hallelujah

"Father of slain Marine wins case against funeral protesters
Pa. man awarded nearly $11 million in compensatory and punitive damages

The brokenhearted father of a Marine killed in Iraq won a long-shot legal fight today after a federal jury in Baltimore awarded him nearly $11 million in a verdict against members of a Kansas church who hoisted anti-gay placards at his son's Westminster funeral."

a special place of honour in hell

a good few years ago, when the internet was still shiny and new, i was traipsing through the web and i found a site that nearly moved me to tears called god hates fags.com. i have no idea if the site is still active, but what struck me was the insane amount of hatred that could be encapsulated in HTML.
there is a man who embodies that kind of hatred, and he's a minister, if you can believe it. his name is fred phelps, and i hope that there is place of honour in hell for this man. do you remember the part in poltergeist II when the reverend walks up to the screen door? that's what this guy looks like .

working from a church in topeka, KS, he and his followers have managed to make the mormons look sane (no small feat, in my opinion). the latest in the zany antics of the westboro baptist church are found in this article.

with apologies to fox mulder, but "i want to be beyond belief".

check out this quote:

"The Westboro protesters, whose church is in Topeka, Kan., frequently picket the funerals of military officials and soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan because church leaders assert that God is killing soldiers to punish America for condoning homosexuality. "

now, don't get me wrong, i am not a fan of the military, and i certainly am not a fan of the war in iraq, but there is something very wrong with the way that these people are dying for no rela reason other than to protect our interests in the middle east and when they die, their deaths are used for the purpose of any nut job trying to get their point across, from bill o'reilly to fred phelps.

i am certainly a proponent of the first amendment, but there has to be a line somewhere. mind you, i'm not very comfortable with drawing it, but this is not a guerrilla war, there need to be rules.

anyway, that's enough for now.

a point of clarification

yesterday i ranted a little about religion, well, not so much about religion, but about extremists. i wanted to just clarify-for myself and for the record what i mean.

i was thinking about it, and my viewpoint is thus: i view the fundamentalist/evangelical movements as the christian equivilent to al-quaida. i'm not saying that the southern baptist convention is going to start sending suicide bombers into abortion clinics and gay bars (though i'm not sure it isn't because they havent thought of it yet). what i'm saying is that the evangelicals are politicizing religion. granted, guys who shoot up abortion clinics and assassinate the doctors are the christian equivalent of your garden variety suicide bomber.

at the end of the day, fundamentalist muslims and evangelical christians both lack a basic understanding of the logic behind a separtion of church and state. both parties are guilty of trying to create theocracies in support of their gods.

i guess that i, like many americans are guiilty of being suspect of Islam as a religion, but since i don't believe that there are really more than a handful of true christians in the world, then i suppose it is logical to hope that there are more than a handful of muslims that want nothing more than to have peace with their god and let you have your own.

i'm not sure if there is a point to any of this, but i needed to get the thought out, at least.

WTF?

to the left is a picture of republican candidate mitt romney. i consider myself a libertarian, but when practicality pushes and shoves, i normally go with democrats, because i hate them less. i have to say that i have found that i waiver betwixt obama and hillary. if you want to be practical about it, obama is a great candidate, but i would like to see him win in 2012. i think that hillary should win this one, maybe just so i can see bill clinton in the white house just one more time, lol.

actually, there is something exciting about a woman being on the ballot for president. it means that we live in an exciting time. although, the old joke comes to mind:

how do you get a woman into the oval office?
have her run against a black man and a homosexual.

the other day, i was at the gym working out and there was a small gap between when i finished working out, and when the pool would open up, so i sat down in this little lounge area and watched tv and rested for a minute. what was on was that insipid "insider" show. i watched for a few minutes, until i couldn't take it anymore. i didn't realize the remote was available until i got up and saw it stuck between 2 cushions. i sat back down and surfed a few channels. i then realized that the pool was opening up and that i should get going. i turned the tv to bravo and project runway was on. i smiled quietly to myself and walked away, leaving it there.

now, to place this in context, you have to remember that i live in north idaho. the tv is in a spot that everybody that goes from the front desk to the weight room has to see it. i have never walked by it w/out some form of sport or ESPN variant being on.

for some reason, i wanted to rattle people in my own subtle way and leave a show about fashion design on. dunno why. maybe it was my little rebellion against the rampant homophobia that exists here. couldn't tell you.

i think there is a little bit of that impulse with my endorsement of hillary clinton. i think it would be interesting to see what a woman would do in the oval office. i have found that her policies are generally okay (though i do fault her for voting for the patriot act). i think, more than anything, i want to see the evangelicals sweat.

i have major issues with the fact that this insane sect of our society is soooo pandered to. does anybody else get the feeling that politicians treat these people like spoiled children? it's like a voting demographic full of verruca salts.

