chollaball.net

Is libertarianism nothing more than a candy-coated political justification for being close to the top of the socio-economic foodchain?  As I have gotten older and harder and softer, the ability to rationalize evolving political beliefs that have been naturally, holistically, influenced by the events of my life has called into question if any of my bullshit has ever been real. This such-and-such is ok, except in such-and-such case because blah blah blah blah *i* really don’t like it, and i speak cleverly and can convince myself of many things.

Relativism says no view is truer than another, perspectivism says no view is true but mine is my own truth, nihilism rejects any truth…I thought I never had a problem with nihilism when it stuck strictly to metaethics, and i could toddle about a happy perspectivalist living by my own libertarian beliefs.  Unfortunately, if you deny any truth, you eventually can’t even live in your own fantasy land, especially when you’re pretty sure you are convincing yourselves of the convenience of your own situational morality. 20 yrs later I am not certain of anything all over again.  Must be a mid-life crisis.

Libertarianism as a policy is far and away better than anything else because of its efficacy, the rational economic side of me and libraries full of data will never get away from that.  But as a morality, it is only given passion by growing up in the privileged class, and privileged really only means a modest 2-parent stable home in a stable country with access to a good education.  Or at least a desire for a good education, or at least 1 parent, or at least living in a camp where carbombs don’t go off in your front yard and you watch your sister get gang-raped while your parents are stood up against a wall and shot.  The kids in Slumdog Millionaire did pretty good for themselves right?

Right?

Its a slippery slope when you try to define what is privileged-enough to buy into the economy of the post-Hobbesian world.  Only in the last few generations has technology and knowledge trickled down enough to make there be plenty enough that its feasible enough for enough of us to want free markets enough of the time to be sustainable.  Given that fact, no, I will not feel guilty for having had a nice-enough silver spoon and blankey to make me, intellectually, passionately support all that prevents gang raping my sister.

Recently I sold a TV in perfect cosmetic and working condition, $800 8 years ago, for $100, cause it was very heavy, and we are moving, and I can buy a 36inch flat screen for $350. The buyer was thrilled, he worked a crappy restaurant job at a chain, like i did about 15 years ago.  $100 is a nice find to me,  not my nicest tv. It is not my fault. i made an honest deal at a fair price, the buyer was happy.  He could be doing a lot worse; he could be jumping trains in Guatemala coming north. He validates my current socio-economic morality.

I think the best way to show your gratitude for having good opportunities and good circumstances is by working hard and passing that ethic on to your kids.  Treating others with respect, encouraging good exchanges by rational free agents, having a kind heart, but a realistic approach.  Craigs List with a conscience.

Me and the TV guy are both cool with that.  However, he is not so far from me, inside of the US.  We’re a society that is so wealthy people willingly turn down bacon, while others figure out how to make bacon flavored jam.  He just spent his bejamin on leisure goods and not calorie-rich hog fat, he is not so poorly off.  The people who are so primitive or crazy they haven’t even nodded at the system — the clan warriors, the culture zealots — i have no means to talk to them.  But fortunately i’ve never met them, even in Mexico they want to work, even in Mesa they want to vote.  I think within my lifetime i will see the end of the people who have simplistic excuses for genocide, either by evolution or execution.

My real angst, my daily doubt, comes when there are not individual tangible items at stake, or systematic choices, but rather when there are preferences i or others want, and we work in congress with many others like-minded.  When does it go from free-trade to oppression by the masses?  When is it worth the risk of lawlessness?  When do the Indians suing Snowbowl for making snow go from being free speech to just stupid and counterproductive, based simply on 99% of us feeling one way in an irresolvable argument?  Not wrong, just dumbassed, all things considered, especially cause I like to snowboard, and they are paying for legal fees instead of college educations.

There is a flip side to being on the winning side: sometimes you get voted off the island.   Its hard on the Native Americans being the fringe minority,  I get it.  Its hard on me living in Mesa, which wants to become a Kingdom of Heaven.  I cant blame these people.   I am an agnostic libertarian living among them. I am 1%. If a bunch of areligious libertarians migrated to DagnyTaggartDesperateHousewivville, the 1% religious people would think we’re all crazy oppressors too.   As long as we understand that we can leave a city council hearing and move, rather than grab our machetes, the discomfort and feeling of cultural nimbyism is worth not running from the neighbors wielding machetes.

