because as he says here, “If they’d listened to me things would be better.”

And this is not to give any quarter to the whiny fucking whiners in the White House. “Oh boo hoo, those bloggers are being MEAN to us, whine whine whine fucking whine.”

It’s like the whole commentariat needs a fucking pacifier. It’s getting really really fucking old.

As Barack Obama appeared on television Tuesday to declare the end of the U.S. combat role in Iraq, were viewers happiest in Baghdad, Washington, D.C., or Tehran?
The obvious answer would seem to be Washington or Baghdad. In fact, some analysts believe the real winner of the war in Iraq is neither the Iraqis, nor Americans, but the Iranians…

The spring’s election and its aftermath, Bazzi said, underscored how effective Iranian influence has been, especially with maneuvering between Iraq’s Shiite factions. “I’d argue that Iran started filling the political void that the U.S. has left in Iraq years ago, and now it becomes even easier with fewer U.S. troops,” he said, noting that the 50,000 U.S. troops that will remain on the ground concern the Iranians. “On a political level, Iranians have played politics in Iraq much more effectively than the U.S. Part of that is that all the Iraqi factions recognized that Iran is not going anywhere, but the U.S. was going to leave, but the Iraqis are stuck with their neighbors.” The Iranians, he said, are “getting a little concerned about the political stalemate in Iraq.”
Iranians, Bazzi said, are “keen on playing this role of the political broker.” To that end, they called almost the entire Iraqi leadership to Tehran right after elections. “The Iranians view their strategic interest in Iraq on several levels. Immediate, of maintaining a friendly government in Baghdad, because they don’t want to go back to the days of Saddam where there was an extremely adversarial threat next door. The Iranians will want a friendly, Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and they see that as the new reality.”
A weak Iraq is also in Iran’s interest, Bazzi explained. “If Iraq is not as dominate as it once was, if it is friendly and compliant, then it enables Iran to maintain regional dominance in the Persian Gulf.” Finally, he said, Iraq has become a “bargaining chip and a proxy in their conflict with the United States.”

You wanna know how many times people like me pointed this out this likely outcome? More fucking times than I can count. And you know, I’m not some kind of foreign policy genius. I’m not a diplomat or a career employee of the state department or an ambassador. I wasn’t educated at some ivy league school. I’m a common, run-of-the-mill idjit.

And it’s like this for everything: the economy’s not picking up steam? Well maybe the stimulus shouldn’t have been weighted so much in favor of tax cuts. People are pissed about the shitty health insurance reforms we got instead of the health care reforms we were promised? Ya don’t say: maybe you should have had that public option that 66% of the country favored. The Democrats are perceived as weak? Well gee, maybe it has something to do with letting the Republicans steamroll you without fighting back.

You watch these institutions makes predictably bad decisions over and over again, and you don’t care to write about it anymore. The fact that people like Tom Friedman and William Kristol still have jobs says all I need to about the state of our discourse and our national conversation.

In short, it’s one driven by dishonest hacks who may be smart but don’t seem to know anything about anything, abetted by a media that’s more interested in spinning stories and ginning up opinion debates than in reporting actual facts.

And that’s why it’s getting difficult to keep up a steady stream of bloggery: every post boils down to “duh gee, no shit, sherlock.”

Last night, after seeing Brendan Cooney’s masterful score for “Battleship Potemkin” (a one-night-only performance), Christina and I hurried over to Nara for birthday sushi. The restaurant closed at 10:00, so at 9:25 we were pretty assured of a nice meal to cap off the evening. The waitress greeted us at the door, led us to a table, and gave us a couple of menus.

Then she left, and never came back. We could see her alright, having a perfectly lovely conversation with the guys who roll the maki, but she didn’t so much as offer us a glass of water for the next ten minutes.

It wasn’t like the restaurant was filled to capacity. Far from it: the only other guests were at one of the long banquet tables, a gaggle of screaming girls from UPenn whose parents clearly never took the time to teach their ivy league progeny how to behave in a restaurant. They were so loud that I literally had to yell at the top of my voice for Christina to hear me. In addition, these shrieking young ladies had already been served.

