Googled!

I just discovered that this blog can be tracked down via Google by searching for "skunk rancher"...see the proof here!

Ain't that the strangest.

What happens to Madison?

So, this is me back at work. Even better, this is me at work for another 2.5 hours. Better than that, this is me trying to figure out with whom I will be spending the night, not in the "sexy way", but in the "we've all planned to do things tonight and you've got to be there for because it's ______".

That ______ is a tricky bit of calculus for me to perform in my head without paper and pencil. But, near as I can tell, I need to be at all of these places for reasons as numerous and as foggy as those that brought us to Iraq.
Los' Band "The Hat Party" at The Glass Nick. I need to be there because it's their first show and they are doing this show for friends and no cover.
Elizabeth and Sarah for drinks at a dive bar I need to be there because Elizabeth is leaving soon and Sarah's only in town for a visit.
Melanie for drinks on the terrace I need to be there because Melanie's leaving soon and plus she's old school crew.
Angie and Robyn for "cocktails" at a "cocktail party" I need to be there because I have, in the past, disappeared on Angie plus I have a bad rep for playing hookie on bar nights.
Parents and Grandma for dinner I need to be there because they're my family and my Grandma's only in town for a short while.

You figure it out. That's some "for reals", SAT-caliber, story-problem math. Working in shifts I should be able to see everyone and get in a reasonable amount of conversation. If I sense the downward spiral of bad bar-hopping and mobile-phone tag, I plan on going "scenister" for the night and just sleeping through everything.

So, what happens to Madison tonight?

On the spend

I made some rather necessary purchases while on my 3 day vacation, here they are In descending order of purchase price:
The 15th ed. Chicago Manual of Style - 55 bones
Sex and the City 3rd Season DVD- 42 bones
Canvas Repro of Picasso "Nude du Nos" from shopgoodwill.com - 41 bones
Sex and the City 4th Season DVD - 37 bones
The Mothman Prophecies DVD - 15 bones
A Grey Wool Overcoat from shopgoodwill.com - 5 bones

And that's not accounting for the drinks and grub. In the grand scheme of work schedules this vacation my not have been the longest or the most productive BUT I did manage to score some nice time wasters AND the new CMS without breaking the bank and without going to the mall. On the downside of the vacation: the return to work. Starting Saturday I've got an unholy 13 consecutive days of work, many of them of the 10-8 variety. But the money will be good and after the first few days of mind-numbing paper-shuffling I should be essentially living outside my body. On the list for the remaining handful of my vacationneering hours: I think some Sex and the City DVD watching, New Yorker reading, and then some friendly conversation with the friendlies.

Could Steve Martin "have" Weapons of Mass Destruction?

It All Depends on What You Mean by 'Have'
By STEVE MARTIN


So if you're asking me did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction, I'm saying, well, it all depends on what you mean by "have."
See, I can "have" something without actually having it. I can "have" a cold, but I don't own the cold, nor do I harbor it. Really, when you think about it, the cold has me, or even more precisely, the cold has passed through me. Plus, the word "have" has the complicated letter "v" in it. It seems that so many words with the letter "v" are words that are difficult to use and spell. Like "verisimilitude." And "envelope."
Therefore, when you ask me, "Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction," I frankly don't know what you're talking about. Do you mean currently? Then why did you say "did?" Think about "did." What the heck does that mean? Say it a few times out loud. Sounds silly. I'm beginning to think it's just the media's effort to use a fancy palindrome, rather than ask a pertinent question.
And how do I know you're not saying "halve?" "Did Iraq halve weapons of mass destruction?" How should I know? What difference does it make? That's a stupid question.
Let me try and clear it up for you. I think what you were trying to say was, "At any time, did anyone in Iraq think about, wish for, dream of, or search the Internet for weapons of mass destruction?"
Of course they did have. Come on, Iraq is just one big salt flat and no dictator can look out on his vast desert and not imagine an A-test going on. And let's face it, it really doesn't matter if they had them or not, because they hate us like a lassoed shorthorn heifer hates bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
Finally, all this fuss over 16 lousy words. Shoot, "Honey, I'm home," already has three, with an extra one implied, and practically nothing has been said. It would take way more than 16 words to say something that could be considered a gaffe. I don't really take anything people say seriously until they've used at least 20, sometimes 25, words.
When I was criticized for my comment, I was reluctant to point out it was only 16 words, and I was glad when someone else took the trouble to count them and point out that I wasn't even in paragraph territory. When people heard it was only 16 words, I'm sure most people threw their head back and laughed. And I never heard one negative comment from any of our coalition forces, and they all speak English, too.

