Crap Blogging

I am slowly recovering from the plague to which I referred in my last post. I'm loathe to say I'm recovered, though I am feeling considerably better and my body is not disrupting my life nearly as much as it was when I whined about all the disease vectors in my life uniting to liquefy my digestive tract.

Life advice: the way to rid yourself of an intestinal-tract bug is most emphatically not to get on an airplane two days after onset and take a 500-mile business trip. Just thought I'd let you know I did that science for you. Y'know, in case you were wondering.

I know that you are very happy to read this news, and I'm pleased to report that I'm not even tempted to simply leave this post at a single graf on the state of my bowels. Things happen even while I'm moaning, and many of them cry out for acknowledgment and validation:

-Awesome evening last night at the Plex, where United and the Phunions (TM) played a reserve game that also passed for a US Open Cup match. United won on penalties, having failed to assert a lingering lead after getting the high-school officiating crew to toss a Philly player (he deserved it, as did three Phunions who weren't tossed; we pass no judgment on whether Saint Piotr Nowak deserved to be shown red after Philly scored a tying goal as extra time waned, because we were on the other side of the field and don't know what magic words Saint Piotr said--presumably in pidgin English, as is his wont--to the incompetent boob of a ginger referee who very clearly had a short-man complex).

The Sons of Ben who showed up were fun--I shared smoke breaks with a few of them, a rare pleasure at the Plex, where stormtrooper poe-leece are not usually given to looking the other way over minor infractions--and they were sane, for a limited range of sanity that includes MLS partisans. It was touching that, in defeat, miles from home, they serenaded us with a few bars of "We All Hate Red Bull." It wasn't as much fun as when they were taunting us with "You're Moving To Baltimore" and I replied with "You live in Chester," but still and all, another unifying fan experience that demonstrates that we needn't all be lime-green retard barista-humpers.

Yeah, the game itself pretty much sucked--it looked mostly like an English Sunday pub league, and that may be an insult to pub leagues. But the weather was fantastic (Ilse will tell you her toes froze) and the company was magnificent--Himself, the Hamster, the much-beloved and too-long-unseen Planet, along with Ilse and Databoy, who actually spent long stretches of the game shutting the fuck up.

-On the topic of Planet, I don't recall mentioning this, but she made the right choice and will attend a small liberal arts college that I once half dropped out of (and half got tossed from). I applaud her good sense, good taste, and general sanity. I thought it might be the night that I'd finally start peeling off twenties to reward the kid for a public display of pottymouth, but no such love. I will not abandon my quest, though I suspect that I'll suspend it for our likely next encounter (her high school graduation), out of respect for her mother and her grandparents.

-I may or may not have a week off approaching, depending on how this week's round of congressional taunting and hyperbolizing and blame-shifting and other masturbatory activity turns out. The whole thing is appalling, though a good thing has emerged: Representative Paul Ryan's fiscal year 2012 budget proposal. You wonder why it's a good thing? They finally came out of the closet, for reals. There is no backing away for the Republicans now. Ryan's outlandish rapestand proposal, embraced by certain completely retarded alleged moderates as "courageous," makes it clear that the Republicans are angling for no less than the repeal of all domestic support programs and the total subjugation of the poor to the idea that greater wealth disparity is not only nonproblematic but desirable. The math is clear, and there's no further argument about this. If you support Ryan's proposal and refuse to admit that it's about making the poor more so, you're a lying motherfucker, full stop. And if you can read about Ryan's proposal and continue to believe, for real, that there's no difference in the flavors, then you're a whole lot of things I won't go into, because I have a feeling my BFF is one of those deluded Tinkerbell-lovers, and honestly? I can't even begin to fathom their reasoning here, after months of committed attempts to decipher the sophistry.

-On the shutdown itself, it's more of the same. A minority is asserting itself as the true rulers and insisting that anything short of their way is unacceptable disrespect to a fantasy mandate. Fuck 'em. The appropriate way for this to be handled is thus: punch them in the nose. When they whine, punch them in the nose and tell them that it's their fault that God made you punch them. Repeat as necessary.

What? It's how they're treating you.