I am moving to Scottsdale.  I am sure i will find things that piss me off, but not to the detriment of schools and firemen and libraries and parks and quality of life.  I am choosing to spend my money on choices.  Not a single one of the people i’ve met in Mexico would do differently.

A factoid floating through the tubes:  Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”)

I won’t even try.  Competition is good, so is  humility.

I have embraced the bourgeois. I have tasted the forbidden fruit. i have felched from the Giant-Ass TV.

And I got totally donkey-punched by it.  There was no gradual ramp up, no transitional levels between level 1 and fighting the Boss Monster. I flashed from my typical Zero-Point-Zero-TV-Cuz-G-Bogarts-It-With-Wow-Wow-Wubzy to a close encounter with bloodshot eyes, missing teeth, and 3 vivacious chins. Of all the shows Beckie could have been watching, it had to be Intervention. I hate all realty shows but Last Comic Standing, and this one epecially after they forced it on us in Shame Training. Wathcing a 40-yr old meth mom cry about her 17 yr old meth daughter in 52 inches of H-fucking-D!

Bike 1, Giant-Ass TV 0

The holidays were so fabulously low-key that the next day we had time for a movie.  I picked The Watchmen, figuring itd be all cool and eye-candy and f/xy.  In the regard that the TV showed every big-budget detail and like the trailer promised totally put me in the scene, it was a riveting success.  Unfortunately, The Watchmen features a ginormous naked blue man with ginormous blue man junk.  And he — or, it — was in practically every scene, all shiny and rippling and pointing his ginormous blue man junk at the camera.  I can’t even say, actually, if the full monty was onscreen.  It could have been a codpiece.  What difference does it make?  The banana hammock was so lambskin smooth i might as well have been staring at blue man junk.

My distress on this point is purely aesthetic and not the least bit political; its not like I never see dudes in lycra or don’t wear it myself.  But this took it to a level we did not need CG to go to.  Even the amazingly awesome fantasy porn scene with the amazingly awesome fantasy superheroine could not make things right.  That scene lasted 2.4 minutes, but for 2 hrs 40 minuts I kept getting whacked in the face with HD blue man junk.

Bike 2, Giant-Ass TV 0

The giant-ass TV’s next and ultimately triumphant opportunity for redemption came on Sunday.  Football redeems us all.  The players were bigger, the hits were harder, the game was faster, the colors were more colorful, the cheerleaders smelled like stripper dust, and the grass smelled like cut grass and left stains. I can’t believe i knew there was such a thing as football before HD on a giant-ass TV.

I’m going to move the trainer in front of it for games, it will be like Indigo Joe’s now that they have wireless, only the beer will be cheaper.

Report: Most College Males Admit To Regularly Getting Stoked

A little FB challenge came my way, pick 15 influential books in 15 minutes, without thinking about any one for more than about 15 seconds.  Interesting on so many levels… not giving it much thought, I found I drifted to the books I could easily see on my bookshelf or on my Recommendations page.  Having the book in mind definitely influenced my decisions.  I resisted the temptation to go with all classics or high school\college reads, which the having-in-mind inevitably steered me towards.  Rarely have I bought books since school.    I don’t read too many classics anymore, but a lot of good contemporary works, so I guess that means I am all caught up.  It seems kinda important to not growing old and ossified to strive to be influenced by things that are new beyond your formative years.

• Beyond Good and Evil – Friedrich Nietzsche
• X Men 2 – Chris Claremont
• The Decline and Fall of the Rman Empire – Edward Gibbon
• The Once and Future King – T.H. White
• The Patron Saint of Plauges – Barth Anderson
• The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
• Watership Down – Richard Adams
• One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest – Ken Kesey
• Parliment of Whores – P.J. O’Rourke
• Close Quarters – Larry Heinemann
• Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? – by Steve Fox, Paul Armentano,  Mason Tvert
• The Prince – Machiavelli
• Blackhawk Down – Mark Bowden
• The Art of Homebrewing – Charlie Papazian
• Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer

Man, I really miss lit classes.

