Please change your blogrolls, bookmarks and feeds.

http://virgotex.net

http://virgotex.net

The new blog is up, albeit a bit sparse yet. But come on over, and please update your blogrolls.

I decided against wholesale integration of the old with the new, though I will be moving over the Barbara Jordan material, and possibly other posts as well.

Ded from teh squee. Rachel says hi to me on video!

Millennia ago, back before the Interwebz, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was a particular classified ad in the Austin Chronicle miscellaneous section, the heading of which was I Danced on Stage with Bono! The person who had run the ad, and who had danced on stage with His Eminence, was desperately seeking photographs of this singular event in her life from anyone that might have been there.  It ran for, possibly, years. I remember my cronies in the back of the Half-Price Books on Guadalupe (for the uninitiated, the store that served as the backdrop for the scene with the Kennedy assassination buff in Slacker ) reading the classifieds and joking about it.

She still hasn’t found what she’s lookin’ for, heh.

yup

Can’t she just go to another concert, like, with a camera this time?

yeah, for real.

I mean, man, I hope this chick has, like, other interests in life, ya know?

Dude. Word.

So, anyway, for most likely entirely unrelated reasons,  I thought of that when Athenae sent me this.

Pulling teeth

Finally got a post up about Episode 6 of Generation Kill.  And only a half-hour after Episode 7 started!  Loved the book and love this show but will not miss writing about it.

Sunday morning coming down juke: And one for Mahler!

For Liprap.

Take 1:

Take 2 (and 3):

Don’t make me put my foot in your ass!

Welly, well well.

Kick. Ass!

Blogger, non-fiction essayist, comedy writer, feminist, soon-to-be-published author, and jewgirl Katie Schwartz has called me a lot of things but this one is a nice thing!  She gave me a big wet Kick Ass Blogger smack on the lips!

¡Muchas gracias, pequeña reina, muchas gracias!

Guess that means rumors of this blog’s death have been exaggerated. By me. Dammit, that also means I can’t quit yet!  How fiendishly clever of you, Schwartz…

So, apparently I gotta now bestow the honor on more peeps.  Not to worry, I got that covered. Seriously, I picked these folks for one reason.  They all make a difference in the blogosphere. I’ve seen it.

1.  Liprap’s Lament: Fighter of good fights. Organizer of this year’s Rising Tide conference. Parent. Member of the New Orleans blogpucheh. Muppet pimp. Lover of show tunes (everybody riiiiiiiiiiise).  And, wicked funny.

2.  ThePoliticalCat:  Turning out post after well-researched post pretty much every freakin’ day. Even when I was getting paid for writing, I couldn’t write this much, this good, every day, but PoliticalCat plays real good for free.

3.  PlushLife:  Do not let the cat pictures fool you, people. A blogger I’m happy to have met in real life, 4LG is a stealth operator and will, literally, kick your ass. Oh, you don’t think so?

4.  The Other Mother:  Not only is she a poet and director of the Writers in School Project in Houston, she’s a lesbian mom-in Houston. Also deadly evil genius player of Facebook word games. Plus, her great grandparents gave Louis Armstrong money for his first cornet!

5.  Spocko:  There are few people on the planet I admire more.  Mr. Spocko is the man that made Mickey Mouse himself cease and desist. He also keeps trying to show us all how we all can be heroes. Without cursing!  I have repeatedly volunteered for a janitorship if the much-anticipated Spocko Think Tank ever becomes a reality.

STRINGS ATTACHED, aka The Rules:

* Choose 5 bloggers that you feel are “Kick Ass Bloggers”
* Let ’em know in your post or via email, twitter or blog comments that they’ve received an award
* Share the love and link back to both the person who awarded you and back to http://www.mammadawg.com
* Hop on back to the Kick Ass Blogger Club HQ to sign Mr. Linky then pass it on!

Now! Now! Now! or Three years high and rising

What this post is really about is the third annual Rising Tide Conference in New Orleans, set to happen this weekend.

But first I want to talk about a dream I had last week, most of which was forgotten the instant I woke up. The part I do remember has stuck with me ever since, and yes, it is related to Rising Tide, so bear with me.

Ashley Morris was in that dream, the part I remember. I say he was in the dream to emphasize that it was not a dream about Ashley. In the spirit of “a vague disclaimer is nobody’s friend,” let me just say up front:  I never met Ashley, and I intend no misappropriation or trivialization of his memory.  The extent to which I knew him, compared to that of others who knew, loved,  worked and fought alongside, him was fairly slight. It centered around a shared obsession that we two and a few others blogged about for an all too brief bit of time. As it happened, that brief bit of time was at the very end of Ashley’s life, which amplified my experience of knowing him.  In that Internet relationship way of valid but skewed immediacy, our friendship was 5 miles deep and about 3 feet wide.

That said, that slice, that appetizer, of Ashley, was enough to get me hooked. It was strong-tasting stuff, Ashley was nothing if not intense. It was evident even from a distance.  A good man with a big heart and a lot of righteous zeal, and not a little bit of anger at the ready to smite the fucking fuckmook fuckers who betrayed anyone and anything to which he was devoted; he was all that, and a little twisted.

And now that he’s gone, he remains, for me anyway, a symbol. I have one of those iconic pictures of him (taken by his brother-in-arms Ray Shea) tacked on the wall in my office.

Who Dat, originally uploaded by Ray in New Orleans.