"but, daddy, i want a theocracy."

"but, verruca, sweet-heart, that's what our forefathers escaped from."

verruca yells "i want it now, and you're going to get it for me; or i won't vote for you."

"oh, all right...."

mrs. salt "if you don't give her what she wants, you're going to be very unpopular around here, 'enry...."

i think that there is something obscene about the politicization(sp?) of religion.

the reason that romney graces the top of the blog is b/c i found something really interesting while i was perusing the net at work. here is an article that i found interesting. the idea behind the article was that the "evangelicals" are upset that there is no candidate that they can fully support and stand behind.

here's a quote:

"Romney, who this week picked up the endorsement of Bob Jones III, the chancellor of Bob Jones University, is viewed with suspicion by some evangelicals because he had previously supported abortion rights, a stance he has since disavowed. Polls suggest that his Mormon faith is also a concern among some evangelical voters. "

isn't there something wrong when the southern baptists and the WASPs think that the Mormons are TOO crazy?

granted, upon further research, it turns out that he was cool about homosexuality for about half a day in 2003, but then was good about reversing that in 2006.

i read a really interesting quote and i can't seem to find it, but it goes something like this: "the problem from fanatics of any religion is that they seek to limit the dialogue about human spirituality"

i know i killed it, but hopefully i have been able to get the point across.

i also read a really interesting article a while back that pointed out that if the LDS church decided to back Romney, he would be the undisputed front-runner. who, outside of the campaign trail veterans in washington, knows how to mobilize a force like the Mormons. if they can dictate to each of their card-carrying members to spend 2 years of their lives trolling neighborhoods across the country in pairs, imagine what they can do with political conviction wrapped in a blanket of moral certainty?

abandon hope all ye who enter here...

I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE
I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW

SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT
I WAS RASIED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE,
PRIMORDIAL LOVE, AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT

ONLY THOSE ELEMENTS TIME
CANNOT WEAR WERE MADE BEFORE ME
AND BEYOND TIME I STAND

ABANDON HOPE, YE WHO ENTER

i've been trying to work on some illustrations and i decided to do some illustrations from dante aligheri's inferno. i have been researching and seeing what others have done (i think the work of gustave dore is my fav, but followed closely by rico lebrun).

what attracts me to this project is the idea of portraying the torments of judeo-christian hell in a striking image. the challenge is, how do you put that much rage, anger, remorse, pain, madness, and regret into a "scene". is that possible?

in dore's version, he seems to go for it, but ends up with something that gets closer to frightening grandeur than anything else. lebrun's version is pictorial pain and madness. horrific figures that exist in contorted motions that can only be horrifically painful. pieces of the human anatomy glued together in a grotesque mockery of "G-d's image".

how do you top that?

linux...grrrrrr

so, in an earlier blog, i wrote about how wonderful that linux is; mind you, i still think it will be cool when i get it to work.

my friend justin and i tried to install studio and it kept having issues installing, so i downloaded the version of Ubuntu (feisty fawn) and put it on a disk so that i could install it on my computer.

i am a pack-rat. i hate throwing anything away, but more than that, i hate to have anything erased, so i took some time and i isolated the D drive that was empty away from my windows-laden C drive. i had the computer arranged so that it was just D drive and my CD reader. i installed Ubuntu on that drive and plugged everything back in.

somehow, along the way, i corrupted my windows drive and when justin and i tried to get everything sorted out on sunday, it took 6 hours to get back to the beginning and only have Ubu on the disk. i have to boot from the CD to have an OS. the cool thing is that i am learning what all of these things do, but it's a frustrating learning curve.

this is all very dry, i know.

there's this great moment in the great muppet caper when diana rigg starts getting lost in a monologue about her brother, ms. piggy stops her and asks "umm, excuse me, but why are you telling me this?".

