The 23rd Floor Version 3.0.

The 23rd Floor 2009 (4.0).

…

…

…

JB and I are both Bill fans, but we differ on this religion thing. It seems like JB leans mostly Bill’s way - i.e. “religious” should appear as a synonym when you google “ridiculous” - while I think Bill is much too fundamentalist. He’s a regular fanatic with his Religion of Anti-Religion or, as he calls it, rationalism.

…

…

I believe that what he means by rationalism is what I think of as empiricism. If you wikipedia empiricism, you find this:

…

Empiricism emphasizes those aspects of … knowledge that are closely related to evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world, rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.

…

As near as I can tell, the main target of rationalism and empiricism is something called magical thinking:

Once again we’ll do this the easy way: Wikipedia

…

In anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science, magical thinking is nonscientific causal reasoning that often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world, correlation equaling causation, the law of contagion, the power of symbols, and the meaningfulness of synchronicity.

…

A current example of magical thinking might be the so-called Law of Attraction and similar ideas advanced by the movie and book, The Secret. In a nutshell: You will attract into your physical reality events and circumstances that match your predominant thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. So, you are directly and personally responsible for everything you experience. You literally create your own reality. Or, at the very least, you create your experience of reality.

…

…

Bill Maher, and at least 15% of the general U.S. population, believe that religion or faith is the most pervasive form of magical thinking. They point in particular at those folks who believe that the Bible (King James Version), and other world religious texts, contain factual history and the actual Words of God, as dictated to ancient human stenographers.

Where to fit “eastern” systems of thought and philosophy, e.g. Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, et al, along this continuum between empiricism and magical thinking, is something Mr. Maher didn’t have screen time to consider.

…

…

Back to my friend, Joel B. JB calls himself a “militant agnostic.” I don’t know, and you don’t either. He’s a far cry from “militant,” in nature and manner, but I take his point. [Admin: JB has requested that this be emended to "grumpy 'cause it's dark agnostic." See comments] Mostly I agree with JB. “I don’t know” is a good place to be. It faces into Life as Mystery, and everybody likes a good mystery. But, “I don’t know” has to really mean I don’t know.

I think Bill Maher believes he knows that The Scientific Method is the right way to experience “reality.” This is pretty much the same way that The Secret fans know that The Law of Attraction is creating their “reality.”

I want to offer another view, perhaps one more attuned to the “eastern” ideas Bill didn’t have time for. To do so, I have to ask you to allow me a fairly off-the-wall metaphor.

…

…

Suppose you are Steve Jobs and you are the face and soul of Apple, Inc.. You’ve been personally involved in the collaborative imagination and creativity that produced the coolest technology since radio, TV, and movies. Your office is at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California. One day you are conked unconscious by a real apple that falls from an overhead campus walkway, dropping out of the re-usable grocery bag of some healthfood nut who works in accounting. A passing nogoodnik, visiting from the legal department at Microsoft, steals your wallet. When you regain consciousness, in General Hospital, you have no idea who you are. For purposes of our loopy metaphor, let’s say no one else there does, either.

As your rehab and therapy progresses, you re-discover your affinity for iPods, iPhones, and iMacs, but you still have no idea you helped create them.

…

…

Finally, you are released. While using a clunky Windows PC at the Public Library, you google “Apple, Inc.” and you find out you’re just blocks from 1 Infinite Loop, where Steve Jobs, the Head Mac, has an office.

You walk there. Everybody seems strangely deferential, including security, and you end up outside Jobs’ office. You are telling everybody in earshot how cool Apple Stuff is and asking to meet Steve Jobs. They are all exchanging eye-rolling looks, but you ignore it. After all, weirdness is a small price to pay for creative genius.

For the next few weeks you haunt Apple Headquarters. You ask questions, take tours, offer ideas and get into spirited discussions with geeky young people who continue to treat you with annoying deference.

It starts to bother you that your requests to meet Steve Jobs are laughed off. More creative geek weirdness. You become obsessed with Him. You read everything you can about Him, and Apple, on the Kindle the geeks give you. You beg them to give you a job, any job. You’ll work for free. (The Apple credit card you found in your shirt pocket still keeps working. You assume the name “Steve Jobs” that appears on it is some kind of marketing thing.) It occurs to you that you even look like Him, only younger, with better hair.

