FC Top 10

So it begins..

1. Atletico Madrid
2. Bayern Munich
3. Real Madrid
4. Chelsea
5. Paris St. Germain
6. Juventus
7.  Dortmund
8. Manchester City
9. Barcelona
10  Porto

Oh Omaha

The police department there may have very well killed "COPS".    At the very least there is probably not going to be an Omaha episode of "COPS" now, and I confess to somewhat looking forward to that episode for the same perverse voyeuristic reasons everyone looks forward to watching that rotten little public shaming orgy.

We common citizens should above all else remain fair-minded here.  We must especially remember that the chronological nearness to the Micheal Brown murder is a coincidence that does not magically shape the facts of this one incident.  We should remember that the OPD were not acting out of irrational fear or contempt for the general public or any particular segment of it here; they were responding to an actual major violent felony being actually committed by a deliberate villain, (one Cortez Washington.)  We should remember that we would be asking the police to be superhuman if we demanded them to tell the difference between a BB gun and an organ-shredding 'real' gun in the heat of the moment.   And yet by this same fair-mindedness we are still forced to ask ourselves this; thirty fucking shots fired at a single bad guy.  Really? Even if every officer at the scene happened to have ubermenshenly perfect aim there still would have been bullets hitting something or someone they weren't intended for by the mere fact of there being no more bad guy to shoot.

From what we know so far this tragedy does not seem to have come about from prejudice on the part of Omaha police but rather 'mere' incompetence.  whether it is better to have competent though bigoted, anti-egalitarian police force or a police force that simply doesn't know what it is doing is for each individual to decide for herself.  And all snark aside we must certainly remember COPS soundman Bryce Dion and especially his friends and family at this time.

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In other Nebraska news:  It is a truly sublime thing when angel Ernie tears into Devil governor and something  he definitely do more often.

  Chambers said the presidency was "simply too tall an order and too big a responsibility for someone of your meager, inadequate capability to handle competently and effectively."


:--O  :-)

I Am the Resurrection

Indian Summer is my favorite time of year.  A "cold front" came in today and now the same clothes I've been wearing for three days are somewhat chilly.  I made a stew of sausage squash and hot peppers for lunch and it was orgasmic.  Tonight I intend to drink bracing hard cold weather liquor like vodka or scotch even though that's terribly premature and overdramatic I realize and yet;


If you could see the way the light glows no in midfternoon you'd agree that it is very autumn gold even if it's mid-nineties bullhot and you can't help but think that all the West O bougie decadents who bought swimming pools in Nebraska have it right after all.  I have a morbid fascination with some tales of toddlers who drowned in private swimming pools, in how they were so intensely fascinated with the skywater that they scaled fences several times their own height or braved dogs several times their size just to touch that skywater and become that skywater.*  I vaguely remember having that thing in myself; that ingrained childhood instinct to be so wholly overwhelmed by curiosity as to become it like a demigod feels lust but I don't remember it enough to truly feel it again; alas.  Though there as a point in my adulthood when I was taking an art history class and viewed a slide of a cathedral in like Occidentia I think it was and letting out the most audible and sincere AHHH at the sight of a dome shaded the color of the most cutting ice blue several hundred feet in the air and good god Damn.  I think Burke was an ass for declaring storms mountains and terror superior to cute and comfortable things but he wasn't without his justifiable reasons. 


*  A less depressing example, if dead children depress you as well they should.  I was once at a smorgasbord restaurant and left a jalapeno at my seat while I went to get some beer-cheese pasta or something.  A girl or four or five was so transfixed by the pepper that she ignored all obvious signs of the seat being taken and the pepper being someone's; throwing my jacket car keys etc aside in her attempt to grab it for herself and being stopped only by her father dragging her away in tears.   She shall make a very brave woman this one.

Last Night

I walked in the rain for thirty blocks and it was glorious.  Especially after working through the beastly hot day on not enough sleep.  It was an impressionistic day where pleasure and pain were felt with particular acuity.  But it was something after all.   Bob Segar is in intolerable beast hack. 

There's A Woman I See About

A smoky look; Afro American I think though perhaps south Asian, thin yet curvy with perpetually somnolent eyes.  Yet it seems obvious that she already has a boyfriend. Alas. 

Why I share this publicly I don't know.  I've never 'believed' in love in the abstract sense.  Though I know it literally exists and I've felt it myself.  And I have never wanted 'a girlfriend' in the abstract.  I have never viewed marriage and children as even a remote theoretical possibility.  I have been completely cold to the idea always and angered whenever a family member spoke of "when" I'd be married as if it was of course the natural human default.  I am very suspicious of those who pursue strong passions, sexual or otherwise,  for the sake of having them or even will themselves into feeling them for the sake of feeling them.  I feel perfectly 'alive' enough idly thinking to myself and perhaps that's a problem though I don't think so. 

Still I have attractions.  I've had relationships that just sort of happened until they died out; freeing me to return to my comfortable norm of solitude.  There are women that I wanted and then either had or didn't and the odd man that I wasn't really attracted to per se but not repulsed by either and one does only live once, after all.  Yet while I say that I admit that I find sex generically pleasant and no better.  I don't find it transcendentally wonderful and on reflection now I realize that this is mainly because I do not want anything to be transcendentally wonderful.  I deplore the thought of any experience having such power over me, especially not if the experience requires another person and is not solely my own.  Take this for what you will.   

