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 endured 36 hours of alcohol counseling. Faster and easier, but I’m hard-pressed to declare it is better. Tent City was boring, Stalag 17 meets Breakfast Club, and humiliating in a very impersonal way. Counseling is phantasmagorical like some of Ken Kesey’s trippiest passages from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Its intimately offensive.

Counseling is not there to help you, or understand you, or talk through the whole experience of DUI. The counselors aren’t MDs or licensed psychiatrists. If they were, you would talk about all aspects of the experience to help you find any valid concept to grow from and avoid the mistake again in the future.    They would not throw you under a blanket set of determinations, and diagnose you all with the same set of scales. 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.   Yes, I made a bad mistake. And yes, it was not the first time. That makes me a lawbreaker lacking respect for alcohol and a car, it does not make me an addict.   They say how if you’ve done it once you’ve gotten away with it many times, and there are hidden perils beneath your surface.   But without results to back up these theories, its a question looking for an answer, defined by counselors. Their job is an inherent conflict of interest, since they both assign and clear you from the program, and get paid by the class.   They   follow guidelines in assigning you sessions,   written by these same experts.

Each session they prattle the exact same phrases and symptoms, and I 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, though I do own a Mexican beach house.
• You call up your day-drinking buddies to fill the time.   Day drinking? Its behind day reading, and day biking.   When I drink during the day, I’m doing chores, at the beach reading or biking, 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 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 talked to.   It takes 12-16 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. Controlling the definitions makes their definers beyond reproach. One of my responses to this whole ordeal has been to study the law and understand the aspects that are unfair, to cathartically communicate, engage the political process, and send angry notes to my State Senator. I emailed a college Professor   who moved me so much 20 years earlier with his trailblazing work on drug legalization, and 20 years later having no recollection of me his lesson blew my mind again.   It helped me stand up to one Nurse Ratched who recited all is denial, because I should really be focusing my energy on improving myself.   I could see the circular logic, but I feared she might still be a little right, and I wanted her out of my head. That is one powerful universal remote.

The counselors are not interested in your opinions 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 to shut my mouth and display a convert’s facade. Its my little self-improvement project for the time I am wasting in these sessions.   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.

The 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   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. No one ever wrecked a car because of too much Chipotle. Another councilor talked about her difficulty maintaining control of her car texting while driving,   yet flew into a rage, table-pounding barking, 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 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. 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!   Handsome folding-chair throne, Coach, and great talk!

These people live for rehashing your misery, they are utterly 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 degree in philosophy, lively mind, and ability to push buttons just like them.   One of them stopped calling on me for a week, 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 creamed herself with elation after each person’s breakthrough. Then she let you leave early as a reward for their soul-bearing.   After the first guy was cut loose, 20 people shot their hands in the air, dislocating shoulders, spilling Red Bulls. Outside the class, a guy who had just revealed his empowered feeling in having not smoked weed 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.   The guy next to you is. If you don’t think he is yet, you will after he is forced to talk.

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 I have reinforced good habits and mindset about habits.   There are people in there who do feel they have problems and are looking for help.   I feel sorry   that they are forced to be in classes with me, and that I am forced to be in classes with them.   Another flaw in   the system.

Unfortunately, the positives in the class are 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 the counselors drive a prybar into that crack. They prey on your vulnerabilities and your moments of weakness while you are their captive audience, forced to gush out in front of the room.   In the workplace this is called harassment, at home its called abuse, in public its called cult brainwashing.   In Arizona its called treatment.   It gaslights you, it makes you 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 are not in this miserable class. 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, to talk to the class about how we all ended up here, without the parasitic counselors in the room, it would be time better spent.

When I was a freshman in high school we put on 1-act plays in the drama club during the late spring spring.   The idea was you got to try something different in theater. I got to be the tech director 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.   Even at a young age it always resonated with me – those in power create the definitions, how the disempowered are disenfranchised, the inequalities between the haves and the have-nots, history and victors. I’ve always had this clarity. When I was about 4 my parents brought me to a psychiatrist because I had a natural aversion to authority. I need to ask my mother about this before she dies.

Every day after Shame Training I have come home and plinked away at this post as a means of catharsis and cleansing, and now with just 3 sessions and 8 days from finishing, my anger is gone and replaced 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 wake from this horrible dream like Chief Bromden, throw a sink through the window, place a takeout order for the Blue Nile Cafe, eat it while I have my first party hat in 6 weeks, and get stoked for the Crazy 88 race 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.

If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.

Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges…all this has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics.

The severity of the penal code provides an especially significant measure of the degree of effort needed to overcome forgetfulness and to impose a few primitive demands of social existence.