I spent 1984-1998 working in restaurants. I understand how hard it is to give customers individual attention when the dining room is packed. But this wasn’t the case at Nara.

Dining out it expensive, and doubly so when it comes to sushi. When I’m paying top dollar for my food, I expect to be treated like a valued customer. As I sat at the table, hungry and at a later hour than I usually eat dinner, I remembered that this had happened to me before at Nara. The first time is a fluke; the second, is a pattern.

Finally we got up, and as we walked out I delivered a loud “GOOD BYE” to the cooks. The waitress never turned around once. By this time, it was pushing 10:00 PM, which is when restaurants typically close in Philly on weeknights. Christina suggested heading to South Philly to find eats, but I rejected that: who wants to gamble a 20-minute drive if there’s no guarantee of food at the end? I suggested hitting a bar for some grub (not that I wanted pub food, but whatever, I was hungry), but she pointed out that with the Phillies about to make it to the World Series for the second year in a row, we probably wouldn’t get a table. And she was right: every bar we passed by was packed with screaming fans.

Instead, we headed home and I made myself an impromptu eggplant parmegiana. As it cooked, I went to every website that reviews restaurants and trashed Nara for their shitty service.

Once again, that’s Nara, located at 40th and Spruce, downstairs. Shitty service, dingy atmosphere, screaming Penn students.

You’d be better off eating out of a dumpster behind a fishmarket, and the feral cats would probably be friendlier than the staff.

I just found out today my aunt is dying at the end stages of Alzheimers, and due to a variety of obstacles including my own inertia and stupid laziness, I haven’t seen her in years. I’m her favorite nephew, and I have been altogether absent from her life in the past decade. The guilt is crushing.

My job is in danger thanks to Dominic “Satan”Pileggi: like everyone else who contrats with the state to provide services, we’re running out of money.

And I just learned my neighbor’s son, who is a good guy, just got shot and is in the hospital, hit in the legs and torso.

It’s a little much.

Who stole our change?

Who hijacked a popular uprising that was going to put a stop to business as usual in Washington, D.C.?

What happened to Barack Obama on his way to the White House? …

There was one thing Obama absolutely had to do, even before tackling an economic meltdown and the Wall Street and big bank rip-offs:

He had to reassure Americans that we all live under the rule of law; that no one by virtue of holding the highest offices in the land, or having the biggest bank account, is above the law.

It was incumbent on new President Obama to step back and let justice be done. Let the investigators do their job, Not only to let justice be done but let justice be seen to be done.

But no. He said he wanted to focus on the future, not revisit the past. He needed to get moving on stimulating a floundering economy. And he screwed that up, too, reaching out to the very pirates who had looted their stockholders, their own companies, their own country to find someone to appoint as Treasury Secretary, thus reassuring Wall Street that he wasn’t going to turn over any apple carts.

He declared that we, as a nation and people, would no longer torture our enemies and suspected enemies; would no longer lock them up and throw away the key; would no longer violate our own laws and those of the international conventions governing warfare.

But he trooped over to the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters to reassure those who had “only followed orders” when they tortured and abused helpless prisoners that they would never face justice. Nor would those who gave those illegal orders.

Go read the rest, and try to tell me Galloway’s wrong.
And people wonder why I get angry, and have no tolerance for politicians.
And people wonder why I’m cynical and have no faith in America.

We’re led by feckless liars who are more concerned with perpetuating their own careers than with doing the right thing for their constituents.

That’s just a fact. When was the last time you saw a politicians take a real risk on something that pissed off the big-money guys? Even in health care reform, single payer was taken off the table before it was even on the table to begin with, and even as we speak, it’s taking massive citizen action to get our representatives to represent, you know, citizens instead of corporations.

This is not rocket science. Unfortunately, your representative thinks you’re an idiot.