One day, when nobody’s looking, you take one of the keys you found in your jacket pocket and try it on the door to Jobs’ office. It’s a quixotic act. Desperate. You don’t actually expect the key to work - but it does!

…

…

You sit in His Chair. You clap your hands, like a delighted child. The light comes on! In more ways than one. It all comes flooding back. Wozniak. The Apple II. Lisa. Macintosh. The 1984 Super Bowl Commercial. The iPod.

You are Steve Jobs!

Here’s the “eastern thought” connection. When you discover you are the Steve Jobs you’ve been desperately looking for, and you have Apple, Inc., at your fingertips: You’ve been Enlightened.

If you’ll allow me just a few more paragraphs to torture the metaphor:

Let’s say that “Apple, Inc.,” and everything it represents, is an analog for The Mystery. The stuff we “don’t know.” As I type this on my MacBook, preparing to upload it to my website via a wireless connection to the WorldWideWeb, I personally think it’s a pretty good analog. Who could have foreseen What Jobs Hath Wrought?

Here we come full circle: What Bill Maher calls “magical thinking” is like Steve Jobs having amnesia and trying to find Him(self) out there somewhere. There is no “Steve Jobs” out there. No matter how many theories and books and DVDs and seminars he plows through, no matter how much desperate praying he does, crying out for help to The Unknown God or to his Personal Saviour, no matter how long he waits: he won’t find Steve Jobs. To find himself and his place in The Mystery, amnesiac Steve has to look no further than … himself. He Is the Who he’s been looking for.

On the other hand, what Bill Maher favors, rationalism or empiricism, is like amnesiac Steve consulting a brain biologist, or running the Large Hadron Collider, in an attempt to unravel The Mystery of Who He Is.

Until the light comes on, he’ll certainly learn some interesting stuff, but ultimately he’ll probably feel more and more confused, even disoriented, by the results of his scientific method. It won’t help him know.

Once the light does come on, and he knows who he is, then he’s in the best possible place to experience The Mystery of Apple, Inc..

I’m with Bill Maher (and my friend, JB) at least this much: If you feel like an amnesiac - I think many of us do - desperately poking around in the Cosmos looking for your missing magical self, or for the Ultimate Magical Self who will save you, is as silly as Bill says it is. I don’t think your salvation is “out there.” (Believing “I Found It” may be even worse than feeling like an amnesiac. Especially if you feel the need to convince others or kill the infidels who don’t agree with you.)

But, I differ with BM and JB this much: If you really “don’t know,” and you feel like an amnesiac, then you can’t dismiss the possiblity that the light will come on and you’ll find out that you already are who you’ve been looking for, and you have your own version of Apple, Inc. to play with. There is a kind of magical thinking in the imagination and creative collaboration at 1 Infinite Loop.

What a relief! There is no need to keep trying to solve the Mystery by searching for myself. Not in books or seminars about magic, not under a microscope or in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

I Am right here. Whatever that means. Who knows: There could be a lot of power, even magic in it.

…

Colin Powell on Meet The Press

This is leadership, not so much because of Colin Powell’s decision to endorse Barack Obama - which I admit to applauding - but because of his style and substance, his demeanor.

Measured, thoughtful, articulate, even-handed. He has praise for both men running for president. He correctly blames partisan bullbleep manufactured by hacks and hatchetmen in both parties - not the individual candidates - for the polarization of the campaign and the electorate.

This is a man who has been a Republican and has served in the Bush Administration. He disagrees with Barack Obama on several key issues. Gen. Powell (Ret.) is devoted to national security and a strong military presence, and understands the threat of militant Islamic terrorist groups. Yet, when he observes Republican attack ads suggesting that Barack Obama is a Muslim, (Obama is a Christian), he is willing to consider even the prospect of a Muslim president. Colin Powell asks the right question: So what?

He finishes up by noting that it’s time for the next generation of political leaders to emerge and assume the leadership of the country. Indeed.