I love the Michael Vick signing. Abso-fucking-lutely love it. AJ Feeley is a poor choice as a 3rd QB who will kill you with INTs. Vick will stink as a thrower in the Iggles pass-wacky O, but he doesn’t need to throw! He will run Wildcat, or provide awesome options when on the field with Westbrook, McCoy, Maclin, Jackson and Curtis. It will be criminal how much speed the Eagles will be able to line up on O. I also really really like the idea of finally taking some pressure off McNabb. I’m sick of hearing “Westbrook makes the Eagles offense go” cause it is just not true – McNabb is the guy throwing 60% of the time, scrambling to make plays. Give him a few plays off a game, and have defenses prepare for what is essentially a whole different offense with Vick, and you have a ridiculous set of matchup problems.

I’m glad Vick is back, and I’m glad it was with Philly. What he did is disgusting and evil, but he served his time. Isn’t 2 years and millions of dollars enough of a penalty? What happened to him was the best thing ever to happen for PETA and their ilk for raising awareness of animal cruelty. The 50 dogs he tortured are nothing compared to the thousands left to die by their shitbag chollo and redneck owners in the Valley every year, who daily mistreat dogs, leave em chained in the yard with no shade then abandon them to certain death at the pound. Is it so much worse than this that he should not have the opportunity to rebuild his life?

The hatred from all the Good People of America is really a backlash against all of these other sins against animals, which we can not do anything about.  Our inability as a “civilized nation” to stop animal cruelty reminds us how barely civilized we really are.  We can only just barely take care of ourselves, and our pets are disposable.  All the shortcomings in our economic system, health care, gun laws, drug laws that our stupid, dullard slack-jawed ways have enabled are scratched to the surface when we can’t save the fluffy Tsainas of the world.  Cancer took Tsaina in 3 months, we paid someone a couple hundreds to put her down in the comfort of her own couch.  And I love dogs.

Hope you’ve been doing sprint workouts, Mike.

In exchange for skipping out on 9 days in Tent City, I had to endure 36 hours of alcohol counseling. This is certainly faster and easier, but I’m hard-pressed to declare it is better. Tent City was boring, mildly surreal, and humiliating in a very impersonal way. Counseling fills me with rage, its phantasmagorical like some of Ken Kesey’s trippiest passages from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and intimately offensive.

Counseling is not there to actually help you, or understand you, or talk through the whole experience of DUI. If it was, the counselors would have MDs or be licensed psychiatrists. They would allow you to talk about all aspects of the experience to help you find any valid concept to grow from your wrongdoing and avoid making the mistake again in the future.  They would not cover everyone with a blanket set of determinations, and attempt to diagnose you all with the same information. In reality, the counselors are all ex-alcoholics or Mormons, who are there only to proselytize a religion that is entrenched in their oligarchy: you drank, therefore, you have a problem.

The untenable position of objectively defining a problem that can only be seen by its negative results, and attempting to project negative results when only the one DUI is there to form a pattern, thwarts them from the start.   Yes, I made a very bad mistake. And yes, it was not the first time. That makes me a lawbreaker, a person lacking respect for alcohol and a car and the authority of law, it does not make me an addict.  They love to say how if you’ve done it once you’ve gotten away with it many times, and if you have done it there are hidden perils beneath your surface.  But without results to back up these theories, it begs the question of exactly what is the problem? The problem is defined by counselors, who’s very job is an inherent conflict of interest, since they both assign and clear you from your program, and have a financial interest in the hours you are assigned to attend.  They of course follow “guidelines” in assigning you sessions, but the guidelines are written by these same experts.

Each session I hear the exact same phrases and symptoms that they spew, and go through their checklist not finding any positives other than the one instance.

• You are more likely to become an addict if you have parents who are addicts, suffered childhood trauma, or are fundamentally narcissistic.  Nope, unless blogging qualifies as narcissism.
• You close down the bars and go looking for an after-bar party. I never go out with kids anyway.
• You call up your day-drinking buddies to fill the time.  Day drinking?  I have a highly productive job.  When I do drink during the day, I’m usually doing chores and yardwork on a weekend, or watching football along with 100M other Americans.
• You drink more than 2 drinks at a time (for men), or 1 for women.  Apparently just about everyone I know is a high-level functioning alcoholic.
• You’ve shut down emotionally. I could never conceive of the depths and complexities of emotion I have felt as a result of my children, and my 2.5 years writing about them is a better history of me than the counselor’s stupid 20 minute intake interview. Oh wait, see the part about narcissism.