Steve Martin is author of "Shopgirl" and the forthcoming "The Pleasure of My Company."
NYT 2003

Gay Bishop to King's 4

Good for him.

I haven't much more to say about New Hampshire's newest Bishop other than that.

As for current events other than those involving gays in positions of power:
I read a couple of interesting articles about Iraq and the mess we seem to be in, The New Yorker's article was a nicely composed long form piece, sadly the photopage introduction was the only featured in the article. The article titled "Iraq's Bloody Summer" is not yet online but there is some material by John Lee Anderson in the Online Only section that overlaps with his printed story. The other article that I read on Iraq was not actually a story but an interview with Michael Kelly, the Atlantic Monthly correspondent who was killed in Iraq on April 4, 2003. He does a little of the obligatory bookpushing but otherwise the interview was pretty insightful. His experience as a reporter during the first war foreshadows some of the strife this go around. In parts it's a bit dry but you can't help but be moved a bit by the conversation, in light of the fact that Michael Kelly died in Iraq not too long after talking so candidly, and at times excitedly, about his time there as a reporter.

Leaving Iraq, I read yet another article about the Killing of God's Banker. This one, a relatively short piece in the Guardian Weekly, had some new details on the re-openning of the case and the suspects. I don't have an available link for the GW story but I'll try and get it up as they send it to me. The jist: This story just keeps getting stranger and stranger.

That's all I got for the news.

In a final note:
I now have something like 4 or 5 e-mail addys...seriously, this is getting out of hand.

akkraus@facstaff.wisc.edu

(professional contact addy)

aaronkraus@uwalumni.com

(alternate professional contact addy)

aaronkraus@hotmail.com

(most frequently checked mainstream junk mail magnet addy)

rockselaborate@yahoo.com

(phone-checkable e-mail addy)

akraus09@sprintpcs.com

(phone-checkable e-mail addy #2)
I might be forgetting 1 or 2 but who's counting after 3 addys?

That's the rest.

My life as an open grave

Background: A few nights ago I cut my foot while chasing after my runaway cat.

Last night I discovered that it ressembles the stigmata in both its physiological placement and the quality of the gore. So, as of last night I'm nearly a 1/4th resurrected from the grave. What of the remaining 3/4's? Trouble, that's what. Despite my claim of having the better sense to stay in and rest, I went to a casual gathering of friends that featured the normal smattering of alcohol, corn chips, and recreationally abused drugs. Despite knowing that I would be getting up early to assemble furniture, I stayed out until half four in the morning. Okay, so I spent the last hour or so in a hot tub, but it doesn't mean the birds sing any softer. Anyway I feel exhausted now and fully expect that I will be asleep for at least one hour before going out again tonight. Not that this marks any special milestone on my odometer of my life but it is getting a little tiresome logging the same miles every night. Bar, friends, bed...morning news, work, bus home, run...It's sad when your life has fewer unique scenarios and events than Life by Milton Bradley.

Maybe I'll strike oil and collect $300,000 tomorrow but I can't help but expecting that I'll inherit my uncle's skunk farm. Basically, I need to find a better job than skunk-rancher and that shouldn't be TOO hard to do, even WITH G.W. balancing the checkbook. In the mean time, you can find me in my open grave waiting for something to fall into my lap.