I’ll tell you what: After watching this YouTube clip of the Meet the Press interview, I have a new Dream Ticket - if we could go back in time about two years:

Powell/Obama, in that order. How far we’ve come, when it is actually possible that the two brightest lights in the political firmament are two intellectually discerning and articulate African-American men, from dissimilar backgrounds, with many differences on issues and policy, but both inclined to transcend the political bullbleep. Especially Colin Powell, the real straight-talking maverick in Washington D.C..

Maybe we’ve finally moved into the 21st Century.

Until then, may we suggest you sample some of the Links in the Link Library? (Down the page, on the right.)

Cheers,

Steve

…

Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia:
How All of Creation Is Conspiring To Shower You with Blessings
Rob Brezsny

…

…

“I’ve seen the future of American Literature and its name is Rob Brezsny.”–Tom Robbins

Rob Brezsny is an aspiring master of curiosity, perpetrator of sacred uproar, and founder of the Beauty and Truth Lab. He writes “Free Will Astrology,” a syndicated weekly column that appears in over a hundred other publications and on the Web.

As much a storyteller and prophet as astrologer, Brezsny brings a literate, myth-savvy perspective to his work. When Utne Reader named him a “Culture Hero”, it observed: “With a blend of spontaneous poetry, feisty politics, and fanciful put-on, Brezsny breathes new life into the tabloid mummy of zodiac advice columns.”

In its profile of Brezsny, the New York Times quoted a reader who compared his writing to that of the novelist Tom Robbins. The horoscopes “are like little valentines, buoyant and spilling over with mischievousness. They’re a soul prognosis.”

His latest book is called Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How All of Creation Is Conspiring To Shower You with Blessings.

from Rob’s Bio.

He meant for me to use it on my little window shade theatre, which I did, but not without editorial comment:

…

…

I can’t think of an election year, including 1984, when Orwellian issues were more clearly in focus than they are in 2008. When Barack Obama showed up as a keynote at the Democratic Convention in 2004, you had to be sleepwatching to not know he would be back as a candidate one day. Sure enough, here he is, sooner than anyone expected. I just hope he can resist the forces of Orwellian paranoia for three more weeks.

When the Big Brother posters went up in Seattle’s U-District, they were put up by 20-year-olds who are probably voting for Barack as 60-year-olds. Some of them probably have the same hairstyles they had then and have a lot of the same music on their iPods. But, the message of that poster has now been turned against them.

Think about it: Who’s afraid of “Big Brother” and wants all of us to be? Who uses the fear of Big Brother to keep us the only civilized country where people haven’t come together to make sure they all have health care? (Then uses Big Brother tactics against our own citizens in California, when the California legislature votes to allow reasonable sale and use of medical marijuana and DEA storm troopers destroy the pharmacies.) Who uses fear of “Big Government” to convince us that we have no right to reasonably regulate Big Capital, even parroting this bushwah as Big Capital takes us all over the precipice on the greedy hunt to grab all the available capital? Who used fear of “Big Brother Stalin” and now uses “Big Brother Mohammed” to persuade us that we need to keep stockpiling weaponry and make pre-emptive strikes on small mideastern sovereign countries because their leaders look a lot like that Big Brother image? Then, in a bizarre use of Orwellian doublethink, when those same countries feel compelled to build their own stockpiles to fend off Bush Doctrine pre-emptive strikes, the counter-stockpiling is used as a reason to make the strike.

…

…

Who is inciting voters, at this very moment, with Orwellian doublespeak suggesting that Barack Obama is a terrorist by association, because he has a Muslim-sounding name and served on a charitable organization’s board of directors with a former 60’s radical who is presently a law-abiding do-gooder?

It’s time to stop believing in Big Brother. There is no Big Brother. There’s only us chickens, and the sky is not falling. Thank God / Allah / Buddha / Goddess / Source / All That Is / The Big Kahuna / The Big Lebowski / Whatever that the under-30 folks are not buying our over-30 Big Brother bullpucky.

