Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Unitarian Jihad

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: The Jackhammer of Enlightenment.  Get yours.

Monday, April 25, 2005

Migrating to Expression Engine

Bless his Stupid Evil heart, Les helped me install EE on my server, and I’m going through the painful process of migrating all my old entries via cut & paste since there’s no easy way to import them into Expression Engine.  Unfortunately, I’m unable to replicate the few comments I managed to get on the old version, so they’re essentially gone forever now.  Ah well…

Thursday, April 14, 2005

The Fire Still Burns

I’ve waited 20 years for another chance to see my hero take the stage again, and Twisted Sister didn’t disappoint as they rocked the fuckin’ Silverton Casino’s Hideaway Theatre for a relatively small (650 or so) crowd of SMFs last Saturday night.  Dee Snider is still the best goddamned frontman I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I was reminded once again of exactly what it was that first drew me to the man almost 30 years ago when I first saw the band in a dive bar in Waterbury (illegally I might add, hah!).  I’ll have to explore my Dee-votion in greater depth at another time on my SMF site, because my admiration and inspiration runs deep and is multi-faceted; that which I have for the man himself, and that for the persona of Dee-as-frontman.

I took some shitty pictures with my phone, and will hopefully get some better ones up from Cathy’s good digital camera soon.

Dee, Jay Jay, AJ, Mark and Eddie have my undying respect for caring enough about their fans, the SMFs old and young, to take time out of their busy schedules to play a gig now and then.  Not only that, but it’s got to be physically exhausting - shit, it’s taken me 4 days to recover just from being in the audience, and these guys were up there rockin’ like they were still in their 20s!  Any vows of love and devotion I could express would be wholly inadequate.  They have my undying gratitude for the many hours of pleasure they’ve brought to my life, and I wish them continued success and happiness in everything they do.  I fuckin’ love you guys!

Friday, April 01, 2005

Saying nothing != having nothing to say

I haven’t updated this blog with my comments about the tragic case of Terri Schiavo and her husband’s unnecessarily long and drawn out efforts to honor her wishes.  I have, however, made my stance known in the forums in which I participate.

What I’d like to know is what the fuck kind of people simply cannot comprehend that Michael Schiavo’s “moving on” and starting another relationship doesn’t mean that he must necessarily stop loving his incapacitated wife, and insist that once he started his new family, he should have ceded his guardianship of her?

In MY family, I can think of two examples right off the bat that demonstrate how loving, compassionate people CAN in fact move on to a new relationship without completely severing ties with, or ceasing to have love for, the former spouse.  Granted, in these two examples, the earlier spouses in question were still alive and sentient, but when they were in need of help, their exes stepped up and provided assistance.

It’s not so difficult for me to believe that Michael Schiavo never stopped loving his incapacitated wife, in spite of his falling in love with another woman half way through Terri Schiavo’s 15-year sentence of being nothing more than an empty shell.  After all, if my mother and stepfather could show compassion for my stepfather’s ex-wife by taking her and her family in when they needed it - in spite of his being in NO way obligated to do anything of the sort (much less my mom having any sort of obligation) - how can I not understand Michael Schiavo continuing to love his wife and care for her?  How can I pretend not to imagine that Jodi Centzone, who loves this man enough to bear him children AND go through all this unnecessary bullshit that Terri’s parents (and their “supporters” from the ranks of fundy pro-life media whores) have put him through dragging this through the courts, ALSO in her way loved and cared for Terri.  Who can deny that Terri was no less a part of the new Schiavo-Centzone family than the two children of Michael and Jodi?

Perhaps my family’s an anomaly, but I’d like to think they’re not.  Almost without exception, the bonds we share with those members who become related to us by marriage don’t automatically dissolve when the marriage does.  My sister, brother-in-law and ex-brother-in-law all lived together at one time, until such time as they could afford not to.  My ex-brother-in-law has named my sister as the person to make any medical decisions for him in the event that he cannot do so himself; and he and my brother-in-law are great friends who respect each other on their own merits, without any rancor over the fact that on the surface it would seem that the only thing they had in common was that they’d each married the same woman at different times.  In her way, and to this day, my sister has love in her heart for both of these men.  One who WAS her husband, is the father of her child, and will remain her close friend until the day they die, and the other who IS her husband, and understands that the bonds of family are defined by those who honor them.  Not by courts, priests, strangers, pundits or media whores who’d like everything to be black or white.

More another time, because there’s more that needs to be said, but I’ve got to get to work.  Should I end up in a persistent vegetative state, or even a minimally conscious state from which the medical evidence shows I am unlikely to recover between now and the next post, these are my wishes:

No extraordinary measures - and that includes artificial nutrition through a tube.  Not only do I want to be left to die, but if at all possible I’d like to be taken somewhere that I can be legally euthanized.  I want my family to mourn my passing, not bankrupt themselves tending my living corpse.  We don’t have any money anyway, and I don’t know how long my medical insurance would last, so maybe it wouldn’t be an issue.  But make no mistake, I’d rather DIE, even if that means it has to happen by my being dehydrated to death.  I’d prefer to be given a big dose of some excellent drugs, or even by a bullet through my brain, but if that’s illegal then I’ll take whatever will relieve my family of the burden of keeping my corpse “alive” and watching me succumb to the bodily ravages that come with being in that state between life and death.

I’d also prefer not to be waked and buried.  I’d rather be remembered alive, than dead in an expensive casket.  In fact, if I can be left unembalmed and quickly put in a cardboard box and cremated, that’d be excellent.  Anyone who wants to memorialize me should feel free to do so, and hopefully they’ll be as irreverent and blasphemous as I’d love them to be.  If some people want to believe I’m “with God” or “in the arms of Jesus,” well, that’s their right, I guess; but I don’t have a problem at all with anyone making jokes and admitting that once I’m dead I’m worm food, fertilizer, or dust in the wind, and that the only “afterlife” I’ll really have is that which is made up of the memories the people who knew and loved (or hell, even hated) me.

That would be infinitely better than being likened to a tomato!  LOL