Apparently I am in denial.

The D word has come up with each of the 6 dipshits I have had the pleasure of talking to.  It usually takes less than 15 minutes before they bust it out, dropping it like f-bombs in a Three Six Mafia lyric.   Angry about the draconian AZ laws?  You are in denial about your problem.  Bored with the class?  You are in denial about your problem.  Feel your punishment was excessive for its impact?  Denial denial denial. Its a deus ex machina the counselors parade out whenever logic fails them. The beauty of controlling the definitions is that it makes their definers beyond reproach.   One of my responses to this whole ordeal has been to study the law and work to change aspects of it I consider unfair, thereby communicating and sharing with others, engaging the political process, and turning my anger into constructive energy.  One particular Nurse Ratched all-knowingly asserted that this is all denial, because I should really be focusing my energy on improving myself and my problem.  The circularity of that logic is really quite elegant.

The fact is the counselors are not interested in your opinions, or connecting with you, or debating; they are coming for your mind.  Session after session, week after week, they are trying to drill into you that you are a bad person.  Shame Training.  The classes take 1 full weekend, and 5 weeks with 2 sessions a week.  If you just sit there and nod and fade into the background, they are easy to get through and generally let out early.  And I have tried, making the practice of shutting my mouth and displaying a convert’s facade my little self-improvement project for the time I am wasting in these sessions – the skill surely will come in handy in the future.  But docility is not my mindset and never has been, and since my mind is what they are attacking, the classes have been a bitter struggle for me.

The ironies and contradictions in counseling stink like cat piss in a carpet. They talk about projection and thinking errors, how throughout our lives everything we are told and embrace is the subjective opinions of others that may lead us to devalue ourselves and become addicts, yet they do not see the lunacy in their projecting a truth about us having problems with substance abuse. One obese counselor talked about her food addiction replacing her drug habit while trying to humiliate us for our arrests. Another talked about her difficulty maintaining control of her car texting while driving,  yet flew into a rage when people were speaking out against AZ’s DUI law that can send you to jail for being 50 feet from your car if you’ve been drinking.  We saw a video about a lifetime whino and his 500 arrests, and the counselors spoke of how the system failed him, how he needed help. I guess first time offenders get punished and shamed, and only when you’ve fucked your life up so irretrievably do you get their sympathy instead of scorn. They mention how only 10% of the people who go through 12 step programs are successful, how opiates and meth recidivism rates are upwards of 95%, they say 60% of the people who get DUIs in AZ will get another and the median time is only 3.5 years!  Yet still they sit on their folding-chairs thrones, and lord over the counseling sessions as they polish their halos.

What I’ve come to realize is that these people live for rehashing your misery, they are utterly and totally invested in wallowing in your problem, and it speaks more about their addictions than yours.  They are in denial about their own codependencies, but they get very very defensive when you turn the scalpel of analysis back on them.   They don’t often encounter someone with my IQ, my degree in philosophy, my lively mind, and my ability to push buttons just like them.  One of them stopped calling on me for awhile, another threatened to kick me out and send me to Tent City.  The most saccharine  scene was when we went  around the room and spoke about a trait of an addict we felt we displayed, and the counselor practically creamed herself with elation after each person’s breakthrough.  The irony and the melodrama were only enhanced in that she let each person leave early as a reward for their soul-bearing confession.  After the first guy was cut loose, 20 people couldn’t raise their hands fast enough.  Outside the class, a guy who had just revealed his empowered feeling in having not smoked for several weeks offered to sell me weed.

The sessions are not all bad.  There is some useful information to be learned about the laws, how to avoid getting caught and mistakes not to make, coping strategies so you don’t do it again, and the realization that you are not a pariah and you are not the worst person out there.  They insist you don’t drink or smoke during the ~6 weeks the sessions have taken me, and in cutting out pot and cutting down beer to avoid the 80hr detection window I have reinforced some good habits about not mixing drinking and driving.  There are people in there who do feel they have problems and are looking for help.  I feel sorry for them that they are forced to be in  classes with me, and I feel sorry for me that I am forced to be in classes with them.  Another flaw in the design of the system.