They’re registering to vote in record numbers because they want to move into the 21st Century where they belong. They’re a little pissed off about the mess their parents have made, but they’re not as afraid as their parents are. The parents are always afraid: Afraid of travelling faster than a horse can travel, afraid of the telephone, the television, Rock Music, Folk Music, Rap Music, afraid of computers and the Internet, apparently even still afraid of people with dark skin. G/A/B/G/S/ATI/TBK/TBL/Whatever: Please help us overcome our fear and elect Barack.

…

…

As an admitted admirer of New Age-y sorts of ideas - within a few empirical parameters - it has bothered me a little that many of the leading lights have not weighed in on the current sur-reality. A few have, and here’s a fine example:

The Field Center’s take on Election 2008.

…

…

I confess to sharing the morbid fascination of millions of others, as we tune in to the news channel or online news aggregator of choice, and listen to the talking heads tell us that the earth has tilted on its axis and our lives are in the crapper for the next decade, because some evildoers on Wall Street forced loans on us that now we can’t re-pay.

So, if They are to be believed, what’s going to happen is that many of us will start living in our cars and eating out of dumpsters and breadlines, while the rest of us fortunate enough to cling to some shadow of our jobs and careers will need to create new thrifty lifestyles. We will need to devote at least half our waking hours to clipping coupons and researching cheap emergency-only cellphone plans, change our travel plans to taking vacations only when we can find someone to swap homes with for a week or two, remember to always unplug every appliance and electronic gizmo from the socket when not in use, sell the cars and buy (used) bicycles, then cancel Netflix and only watch years-old DVDs borrowed for free from the public library.

I know: There are some decent ideas in there, but enough already! This is The American Way. On Monday we’re maxing out our credit cards to buy that fourth 50” plasma TV monitor for the guest room or to finance the annual Mediterranean Cruise, on Wednesday Wall Street takes a hit, on Friday we’re selling off our stock portfolio and closing out our bank accounts and putting the cash in coffee cans buried in the backyard.

…

…

Good grief, can we climb down off the pendulum for long enough to catch a breath? I am starting to think of newscasts and newscasters as Inner Terrorists. They are flying their teleprompters into our heads and our brains are burning.

We need to fight this Inner Terrorism! Let’s stop terrorizing ourselves!

There is an upside to the sur-reality: If you want to stay sane, you’re going to have to turn your attention inward and figure out what you really believe about “reality” and start to resist all that outer “guidance” that is being offered by the folks who make their livings figuring out how to keep us watching or reading their take on “reality.”

There is a silver lining to the looming disaster clouds: They get your attention and they make you focus. When it’s all good and easy, you know how quickly life becomes a bit unfocused and your attention wanders into a comfortable routine. Right now, though, you’re focused and you’re taking a close look at your routines. Am I right? It’s as good a time as any to grow up. (And I’m not talking about thriftiness and retirement planning.)

I’m talking about where you look for guidance.

…

…

Please bear with me while I try to assemble this metaphor: It seems like there is almost an either/or about this guidance business. Either you are looking out into space for a “Pole Star” to align your life with, or you are looking inside for some kind of “Inner Light” to follow. Extreme examples of the former way would be religious fundamentalists who don’t want to decide anything until asking some version of “What would Jesus do?” Perceived answers to this question range from inspiring to horrifying. Extreme examples of the latter way might be the guy betting his 401(k) on Count Fleet, in the fourth race, because he and the horse have the same initials and “he has a gut feeling.”

But, those are extremes, just for explanatory purposes. Of course extremes are dangerous. We don’t have to go there.

With that caveat, I say that the arc of our lives should move from looking “out there for The Pole Star” to finding and trusting the “Inner Light.” We begin life believing our parents know everything and have the right and authority to micro-manage our toilet habits, which perhaps they do, when we’re in diapers and can’t change them ourselves. They are the first and foremost Pole Star we align ourselves to. Or else. But, by the time we’re not wearing plastic pants anymore, we should be test flying a practice of telling our parents to put a sock in it, figuratively speaking, and insisting on our own right to micro-manage our lives. The same goes for the other in loco parentis stand-ins like teachers, preachers, employers, and news broadcasters. As much as they might want the job, even insist they have the job, we don’t need to let them be our Pole Star. They have some limited rights to our attention, but none are entitled to Pole Star position.