Be my September 11th

I was just going through some old ghosts and came across that little bit of culture from the orignal "1 step" and thought I would re-post it. I'm going for a run and then a drink, maybe a kiss. Maybe a clove. I hope I don't die young before I start really having fun.

As I create so shall I destroy and profit from the sales of t-shirts

I'm finished with "work" for today. On an improvised scale of 1 to 10 this state of being "finished with 'work' for today" ranks damn close to the square root of 100. Tomorrow, God willing and car operable, I will be earning sweet tax-free, under-the-table clams for assembling some home furnishings for the elderly. That is also cool. As for the whole Power Point thing of some minutes ago, I have resolved to publish more works in the PP medium. Add it to the list, it's a go.

Also on the list:
T-shirt designs
A graduate school education
The new Jay Farrar cd
The new Chicago Manual of Style

Well, the list is rather long and fat in the middle with the usual blah-blah about being sure to stretch before running and drink water after beer. Anyway, "Power Point publishing magnate" will soon be listed just after "Death or Glory tattoo".

1000 Power Points of Light

I spent nearly one full, uninterrupted, hour at work creating what I can only justly describe as the FINEST Power Point presentation EVER crafted. It was not of a particularly noteworthy length (I've done longer PP's for a college ILS course crosslisted with Social Science) nor was it of exceptional importance (I did a really informative PP presentation for a science course, also in college) but none of these individual rankings could lessen the appreciation of the whole project. It was fucking awesome. And what is the topic of my FINEST EVER Power Point presentation?

My life as a Power Point presentation.

I know.

Why doesn't anyone hire me as a writer? I don't know, but I could probably generate a Power Point presentation to investigate that question.

When I say GO

An up-to-date scorecard of imminent departures:

Mark leaves for Hampshire on August 19, 2003. 14 days.
Elizabeth leaves for Pland on the August 25, 2003. 19 days. (She leaves Madison on th 14th)
Melanie leaves for SanD. on August 22, 2003. 17 days.
Nora leaves for Ann Arbor on or around the closing of August.
~2.5 weeks.

I am staying here until a proper employer sees fit to call me up from the Minor leagues.

What Papa Tomato said

Well, this is new. I decided to destroy my original blog and reimagine it as something more than an outlet for my unstudied thoughts on West Nile Virus and plainly-written stories about parallel parking. These topics will not be completely expurgated from this forum, but, I wouldn't bookmark this page in your browser's "Cliff's Notes for West Nile Virus enthusiasts" or "Parallel Parking Fetishists" folder, should they exist at all.

Now we play catch-up for a bit.

Officially felled in mid-July of 2003, "I am 1 step ahead of you" was as distinguished a record of my life as is likely to ever be found in print--electronic or scrawled in blood on the bathroom wall. I was a dutiful blogger for the better part of a year and quickly amassed an archive to rival that of Aristotle, except with more liberal use of the words "fuck" and "fucking", I think.

I contributed the better part of my time at "real work" to the "contrived work" of keeping my readership informed of my thoughts on where my life was going, who I was likely to be drinking with on any given night, and why the noise air conditioners make sounds like people talking. July's sheet turned up on the calendar and I discovered that I was sick of pursuing these questions and that more importantly, no one else cared much either.

Sad but true: not even my compelling essay on the cross-genre similarities between "Pirates of the Carribean" and _Ulysses_ seemed worthy of comment.

That was mid-July, and I could hear that the end was stumbling around the bend. Punched-up by the drunken awareness of my own irksome blog I pulled the plug and never slept better in my life. As I said, that was mid-July.

Now is August. I officially de-listed my occupation on Friendster and have since re-listed it. From "Retail Terrorist" to "Iraq and Afghanistan" and back, very little changed. I want degree-adjacent employment but it doesn't want me, same; I want less George W. Bush but he persists, same; I want more time to sleep but people need furniture questions answered at 10am, same; and on and on it goes. Expect something to change and will always stay the same. Pray for routine and you're bound to be kidnapped.

And what you're left with: that's catch up.