I'm Not Looking Forward to Football Season

Though At least I am now free from small-town men in bars and their-weirdly moralistic, manfully adamant for manful adamancies' sake analysis of the latest big game.  I've no greater hope than for the Cornhuskers to be blandly mediocre for so long that they cease to be viewed as intrinsic parts of Nebraska identity and the head football is paid in proportion to his actual value to society; maybe half of what a sociology GA makes if he's especially good. 

The solution to the recent controversy over paying players or not  is to completely abolish athletic scholarships and recruitment for every school of every size everywhere without exception.  If you want to keep football then form a team out of scratch from among actual student body; a pack of business, history, and computer science majors who have never touched a barbell running single wing sweeps on the common campus green space before an audience of dozens.  My God it could be beautiful.  At any rate the absurdly loud, vulgar, hyperbolic protofascist thing we call college sports today must for the good of humanity be destroyed, exterminated, annihilated and burned to its respective subatomic units of obnoxious bullshit.  The question of whether to replace it with something or nothing is a luxury that can wait. 

And my God but you should see the bougie knobheads that the football team brings to my town on fall weekends; clogging up my streets my neighborhood my bars and generally treating my beautiful city and its people like an amusement park.  It's enough to embitter the greatest saint. 

 

A Story I tell Every now and Again

I'll be attending this event at the NE state capitol about an hour from now.    

When I think of how 'white privilege'  has benefited me directly; well, I sometimes speak of past occurrences when I would walk to the capitol straight from classes at the university, (It's only eight or nine blocks depending) with a backpack clearly bulging with... something or another; receiving no more than 'attaboy that thing sure looks heavy' jokes from capitol guards and every else who even bothered to mention anything.

Just thought you'd like to know.  Boom. 

No Justice No Peace is Self-Evident Common Sense

Looting Isn't cool or anything like that: and yet....

"The law' you see, does not exist as an abstract totem of moral authority to submit oneself to.  Nor are police officers the priestly representatives of this non-existent ideal.  Police are the passive agents of laws that other people make; no less and no more. If the promise of social deference or 'respect' played the slightest motive in one's pursuit of a law enforcement career, then one should not have been allowed to pursue a law enforcement career.  But I digress.

'The law' you see, only actually exists in as much as people gain from it materially.  This goes no less for the privileged than it does for the oppressed. If summery execution is the penalty for, as a matter of fact, obeying the law, then it is in no sense 'radical' but statement of objective fact to say that the law does not exist.  If a young black man or anyone else knows that the law's 'or else' is the only  consequence of anything he does or doesn't do, then of course the law doesn't exist. Why would it?  How could it? 

 As I said before I do deplore looting and chaos; up to a point.  I myself am no Marxist but merely Keynesian, no militant but merely liberal.  Yet if one finds the current looting in the St. Louis area to be 'outrageous' or what have you then please understand, among those who can expect summery execution for obeying the law respect for property cannot possibly exist; and again this is quite indisputable.  One has to be alive to own things. One has to be alive to enjoy or appreciate any level of wealth in any way.  And as of now as of our entire history so far our black compatriots, our neighbors throughout our national journey who have formed us as much as vice-versa, have no cause to reasonably expect that their lives will be protected.  Their lives are not being protected.  It's quite as simple as that. 

Well Shitty Shitty Shit.

I remember the disgrace of a ballot initiative that made gay marriage in Nebraska cooties no-tag backs double illegal.  It was 2000 and the first major election I was old enough to partake in.  You probably a couple other things from that one yourself; but anyway.

Yet even within the context of this law (and of course I'm in favor of legal gay marriage) I find this story very baffling.  Just what the hell is the trouble here? Sue Stroesser has decided to take her "roommate's' name then.  Better now?   

Tip for Amatuer Erotic Writers

It's perfectly alright to build a fictional universe where your own proclivities are more common than in our world. That's a writer's prerogative.  But please still bear in mind that your fetish is perceived as a 'fetish' for a reason and that it simply won't do to build a world where every human alive of whatever cultural background or general orientation just happens to share your particular fetish.  This simply goes beyond a recognizable human credibility even if you build the most fantastic universe with rules wildly different from our own.   It cheapens your tale, you see; causes reader indifference.  People would be disinclined to keep up with the how and why of your climactic battle if they know it's just an excuse for another 20 page diversion into how much the emperor loves to rub himself off on the lower spines of miniaturized rat people.  Sometimes you need to step back and allow your characters some autonomy of will. It makes everything better.    

I Remember

As I recall it was either late fall or early winter.  I know it was Sunday night because I was at O'Rourke's having one of their cheap but serviceable bloody Mary's.  This is not a ritual of mine per se but rather something I may or may not do based on being truly hungover and especially if I had something savory or spicy for dinner that day.  Anyway I was here in this day smoking in the streetfront cube where I met a man who'd come up from Texas for some kind of contract work.  He saw me drinking alone and accosted me for rambling Texas banter.  I told him that I noticed the distinct Texan of his accent and he replied rather defensively that 'it's Southern!'  I suggested otherwise at no point at all though I meant that I had his accent pegged for north Texas/Oklahoma in particular; Southern watered down by Great Plains flatcent influences. 

He made a point of hitting on the blond pony-tailed waitress at O'Rourke's; the quiet one with the probable husband/boyfriend who works at the Zoo.  I've 'known' her for near a decade now and I've may have heard her name before or maybe not as I'm quiet too.  Anyway he clearly made her uncomfortable though she must have built some protective callus against such jackassitude by now. Eventually I managed to not-too-roughly get away from him myself; and while I know it's wrong to stereotype anyone; even when it comes to assuming that all white Texans are loutish obnoxious dudebros; the fact remains that this particular one.....

Well I guess he caused no real harm.