The problem is that, ultimately, you can’t ever be sure you’ve found the right Pole Star, whether it’s Oprah, Billy Graham, Suze Ormond, or Tom Brokaw. It should dawn on us, after awhile, that the reason we look to these bigger-than-life figures is that we assume they have some “Inner Light” we don’t have. That’s a helluva dangerously disempowered place to find yourself.

…

…

Ultimately, you’ve got to find your Inner Light and follow that.

It’s not nearly as obscure or difficult as it may seem. I’m willing to bet that in any given moment you can take a few deep breaths, maybe close your eyes, and find your Inner Light. I’ll agree that sometimes events and circumstances may get your head spinning so fast you can’t find the IL, but then it’s just a matter of finding a way to stop the spinning. Deep breaths, a long lunch break, meditation, a few minutes by yourself in your car. Whatever.

For me, right now, the Inner Light feels like this:

I know my life (and your life) are not about The Money Crunch. They’re just not. We’re both much bigger than that. I know that, one way or another, we’ll both find our own ways to keep the ship afloat. We always have. If not, if we run aground or hit an iceberg, we’ll swim. If we don’t make it to shore, we’ll drown. So what? The day was coming, sooner or later, that we weren’t going to make it to shore, anyway. What you believe about what happens then is your own business. I believe I’ll be coming back in another boat. Bon Voyage!

I know that whatever Creative Intelligence is behind All This has a bias toward Love and a natural state of Wellbeing. I know that I need to find a way to solve each of my law practice clients’ problems, or refer them to someone who can, and not ignore their files. I know that I want to stay married to my Spouse in spite of her own personal belief that I should be paying more attention to Suze Ormond, and in spite of my resistance to that belief and the stress our disagreements can create. I know that I have no reason to believe that anybody “out there” is somehow more qualified to live than I am.

Imagine this: It’s lunchtime at the office. You’re working on a project that will be greatly enhanced if you finish it by quitting time. To do so, you have to hit the snack machine and work through lunch. On the other hand, Frank from Accounting wants to talk to you at lunch about some personal stress you’ve helped him with before, maybe across the way at The Red Onion. And, you’d love to spend lunch at the Bookstore, looking for something to soothe your own soul.

I guaran-damn-tee it: If you take a few minutes to feel for it - it’s more about feeling than it is about seeing - you will find the Inner Light on this conundrum. It may be a sense of mild relief when you make the right choice, there may be an actual, tactile warming feeling, you may feel like your head suddenly, literally cleared. A kind of brain release. Whatever it is, your Inner Light has a way of letting you know when it just turned on.

And so it goes with every decision and choice I (or you) make. I find that I know. It just feels right. It’s the Inner Light. I know what to do, or how to get to the place where I know what to do. I just need to trust the knowing. And, of course, act on it.

…

…

Getting from believing that the parental figures in our lives know, but we don’t, to the place that we know, whether anybody else agrees or not, seems to me to be the main task of our adult lives.

Some get there sooner than others. There are many examples of folks who learned to follow their own Inner Lights while they were young and ended up being Michael Jordan or Steve Jobs or Jim Carrey or Barack Obama. Others, like yours truly, may spend decades floundering around, looking for a Pole Star, and only discover they have a dependable IL when they’re down to just a couple of decades to enjoy the experience. C’est la vie. Better late than never. Anyway, some of us believe we’ll get a few more lifetimes to try discovering the IL earlier in the voyage.

A couple of necessary backtracks:

There’s a difference between learning from others who have discovered their own Inner Lights and making those others your Pole Star. This may be a fine distinction, and it’s certainly easy to cross a line from learning something from someone to playing follow the leader.

Over the past ten years, it’s easy enough for me to see that I have had two main teachers. One is the novelist, Tom Robbins, and the other is Esther Hicks, principal teacher of the Abraham-Hicks material. You may or may not be familiar with either teacher. That’s not the point. The point is I am grateful for what I have learned, and continue to learn, and I will no doubt quote them more often than I probably should. I am willing to risk that, so long as I remain firm in my commitment to only follow the Inner Light, and not either of them.