This grant has been a little more straightforward, but in the typical federal government style i’ve grown used to, there’s always something totally fucked up. And in this case, the fucked up begins with the application itself.

One thing you have to understand about the feds is that they have the Sadim Touch: that’s the opposite of the Midas Touch, in which everything you do turns to shit. In the past this has included forcing grantees to apply using an application no one else uses called the Pure Edge viewer, the pdf equivalent of Betamax. This year, the application is adobe-based, and in a rare bit of foresight, the feds realized their usual inefficient and not-quite-up-to-par grant site, grants.gov, would be overwhelmed due to response to the president’s stimulus. They allow you to submit via email.

The application is a VERY dense pdf with upload capabilities, allowing grant applicants to upload all their supporting documents like budgets and job descriptions to one big document and then mailing the whole package in one file. In theory that is.

“In theory” because the upload capability doesn’t always work. In fact, it shuts itself off and on quite randomly. So I was able to upload the project abstract (a word document), but not the project narrative (also a word document). In an hour I may be able to upload the narrative, but who knows.

When this began happening yesterday, I scrolled through the RFP to find the contact name, and dialed Dave, the Grant Officer. a woman answered the phone cheerfully saying “I’m not dave, this is the wrong number!”

“Oh!” I said, surprised. “Guess you’ve been getting a lot of calls related to the–”

“–the citizenship grant, yup, every 5 minutes. The number is one digit off.” She gave me the propoer number, which I dialed. Dave’s voicemail kicked in and explained that he wasn’t available, and if I had a citizenship grant question, I should call a third number, where i would have to leave a voicemail so he could call me back. But when I called that number, no one picked up the phone after a good dozen rings. So I called Dave back and left a message, explaining the problem with the application. He called back, and just like your car stops making that horrible grinding noise when the mechanic looks at it, the application began uploading again. The minute Dave hung up, it stopped working agaibn. great.

This morning, I was able to upload one document before the application had decided it had enough. the deadline is in two hours, and the only reason I’m blogging right now is that I’m waiting on one or two documents that need to be completed. Time is running out…

And so, like the straight shooter I am, I have complied 100%. That hasn’t always been easy: at least once during every visit, Sam wakes up late at night crying because he’s lonely for his mom. I always run into his room and rub his back so he’ll feel secure and fall back asleep, but I always miss letting him hop into bed with us, and I feel guilty leaving him alone in his room. Despite the kicking, it’s nice to have your little guy sleeping next to you. Anyone with kids knows the specific smell of their offspring, and it’s comforting to both the kid and the parent to be that close to each other. I remember running into bed with my mom and dad during thunderstorms or after nightmares, and making a big sandwich as I fell back asleep feeling safe again. But I’ve gone along with this for more than three years, forgoing a lot of snuggles and cuddling with my kid because I took his mom seriously.

Tonight, Sam let me in on a little secret: back home in Montreal, he climbs into Mommy’s bed and sleeps between her and her fiancee.

It’s so nice, so fucking civil, to be on the receiving end of a double standard. It makes me feel like a truly valued partner in Sam’s upbringing, someone who can expect to be treated like an equal, someone whose input actually fucking matters.

And before anyone says I’m flying a little off the handle here, remember, I’m the guy who got two weeks notice, like some dishwasher at McDonalds, before Sam and his mom were supposed to move in that she “got a better deal in Montreal” and -kapowie- the whole thing was off. I don’t get a lot of time with my son, just ten days here and there, sometimes going as much as two months without his physical presence. Last summer, I didn’t even get my usual two weeks at Labor Day and I don’t get it in 2009 either. And as we all know, I’m not going to be seeing him as much after September, so the past four years are probably about as good as it gets for a long time, unless he decides to move down here when he’s older. “Oh but you have Skype!” Yeah, you try to carry on a conversation with a 4 year old over the internet: they’re not too good at that. What kids that age want and need is someone to play with actively, in the flesh. Skype is chump change, a few dimes tossed in a homeless guy’s tin cup.