she simply turns and without missing a beat says "it's exposition, it has to go somewhere."

so, now i wait. i'm waiting until my next day off (thursday) to install windows (vista this time) and the very latest version of ubu (i think it's call gutsy gizelle or gamey gnome or something like that-i would like a more graphic name like gelded gnu or something more interesting)

so, now i have to get them so that they can boot to either drive.

i read a really interesting article that mentioned that Ubuntu seems to be the winning dialect of linux. because of it's user-friendly GUI, it should start working it's way into the greater market as an OS. i still think that linux is quite some ways away from that yet. based on my experiences, i am learning that it is not as simple as it seems. granted, most people just have their pet computer geek help them w/ installing an OS, but this system has proved to be intreresting. of course, all of that having been said, one should take into account that my computer is kind of a heap and there might be something to that.

linux ubu releases a new version every 6 months and they go through the alphabet and use the same letter for the adjective and the noun (it's very cute). my suggestion for the next release

is HELLFIRE HARLOT

LDS with SSA

in retrospect, i have come to believe that being gay is one of the best things that ever happened to me.

it's hard to explain. i'm a white kid from the suburbs of a blue-collar town in the midwest. racial tension is high on both sides of the issue in my hometown. for example, the ghetto has boundaries.


when i was a kid, there were certain streets that were considered boundaries. the city is laid out on a grid for the most part. greenfield was a north-south street, but the east-west streets were numbered. when i was 13 or 14, if one was walking down greenfield at night, you did not cross 16th street. if you were smart, you stayed up in the 20s. there was a 10 block neutral zone that wasn't great, but it wasn't a guarantee that you were gonna find trouble if you went there.


point is, as a white kid, i grew up hyper aware of gentrification and downward spirals caused by poverty in reagan's america. when one is young, it is easy to make racial connections with ghettos, poverty and crime rates. in fact, i will admit to myself that there are biases that i still have based on the way i grew up. the difference between being human and being a racist is that i choose not to let my internal issues affect the way that i deal with people. people suck in general, but it's foolish to throw away the baby and the bathwater together.


the reason that i say that i think that being gay was a great thing for me, personally, is that it taught me to see from other perspectives. in college, i read a book called Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. (1991). by an artist named david wojnarowicz. he was a gay man living w/ HIV in ed koch's NY and reagan's america (a scary place, by the sounds of it). wojnarowicz talks about being born into a civilization with rules that don't really apply to him b/c they don't take into account his existence. to wit; "If I die it is because a handful of people in power, in organized religions and political institutions, believe that I am expendable". like any good artist, he sees society from the outside, a condition that is compounded by his homosexuality and then further compounded by his HIV status (this is the late 80s).


in close to the knives, DW is tired of being on the fringes and angry. really angry. one of my favourite quotes i cannot find in detail, but i can sum it up; "i am ten feet of rage stuffed into a 6 foot frame."


i ran into DW at a time when i had finally started to stop fighting so hard against my attraction to other guys. i had fought hard, with prayer and with will and found that i was weak. we all grow up in a society that is built for heterosexual white guys and i came close to the mark. i came close enough to the mark w/out hitting it that i believed that there was something wrong with me b/c i wasn't like everyone else on the inside. there was a part that i hid, a part that i was ashamed of, a part that i did not address for many years. around 19 or 20, i finally got tired of fighting it. there are so many other things that consume your energy during any given day in modern life that it seemed like a waste. maybe that's not the right way to say that. i think that one day i woke up and decided that maybe there was a reason that i was this way.


i have always had a strong belief in G-d. that having been said, we don't talk a lot. the fault is mine, but i don't have a single doubt in my head that there is a G-d. sometimes i wish that i did. i believe that if you can quiet your heart and your mind enough, you can hear him.

there was a greek philosopher named Pythagoras who believed in what he called "the music of the spheres". Pythagoras was the first to believe that math was the universal language of the universe. he also believed that music was a direct extention of mathmatics, hence, there is a perfect harmony that keeps the universe together and it is called the music of the spheres. (of course, it is a metaphor)


maybe G-d's voice is that harmony, just white noise in the background. like a fridge that you didn't realize was running until it cycles down for a few minutes.


back on track.....


it was when i read a great book that took what the bible said about homosexuality and really examined it in detail that i was able to concede that this part of me may be part of G-d's plan for me. while following that rationale, i have realized that i have become a far more tolerant and empathetic individual.