…

…

I’m running out of steam, here, so I suspect you may be, too. I’ll tie up a couple of loose ends and we can both be on our ways:

1. I write these posts because it feels like something I want to do. It’s in my Inner Light to do it. The keyword list for this Blog identifies a few elements within the focus of my Inner Light: the ones I find most compelling.

I truly hope that this little personal online diary will occasionally help someone in their own efforts to find and follow their IL.

2. The Inner Light is my guide, and your guide, into and within The Mystery, however you think of The Mystery.

3. I think it’s possible for people to find and follow their own Inner Lights and still find communion and community, if that’s something that appeals to them. To that end, I participate in another adventure called The Church of BuVu. It you’re interested, you can find more HERE.

“Man has no instincts.” Ashley Montagu

“The human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none.” Stephen Jay Gould

OH YEAH!? Linguist, Stephen Pinker, says otherwise:

…

…

Typically, tricksters are disruptive mischief-makers; they’re liars and thieves who delight in playing pranks on overly serious human beings, but in the end, provide the clueless humans with what they need most to prosper and survive. In Japanese mythology, the principal trickster figure is Kitsune the fox, a wily rascal who serves nevertheless as a vital emissary between mankind and the gods. Having no such benevolent function, what foggy little Tanuki shares with his more evolved trickster counterparts is an enormous appetite for food, strong drink, sex, music, and dance. In fact, Tanuki is all appetite, he’s an ultra-sensual embodiment of the life force in its purest, most raw and innocent form. He’s a figure of fun and for fun, including the kind of fun the gods must have had when they danced the universe into existence. So, yes, in its own way, his role is profound.

Tom Robbins on Tanuki, a character in Villa Incognito

Read the entire Borders Interview.

…

So, imagine with me a continuum.

On one end of this continuum, perhaps the right end, are serious twits like Ralph Nader. Everybody who is not in complete whooping denial knows that Ralph is correct about almost everything he talks about: Lethal corporate irresponsibility, effed-up consumer protection policies, the folly of limiting our electoral choices to two political parties, etc., etc.. We just find him boring. We’d rather watch The Simpsons. (Bart the Trickster!)

On the other end of the continuum is Idi Amin, or Pol Pot, or I suppose we could default to Adolf Hitler, except he actually exhibited some sort of twisted love for the German people, while our boys Idi and Pol wanted to kill everyone who didn’t serve an immediate egomaniacal purpose, including friends and family.

What the Trickster does instinctively - it has to be instinctively - and why we (almost) all love tricksters, is they assemble their personas with bits from both ends of the continuum, maybe even dangerously close to the extreme ends.

…

…

I’m dead serious about this: If Ralph Nader re-assembled his persona to include a reputation for visits to titty bars, put on a little weight, maybe lost a few thousand bucks in Vegas, and could make it appear that it just sort of happened to him: we’d be hanging on every word.

This is why the Puritans who still steer the Ship of State, and still have our culture in a death grip, can never round up quite enough votes to bring down a Bill Clinton. The combination of Rhodes Scholar and bj vivant is just too cool for even that uber twit, Ken Starr, to lasso and hogtie.

[Even Jedgar Hoover, with all his spyware, couldn’t take down JFK (so far as we know) and JFK made Bill Clinton look like a third-stringer in the sport sex department. The combination of the urge to serve the good of everyone and hang out with Marilyn Monroe and mafioso is unassailable, except for when the bluenoses are packing heat.]

…

…

I can’t believe the partisan political wiseguys don’t get this. They continue to believe that we won’t vote for anyone who inhaled or stayed through a whole stripper-gram at a bachelor party. C’mon! You’ve got to be kidding! We the people freaking put Charlie Sheen on the red carpet for an Emmy!

Let’s start with the dumb Dems. John Edwards, who was an early favorite of mine, can’t even attend the Dem Convention because of zipper problems. Ridiculous, but an accurate reflection of how much power the Puritans still have. (I’ll give the Puritans this: Edwards’ problem was that he ended up looking selfish, in the same way that Elliot Spitzer ended up looking like a phony, with all his Puritan talk at the same time he’s keeping a pet hooker. Selfishness and phoniness don’t look good even on Tricksters, although phoniness is worse than selfishness.)