–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 2nd essay, section 3

The other day G put her stuffed animal in the sink, after Beckie told her not to.   Then I told her not to, and she did it to another one.   So I scolded her and shrugged her off.   She threw a fit and cried with shame for 5-10 minutes.   Beckie tried to calm her, and that usually works but this time did not, until finally I told her it was ok just don’t do it again.   Then she chilled.

I knew this wait was making her upset, but its just like teaching her to climb the monkeybars, she has to take some hits to learn. Punishment to a child, where it can be infused with an emotional connection, can be tempered.   The feelings G has to the victim — in this case, me — internalizes the sense of wrong and enhances the impact of the punishment such that it need not be extreme.   A society, however, can only offer a conceptual and anonymous connection to the victims of most crimes.   For its punishments to be effective as revenge and deterrent, it must inculcate in the perpetrator an appreciation for an abstract wrong and an abstract victim.   It must replace emotions and empathy with common currencies – time, money, and most of all cruelty – to develop a notion of right and wrong.

The average person who has no experience with the criminal justice system and its role of building deterrents out of abstractions may be unmoved by the idea of penalties, and they do not understand their full severity until the weight of the law is upon them.   By then the deterrent is only useful for future violations.   What remains is vengeance, and a brutal, blunt, yet effective means of establishing a morality.

I think of this every time I think of getting busted. I had no appreciation for Arizona’s status as the toughest state in the nation on DUI, the mandatory minimums, or their role in crafting a behavioral model for society. I think how minor my transgression really was, how close I was to home, how quiet the street was at midnight, how i was not reckless, and how I was cooperative and polite with the cops.

My lawyer wrote me: “Both Officers indicated that you were incredibly polite and both were impressed with how honest you were with them in every aspect of your case. Unfortunately, the City of Mesa prosecutors will not give any weight to this information.”

I wasn’t blowing a .20 and driving a boat home from the lake on a holiday weekend. I got caught by a fluke, no one was close to harmed, and had things been just a bit different I might have been let go. The cops kinda felt bad about busting me, were as easy on me as i was on them, and wished me well with my new daughter.

Singular, monolithic, uncompromising. Systematic.

Its unfair, overkill, and impossible to separate the motivations for reform and revenge from the cash cow its become.   But it is effective.   I will never drink and drive again.   The punishments are too severe to ever risk it, and their punitive effects go far beyond what is listed on paper.   Each one comes with so much overhead and bullshit that the reality of its impact far exceeds its description.

Thank gawd my suspension started at the end of April instead of the end of June, I was on my bike so much. My knees ached, my back was sore, and I was unable to get to regular yoga classes or my chiropractor.   My license is also maxed out on points for 2 years, so any minor moving violation during that window and I’m handed another suspension. After my conviction, I received another notice that my license was being suspended, but DMV just made a mistake on this one triggered by Mesa’s resolution to my case. Yay, process! I rode my bike to the DMV after my 30 days were up to get my restricted license enabled, to find the next day that they had automatically mailed it to me anyway.    The   DMV is quite good at handling this since they do it so often.   Mornings lost with Genevieve, love lost for my bikes, any ability to contribute outside the house. I tried to go shopping with the bike trailer, things melted, and fell out. Beckie showed infinite patience, due to her getting a DUI 15 years earlier.

Interlock, day in jail, lawyer, courts, paperwork, fines, counseling, fees, insurance, police profiling and shame for about $10,000. Every time I get mad, I struggle to point my anger back at myself:   I was the one who fucked up, no one else.   But its really hard to acknowledge one’s guilt and mistakes when the penalties and consequences are so out-of-line with the effects.   What choice do I have?   The only good to come out of this is if it never happens again.

Would I be so motivated to never let this happen again if it only cost me 1k, some points on my license, and a 30-day suspension?   Honestly, no.   Would I have been motivated enough…yes, probably.   Having no car and 2 little kids for a month in summer in AZ, then paranoia that every time I do take them to daycare might be construed as a violation of my restricted license, has quite an effect on your attitude.   Having tasted the sample, the serving for a second offense is more than enough to deter me.

One has only to look at our former codes of punishment to understand what effort it costs on this earth to breed a “nation of thinkers.”   — Friedrich Nietzsche

Angry and scared with some new-found knowledge of AZ’s “Zero Tolerance Per Se” and “Impaired to the Slightest Degree” laws, I wrote this letter to Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance.

Hello Dr. Nadelmann and Team,

I am sure you do not remember me, but I was an undergrad student of yours at Princeton in 1992.   Your class was one of the best I attended, and I have followed the DPA closely for almost 5 years.