Unfortunately, the positives in the class are in reality just the bait-and-switch for the counselors’ reproach and ignominy that fill you with self-doubt.  Most of us are affected enough by the awful experience of a DUI arrest that we are genuinely trying to find a lesson and some meaning in it all, and into that breach the counselors plunge.   Like sect leaders or military recruiters, they prey on your vulnerabilities and your moments of weakness while you are their captive audience.  In the workplace this is called harassment, at home its called molestation, in public its called cult brainwashing.  In Arizona its called treatment.   It fucks with your head, it makes you begin to see yourself as their addiction statistic when you are trapped and can not raise your own voice for your own affirmation.  But on their side they have the inarguable fact that if you don’t drink, you don’t get a DUI. If they packaged the message in a way that was supportive and positive, rather than confrontational and humiliating, it would be such a better use of the 36 wasted hours.  If I could have the time back to pick up trash at the park, to talk to other adults about the consequences of my mistake, to communicate with the other class members without the disingenuous counselors in the room, it would be time better spent.

When I was a freshman in high school we had these month-long 1-act plays in the drama club during the spring, after the “big Spring production”.  The idea was you got to try something different in theater. I got to be the tech director, but that is not significant. I worked on a play called “The Insanity of Mary Girard” which was kinda cheesy and probably easy for a high school to pull off. It was abstract, attempting to anthropomorphize the “forces of society” in declaring a woman insane when she was not.  I liked it, and not just cause I got to hang out with the seniors and go to their parties.  The notion has always seemed so obvious to me, and even at a young age it resonated deeply with me – how those in power create the definitions, how the disempowered are disenfranchised, the inequalities between the haves and the have-nots, history is written by the victors etc etc etc.  Its a clarity I’ve had my entire life, developed as a teenager, maybe even earlier – when I was about 4 my parents brought me to several sessions with a psychiatrist because I had a natural aversion to authority.  Every day after Shame Training I have come home and plinked away at this post as a means of catharsis and cleansing my mind, and now with just 3 sessions and 8 days from finishing, my anger is gone and replaced mostly by amused boredom.  The education is not about me anymore, its about the blunt tools those in power use to try to define you, and how fighting them is not about logic but about misdirection.  When the last class ends, as the counselor is printing my certificate, I am going to place a takeout order for the Blue Nile Cafe, eat it while I have my first party hat in 6 weeks, wake from this horrible dream like Chief Bromden, and get stoked for the Crazy 88 that weekend.

Karl Rove probably never imagined Sarah Palin to be his legacy. And yet you can draw an arrow from Bush to her. Bush was the perfect folksy coachable candidate, with just enough of a nod toward the center to attract both the evangelical rednecks and the fiscal conservatives, at least in his first term. Palin is almost all that, in a more media-sleek package, and just dumber and commoner enough to seem approachable. She gets the passive-aggressive Baptist women who resent their husbands for forcing them to stay home, or who resent the world for never being able to amount to much more than an empty breeder in the first place.  She gets the dumb hicks who like her tits.  She gets the god-lovers and the gun-lovers.  The only thing she doesn’t get are the intelligent, thoughtful Republicans, and they aren’t going to vote for Obama anyway.

You’d think the Republicans would learn from the polarization of the last 3 elections, and how McCain lost 2008 because he followed their playbook instead of the one that had made him so popular for so many years.  But they continue to let their party’s blowhards set their course.  Palin having a soapbox is fracturing whatever is left of the Republican Party, and I say good riddance.  The best thing would be if the noble part of the Republican Party shed the “base” that demeans them. It would leave them as a minority party, and I cringe when I think of Obama’s health care plan and Nancy Pelosi lording over the House.

Congratulations, Karl!  Your sins have come home to roost.

I’ve been very pissed off and political lately. All the morality and hypocrisy I’ve been swallowing in AZ’s DUI and pot laws has made me pay a lot of attention to gun laws, since their regulation (or lack-of) is zealously defended on the basis of personal freedom, and this eye on freedom seems to have been put out when it comes to drinking and driving.  You can get a DUI in AZ by having your keys within 50 feet of your car.  Go to a bar, call a cab, fetch your laptop from your car, go to jail.  Move car seats around in your driveway with the front doors closed and the back doors and trunk open and your keys on the ground and a beer on the roof, go to jail.  Yet at the same time we are considering a law in AZ to do away with all licensing requirements for a CCW.   Just last week there was an article in the Republic about a guy who brought one to India, and then was dumbfounded when he got busted.