…

…

Then there’s the goober GOPs. Why bother expounding on God’s Own Party? They’re the Puritan Party, pure and simple. This is why when I kneel down by my bedside every night, I have the same prayer: “Dear God and/or Goddess, please let Barack Obama lead us out of the 17th Century into the 21st Century, and please let all the Puritans finally go extinct. I know even You must want that, because of the reputation they’ve given You. And bless all the animals and small children. Amen.”

…

…

So, let’s have some fun. By default I’m a Barack fan, but he’s still way too upright and beyond reproach - I don’t think even Mean John McCain will be able to Swift Boat him - for me to be completely enamored. Let me run through a few possibilities for 2016:

Bill Maher - Close, but no Clinton cigars. I watch Real Time more faithfully than I ever went to church, but when it comes to being anti-religious, Bill is a regular Puritan. Too damn serious about it.

Al Franken - A few months ago, he’d have been my man. But, suddenly he’s distancing himself from some of his best material, because it may not sell in St. Paul, where he’s trying to get elected to the Senate. C’mon, Al, get some cojones! Actually, if it weren’t for a better candidate whom I’m getting to, I would actually vote for Al, because I think his Trickster instincts are still sound.

Jim Carrey - This is my guy. If you’ve caught him on Oprah or any other interview piece, it should be obvious why. This dude carries major do-good vibes coupled with total sexed-up inzanity. Just watch The Pet Detective, his breakthrough movie role.

…

…

In fact, there’s my Dream Ticket for 2016: Oprah and Jim Carrey, and I don’t care who’s on top. We’ll have to make sure O doesn’t get too serious, but with Jimmy in the house, there’s not much chance of that.

…

Errata

6 Oct 2008 - Extraneous Rant

Sometimes, when I’m at the office hacking away at these posts, I let the keyboard cool off while I jaywalk across my street to the conveniently located organic-and-mostly-vegetarian deli and coffee shop. The problem with an o-and-mv deli and coffee shop is that it tends to self-select a clientele with a higher than normal narcissism quotient. Yeah, I know: I’m one of the clients.

But, I’m there to make a quick selection - the cinnamon twist or Grandma’s Chocolate Cake - and swiftly make room for the next person in line to make their purchase and move on. I have my own Mr. Coffee back up in the office, so I don’t have to commit the supreme act of narcissism:

Imagining that the folks in line are entertained while you make them watch the overworked counter person jigger with three different nozzles on the Rube Goldberg expresso machine and carefully mix the doppio with just the right amount of one-percent from the subsidiary silver milk jug to create your own little personal java-script. Worse yet, imagining that if there are two of you, probably women, that the queue enjoys watching this show twice.

(In a burst of uncharacteristically ill-conceived menu expansion, I note that Mickey D’s has added the espresso thing to their menu. Bad idea. People at the counter or waiting in the drive-thru are not going to put up with this sh–, and, furthermore, nobody ordering at The Golden Arches is trying to build an audience.)

This is political. I blame the Democrats, even though they are my party of choice. (Sometimes my spouse asks about candidates when she’s filling out her mail-in ballot. She knows I follow the minutia of the local ballot items more closely than she does. My answer is always the same: “When in Doubt, mark ‘D’.”) That said, espresso machines tend to be over-represented in towns like mine, where our Nader vote in 2000 was probably Ralph’s benchmark. Maybe I’m missing some important data, but my hunch is that folks who voted Nader, because Gore was not Green enough, are more likely to make me effing wait in line with my cinnamon twist while they negotiate their instructions to the barista.

You want to know the real reason behind the economic meltdown? Mortgage bank and brokerage house personnel in NYC standing in effing espresso lines while they should have been examining effing loan applications and SEC filings.

I suppose, upon reflection, this is just a logistical thing. There could be one line - the blue line - for those whose self-esteem is built on believing they deserve the kind of time and attention to detail required to build a “flat latte, venti, with an extra shot, half-caf decaf cap, soy with a drip of skim,” and a red line for those who are willing to order regular coffee, for cryin’ out loud, so the line can keep moving and we can all get back to our keyboards.