I recently learned about a law in Arizona (where I’ve lived for almost 15 years) that merits re-evaluation.   If a person is found with any metabolite of marijuana in their system while driving, they can be convicted of DUI.   The drug could have been active weeks before.   The law is documented below in Arizona Revised Statute 28-1381:

http://www.azleg.state.az.us/ars/28/01381.htm

My nightmare scenario is this: I get rear-ended with my kids in the car.   The officer runs my record, sees I have a ticket for running a red-light (AZ also leads the nation in photo-enforcement cameras), profiles me as a problem driver and orders a blood test due to the accident.   It comes up positive due to pot smoked weeks prior, and now I face felony DUI for being under the influence with minors in the car.

I am opposed to driving under the influence.   But this law is practically carte blanche to turn usage into DUI.   AZ has the toughest DUI laws in the country and a very red\Mormon\family-values population that makes a jury trial a very scary proposition.

I have written my representatives about this law.   But the political climate in AZ is not friendly towards any easing of DUI or marijuana laws.   Unfortunately, most of us only find out about these laws after attending Traffic School due to photo enforcement, and by then we are labeled as criminals in denial.

I hope this unfair and punitive law gets the attention of your organization, and would appreciate any suggestions for raising awareness and opposition to it.

Keep up the good work!

I also wrote to State Senator Chuck Gray and Representatives Kirk Adams and Rich Crandall.

I’ve lived in District 19 for 9 years, and recently attended Traffic Survival School due to a photo-enforcement ticket for running a red light. I learned some great lessons about becoming a better driver and the tremendous harms DUI causes on our roads. I am now more firmly than ever opposed to DUI. But I disagree with ARS 28-1381, sections A-1 and A-3. These clauses make it a criminal DUI if one is impaired to the slightest degree, or one has any metabolite of a restricted substance in one’s system. Again, I am completely opposed to DUI, but these laws are too restrictive to personal freedom and turn sensible law-abiding people into criminals. The notion that a .01 BAC due to one beer during an hour-long dinner, or a vicodin weeks earlier from a dentist appointment could result in a DUI is very unsettling. Responsible consumption and responsible use of prescription drugs is legal and should not put a law-abiding person at risk for the tremendous penalties of DUI comparable to someone with a BAC of .14.

Please continue to support laws that vigorously deter and penalize DUI, but remain sensible about turning ordinary responsible people into criminals.

Didn’t get a response, no surprise. Mesa is a very Mormon city, in a very conservative state. There is inevitable crossover between personal beliefs  and legislating morality. On the one hand that is democracy in action, but I still get cranky when Rs (or in other places, Dems) run unopposed since it drives extremist politics and laws that simply go too far.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a response from Dr. Nadelmann, in which he described work DPA did opposing a similar law in Ohio.   He forwarded my information to members of the organization in Ohio and New Mexico, as well as representatives for NORML.   Unfortunately, a Senior Policy Analyst from NORML also replied, saying that AZ’s law was among the first and toughest in the nation, and there is little to believe there is a receptive legislative climate for change, citing our state’s regulartory history.   Yeah, I figured that out too.

 

It may finally be succeeding.   I am down close to 5 lbs, having gone to bed last night after a ginormous meal of hamburgers and bbq and still clocking in just over 154.   I   now feel motivated to get below my goal of 153 down to about 150.     I’m most psyched that my body has finally turned the corner and is not wanting to eat as much anymore.   My 6-pack is becoming defined again.   Its always been there, but like its namesake, just hiding in the fridge behind the milk and cheese.   I thought I was old enough to not give a shit how I look anymore as long as I wasn’t hideous, but I see now that was a coping strategy.   It feels good to look tight again! Infused with momentum from my success, dropping under my goal seems suddenly within reach.    

My strategies have not been extreme, but compared to my prior habits have made a few minor but significant changes:

• Much less carbs:   I had a bad habit of snacking on bread as a mini-meal before dinner, since dinner often didn’t come til about 10pm, or eating lots of bread cause I wanted to eat and it was not junk food.   Carbs for athletics are one thing; carbs beyond needed calories are mostly just another form of sugar.
• Less snacks:   we’re just not bringing it home.   I’ve chapped Beckie’s ass when she has, and she has grudgingly acknowledged the validity in my complaints
• High fiber: my diet has always been pretty good, but I’m making a point of eating stuff like acorn squash and brussel sprouts, now that I’ve finally figured out how to cook them so they taste really good.   They fill me up, and make me feel just a little bit sick, which keeps me from overeating.

How cool would it be to come into the Crazy 88 as light as I was with Ironwood in ’03?!?!