maybe it's some kind of mutual courtesy? a live and let live thing?


dunno.


what i do know is that i have one prejudice that i cannot let go, as much as i may try. that is my loathing of mormons.


i have never been able to figure out what it is about mormons that makes them different in their belief structure from regular "christians".


i find it ironic that the LDS sends out missionaries around the country (and maybe the world), but they require a membership card to enter their temple. you have to meet their exacting standards to enter.


by all means, they certainly don't hold the monopoly on trying to make their religion an exclusionary experience. i would submit that they fall in the same vein as the extremist (read terrorist) muslims and the hasidic jews. i consider myself a jew, but i'm not really a fan of the hasids. the great thing about hasids, though is that they treasure learning, wit, and tradition. in fact, learning and wit are part of the jewish tradition. hasids are, however, less likely to blow up a bus full of school children (israel aside).


if you nose around the internet, you find sites about ex LDS folk and what they describe is kinda scary (though i will admit, i have a thing about mormon underwear; it's kinda hot. i know it's weird. don't ask me why).
here
are
some
links.
here's another interesting link.


what got me out of my morning daze, and moved me to action was this blog that i was reading. i happen to find a really interesting blog called "attempting the path". it is the blog of this really cute and interesting kid with what he calls his struggles with SSA (that's same-sex attraction-leave it to the mormons to classify it like a disease). in his links list, he has various sympathetic blogs and some that are frighteningly relevant.

there is this blog called savingjohngalt about this guy who is full-blown LDS w/ a wife and 3 kids and on a business trip, he meets this guy in london and they have this whirlwind relationship over a 2 year period. the blog starts in august of 2006 and ends in june of 07.

it is a document of a good guy whose desires conflict with everything he believes about the world around him. been there. except for an incredibly lucky and small percent, anyone who knows that they are gay knows this fight well.

what is heartbreaking is the hell that he puts himself through in his quest to adhere to the things that he believes he should be doing. when he goes to his bishop for help, the man revokes his membership card for 6 months.

i have always thought that it is easy and cruel for people to try and "help" you to change. if you like chicks, it's really easy to believe that you can do it too. don't get me wrong, men can usually have sex with anything. hell, i have even had the urge to sleep with women from time to time, but that was more to do with boredom and frustration with gay sex at a time when i was heavily into drugs and had a voracious appetite.

that blog is a document of suffering that is self-imposed and i can't help but wonder about the cruelty of his family and social surroundings that make his life a living hell.

i have to stop here a moment and add that i feel nothing but sympathy for the wife. when you read about the LDS, the common story seems to be "marry a good woman and you can put it all behind you", which leads to the inevitable crumbling of the marriage years later.

david leavitt wrote a book called the lost language of cranes and in it, the son struggles to come out to his uptight parents, only to find out that his father has been fighting his homosexuality his whole life. the reason that the father has remained distant from his son all of these years is that he believes that lack of contact means that the son won't contract it by osmosis or whichever.

my life is far from perfect and there are some things about being gay that kinda suck.

my greatest regret in this life is that i will most likely never have a child, but i will definitely never know the sensation, the miracle, of watching my/our child grow together in the person that i love the most in the world.

i can only imagine the joy of that experience.

i can't say i have many regrets, though.
i regret my drug use.

actually, that's not entirely true. i don't regret the experiences and lessons that i learned from my time in the seedy underground of LA, i just regret the cost.

i regret not chasing after someone when it was clear that...
i regret taking so long to get my act together.
i don't regret being gay.

i do, however, regret using the validation inherent in relationships to supplant my low self esteem.

i regret that it took so long to get myself back.

back to the matter at hand. i have no idea how long this rambling will be, but what i do know is that i am moved by the story of john galt. i am moved by the sickness that is him fighting what he sees as a sickness.

john's entries end in june of 2007. that is where my involvement in his story ends. i can't say i would be surprised to find out that john galt had killed himself.

john is done writing. i never really knew him. he is, in a way, a fictional construct. he is, like all good characters in fiction, a mirror showing us the joys and pains of life and the caliginous murk that is the human psyche.