I can’t get behind the NRA zealots since their arguments are almost all about philosophy without any nod toward the reality of guns in society.  Too many of them sound like they have never read the Constitution, and just want to blow shit up.   Too many of the anti-gun people cite only crime stats without any respect for the idea of a free society.  They ignore stats that suggest violent crimes are worse when outlawing guns leaves only guns in the hands of outlaws.  I spent some time reading some websites on either side of the debate, and all I can conclude is that both sides are completely and totally full of shit.  What none of them seemed to provide is an analysis of the situation in a technical and economic context, prior to getting all wrapped up in morality.

When I did stand-up a long time ago I had a pretty funny bit about how the Founding Fathers wrote the 2nd Amendment when the only gun was a ball-and-powder musket, and I’d do a little move where I pretend to shoot, then use the mic stand as a prop to imitate packing the powder back down as your prepared to reload.  Hilarity ensued.  The technical limitations and lack of range and accuracy made a musket a very poor choice for an offensive weapon.  It was probably among the most expensive possessions a man owned, right up there with his horse and saddle.  People lived in filth, guns jammed, powder didn’t light, the bullet store was half a day’s ride into town or something you made in your barn smelting metal from old nails you pulled out of a horseshoe and burned over a fire lit by a tree you chopped.  That’s the baseline of the 2nd Amendment.

A bit of research online suggests that in 1875 a Colt Peacemaker cost about 1 month’s wages for the average man.  It may have been better maintained and better manufactured, but I would think the average cowboy riding around on dirt roads and frontier kicked it full of dust while it was strapped to his waist or saddle all day long.  To tolerate the conditions it had to operate in, the gun must have sacrificed range and accuracy, and you still hear how guns regularly jammed.  My camera spends one day at the beach and a little piece of grit gets trapped in a small ratcheting mechanism and destroys it.  My bike in the back of my truck travelling 10 miles down a dirt road needs a wipe down.  8 hours of riding and my drivetrain ghosts shifts mercilessly.  The conditions had to affect the gun’s use, and while 6 shots and a better rifles certainly become more offensive in function, you also hear about people barely hitting 50 yards.  Lack of sights and well made bullets etc all realistically were limits.   I am no expert, and will not pretend to be one, but it seems a no-brainer the average use was not in an ideal laboratory setting.

As per wikipedia and the 2005 census, the average male income in the US was $39,400.  2 minutes shopping online found an AK47 for $1000, AR-15 for $1200, and a 9mm for $300.  In real dollar terms, you can get the 15 shot 9mm with better accuracy and firepower for 1/10th the cost of the 1875 Peacemaker. Factor in the ease of obtaining guns and supplies, cleaner conditions and ease of service, and the gun today is a totally different tool than the gun of the Revolutionary War.

As a libertarian i think guns should be legal, but the data argues in favor intelligent, evolving regulation that balances the goal of freedom with the reality of modern society.

and now for the obligatory “why do you hate America?”

Cafe society shudders!  George Braque laughs! Museum curators gnash their teeth since they must now display that picture of the dogs playing poker!  Chollaball wallows in his overpriced liberal arts education!  This was a tragic loss to the art world, but when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Why do you write or paint or create, if you are not getting paid?  For yourself? For attention and self-esteem?  The inevitable answer is some of both, otherwise why bother having a website when you could just have a diary?

The creative undertaking must be personal, but the appreciation and attention adds to the satisfaction for me, not because I need validation, but because the idea becomes more powerful when its appreciated by others like-minded. The audience, even if anonymous and never encountered, inspires me to surround the kernel of creativity with rigor and discipline and honesty, to make the glimmer of a good idea into a nice piece of work, to achieve by the struggle for quality the genuine catharsis we seek when we create.

Recently I have written some fantastic posts, and kept them private.  The writing and research and sincerity are among the best I’ve ever done.  Its been essential to keeping me from totally losing my shit.  And I want to share it. Some things however, shouldn’t be public. This is not my day job, and often on the internet there is nothing to gain and much to lose.

After he became wildly successful, did Picasso need an audience? Maybe his puppy was all the audience he needed.

This post is a proxy for those I can not publish.