My relationship with Sam is always at arms’ length due to geography, and in an effort to abide by his mom’s wishes and provide consistency, I’ve kept him at some degree of arms’ length in my own fucking home, never knowing that the same courtesy wasn’t being returned to me.

Whatever whatever whatever. I should probably just suck it up and be grateful for what I have, and that I found out now rather than later.

I’m sure it was a miscommunication or whatever the euphemism is these days. But I’m still not calling back to apologize for yelling.

I asked Jeremy how the move to Nashville was going and how band stuff was working out. “Great!” He said. “The album’s coming out on Pinecastle, and we’ve got tours coming up like crazy.” he began to rattle off a list of festivals, conferences, and other appearances.

“Man oh man, did that bitch fucking ruin my life,” I muttered. “It’s gonna be another 5 years at least before I can do that again.” After Sam was born, any dreams I had been pursing of being a professional musician were shattered, yesterday’s news, inoperable.

“Whaddya mean?” Jeremy asked incredulously. “You get to enjoy your son!”

“Do I?” I asked. “Do I really?”

“Well, uh… umm….” There was a pause.

“I mean, it’s not like I don’t enjoy my time with Sam, but Jeremy, I only get him 70 days each year. That’s not exactly ‘enjoying my son’. That’s ’scrambling to have any time with him at all’ and believe me, those scant fleeting moments don’t do anything at all to balance out the rest of my life, because they’re so infrequent. I mean, if I had him every day, there’d be something to say for your argument, but the reality is that no, I actually DON’T get to enjoy my son. But listen, let’s change the subject: you caught me at a bad time.”

It’s a real sore spot for me, and popped up again yesterday as well when I was working the “Kids’ Day” event my employers sponsored as part of our domestic violence fundraisers. Many of our volunteers have kids too, and they brought them out for face painting, pumpkin-face making, and other activities.

“Where’s you boy, Brendan?” one of my colleagues asked me.

“Um.. he’s up in Montreal? Where he lives?”

“Oh, that’s right. He just visits with you.”

“Yup,” I said tersely and looked the other way. Again the uncomfortable silence, until thankfully another little kid tottered over looking for face paint, and we could both drop the subject.

I think I come off as bitter and angry whenever the topic comes up: playing a wedding earlier this summer, my mandolin player asked me what Sam was up to. “How the hell would I know,” I said flatly and a little beligerently. “He doesn’t live here.”

“No, I mean, what developmental stage is he at?” the guy persisted. And then I had something to talk about, but it was all secondhand. “His mom tells me…” “Well, I heard that…” It’s a really bullshit way to live, and a crappy foundation from which to approach parenting. And since his mom hasn’t exactly been cooperative about getting him on the phone with me, I feel more distant from Sam than I ever have before. It’s gonna be pushing two months by the time I see him again.

Two fucking months to see my own kid. Two fucking months, and everything I ever wanted in life a total shambles. And when I read heart-wrenching articles like this one about the children of soldiers who’ve died in Iraq, many who were only toddlers when Mom or Dad went up in a cloud of smoke, steel and sand it gets me all fucked up.

It was the first time that Ms. Kross had shown the letter to CamerynLee, a sprite of a girl with a gentle voice and large blue eyes. “I think about him every day,” CamerynLee said as she studied the letter. “I remember cooking with him. He was helping me flip the sausages. I remember him carrying me. I wish he was still alive.”

In some cases, involving children who were very young or not even born when their mothers or fathers died, the surviving parents attempt to create memories.

I wonder if my son remembers me sometimes, and why he never wants to talk on the phone when I call. I worry that he sees his mom’s boyfriend as his parent, and I worry that her boyfriend has a greater presence in his life than I do. I wonder if she’s going to disappear with him again, giving me two weeks notice that they’re moving even farther away.

Some birthday.

Added: and what a egomaniacal dick I am comparing my grief to the grief of kids who’ve lost their parents. I gotta get a sense of proportion.