thanks for listening

So, recently I have begun to truly embrace wikipedia. Anything you want to know, is there and for the most part it seems to be true. Even better, there are links to sources and links to places to go on the net to further research the chosen topic that usually dead-ends at amazon.com. i have to say that i love the logo.

look at it. it is simple and beautiful.

cisco has a commercial and in it, they show different parts of the world and how inter-connected they are through technology. there is a shot were they show a girl sitting in a halway on a laptop and she is quite obviously on wikipedia and the overdubbed voice mentions "book that write themselves" and i realized that that is the practical version of what wikipedia is.

i've been harping about linux, and now i'm harping about wikipedia. i guess that's what happens when i wrote blog posts at work. you can't get too emotionally involved with what you're writing b/c you'll be in the middle of it and then suddenly get a call.

don't get me wrong...there are plenty of things going on that warrant a long blog that lists a discussion between my self and myself. i know that there are many things that need to be addressed in my life by the fact that i cannot get a decent night's sleep to save my life. when i do sleep, i have dreams of running and being chased in bizarre situations. i wish i could stand away from them and watch them, but it's always me that's running. i want to make some kind of snarky comment that the guy who directs those films is really good, but what i really need to say is that there is something that is hunting me down from my subconscious. i cannot seem to escape and hoping that it will not find me does not make it less true.

of course, i have my suspicions about what it is that is haunting me. there are various things that i could point to. i'm self-aware enough to know, but smart enough to push these things down to where they don't affect me during the day.

i have to wonder if that's the trade. if i have the will to push things out of my mind that would torture me during the day, then maybe it's a trade-off and i have no choice; the thing will have me at night if it can't have me during the day.

the gym has been good about helping me to get more energy and to be more conscious of what my body is doing. i have fond that some spark in me that i had thought dead has re-ignited. i have the urge to create again. i have a couple of projects that i am thinking about working on. i'd like to do illustrations again. my first idea is for a cover for richard III by shakespeare, after that, maybe something for marlowe's faust and then some plates for dante's inferno.

dark and sinister is easy to do. it's a good place to put all of those pent up emotions that one can no longer safely express in the society that we live in.

i work in an office environment. people here are easily threatened and easily offended. the only way left to express the frustration and rage i feel against my daily life (the kind that i keep lock and key under anti-depressants) is in some form of art.

the reason that i am putting linux on my computer is so that i can maybe record some music and mix it together elliot smith style. there are supposed to be some really good music programs on ubuntu studio.

i was reading about elliot smith on wikipedia and I was reading about his life and listening to his music on my IPOD and thinking about the elliot smith tribute band I was in a few-3 years ago. I think there is some irony that directly after the show, I started back on meth after a month-long stretch on being clean.

i could write a whole blog just on elliot smith.

actually, i'm tired of writing like a whiny high schooler. i'd like to write about something else besides myself.

dr. linux: or how i stop worrying and learned to love the penguin

so, i recently decided to try out linux on my computer.

when i went to school, i was trained on MAC and when i got out of school, i found that PC was far more reasonably financed. so, in the intervening years, i have been using windows. i can't say that i have had a huge amount of issues, but i've never really been one to tweak my computer. there are some people who can't leave well enough alone, but i think that having a healthy fear of screwing up my computer has always kept me in check.

several years ago, i had 2 computers, but i had an ex that one day decided while i was at work that they needed to be combined into one tower. it turned out that he was right, but that didnt make me any less furious with him for messing with my computer. until very recently, i have always assumed that everyone else knew more about computers than i did and that there was so much to learn that you would have to be born to it. after my latest roommate decided to "help" me with my computer, i reckoned that that was enough. i have since taken an active role in learning how and why my computer works.

the hardware part is easy, but figuring out the software is hard. i only recently found out what the BIOS does, lol. i have been scouring the internet looking for keys to crack open my trial version of illustrator so that i won't have to pay adobe for the privilege, but then my friend justin told me about linux. i had forgotten about linux (in fact, all i remembered was the penguin-doesn't he just look like he should be a squeak toy?).

linux, if you don't know, is free-ware. the version that i am using is called UBUNTU (incidently, the name of the version is Feisty Fawn). here's a link to some info. what makes it interesting is that it can pretty much be customized however you like. i am still attatched to photoshop, don't get me wrong, but i still would like the learning opportunity that linux provides.

the other good thing about linux, and the best reason is that there are no viruses for linux.