I put it up there during a bad patch.  I had to fight my share of fuckmooks this year. It sucked and it earned me no popularity points but I was right, I knew it, and I persevered and ultimately won my tiny little war. That photo, in a little “power corner” with some other totemic objects and images, helped me keep my focus.

The picture also always reminded me of something or someone…I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, then one day I realized what it was. The pose, the striped shirt!  It was Artie. The Strongest Man in the World! from that long-gone gem, The Adventures of Pete and Pete. A more (or less) ordinary looking guy, kind of a spaz really, that just happened to be a superhero, Artie was on the lookout to protect kids everywhere with his odd assortment of superhuman powers. He once helped Pete beat up the Atlantic Ocean, revenge for allowing summer to end.

And that’s what Ashley remains for me, a bit of a legend, an ordinary superhero, a motivator to fight the good fight, to remember that people do have the power, we can be heroes, a call to action.  Which brings me to the dream.

It was one of those tedious dreams full of seemingly pointless details, things I had been worried about in waking life,  which in the dream seemed critically important and loaded with portent, but tedious and neverending at the same time, sort of like a loop of worrying. Then I looked out my window and saw a man in my back yard.  I walked out onto the porch and recognized Ashley. In the dream, I knew he was dead, I assumed he was a ghost, but he looked pretty damned corporeal. He was holding something in his arms, clear in the dream but I can’t remember what it was.  Maybe a child, or a cat or dog?   I ran down the steps toward him, to give him a hug.  As I got closer, from out of nowhere, in the way dream action can happen,  he pulled out a shovel. One of those big square flat ones, for shoveling snow, or manure.  I remember wondering in the slowmotion climax of the dream…just maybe, since he was a ghost, maybe that shovel he was swinging wasn’t really real.

It was.  And he hit me in the face with it.

There wasn’t an iota of real violence or aggression implied, even in the dream.  It was very cartoonlike, ala Coyote and Roadrunner. Or Tom and Jerry. Complete with sound effects.

Then, I woke up.  Entirely appropriate because that’s what I take Ashley’s appearance in the dream to be:  a wake up call.  My subconscious’ way of saying, “Whatever all this is supposed to mean, fuck it. This stuff isn’t what’s important.  Wake the fuck up!”

There’s a Buddhist story about a rich, vain woman seeking enlightenment. She tries all the usual shortcuts, then eventually someone tells her about the inevitable old guru on the top of the mountain. She clambers and climbs up the mountain in her finery and finds herself standing in front a wise old woman.  She begs the old crone for the key to enlightenment.  “Are you sure?” the old woman asked. Of course, the seeker vigorously assures her, she is ready to receive enlightenment.  The crone shrugs, then instantly turns into a screeching demon, shrieking, “Now! Now! Now!”  She chases the terrified pilgrim down the mountain, hollering, “Now! Now! Now!” every step of the way.  The point being that true enlightenment is always right in front of us. Right now is where we can start. Right now, in this minute, there’s much to do.

Which brings me back to Rising Tide.  Katrina hit the Gulf Coast three years ago. To most people going about their lives, sitting in front of their televisions, worrying about their own stuff, the disaster was over after a few weeks, when the water finally went down, when the news cameras left.  In New Orleans, Katrina is still right now. Even after the changes that three years have brought, right now is a disaster. Entire communities disappeared. Families torn apart, spread all over the country. Schools, housing, crime, corruption, failure of government. The levees. The fucking levees, inadequate before, being rebuilt at great cost, still inadequate.

There is much to do now, and when tomorrow and next month, and next year are now, in New Orleans there will still be much to do, and there will still be people in New Orleans doing it. Mostly all by themselves. Ordinary superheroes, like Ashley was, getting up every day and facing now. Some of them are part of the   amazing NOLA blogging community.

Rising Tide started in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of the city when a small group of New Orleans, La.-based bloggers decided to expand their on-line advocacy for the rebirth of New Orleans into a public event.

Easier said than done, but they did it.  And this year, they’re doing it again. Without Ashley this time —  I’ve heard through the grapevine that his absence has been keenly felt.

Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you’re interested in Internet community, the netroots, online activism. That’s what Rising Tide is about. So, in Ashley’s honor, in his memory, if you haven’t thought much about New Orleans lately, please allow the NOLA bloggers to hit you in the face with a big cartoon shovel.

We will come together to dispel myths, promote facts, share personal testimonies, highlight progress and regress, discuss recovery ideas, and promote sound policies at all levels. We aim to be a “real life” demonstration of internet activism as we continue to recover from a massive failure of government on all levels

Especially if you’re not in New Orleans, pay attention to what happens there this weekend, what comes after that.  Watch the videos, bookmark the blog, drop them some cash, go get John Barry’s book, get familiar with the NOLA blogroll. They are on the front lines, hitting the world in the face with their shovels, trying to make it wake up and see that things are not over down in New Orleans.

You’re not going to get this stuff from Anderson Cooper, folks. This is happening right now. Three years high and rising.

Friday morning rehab video: more dibby dabby!

No, not that kind of rehab!

Something to brighten up good neighbor PoliticalCat, whose bloggin’ hand’s been all stove up this week. Let’s hope it’s better by Caturday.

Wednesday First Draft post

First of my Wednesday posts at First Draft is up:  Obama in support of GLBTQ adoption, McCain not so much.

Rumors…yada yada…exaggerated, OR “I’m not dead. Yet.”

Well, it’s Spanish and it’s wet. As is/was T.S. Edouard, who was supposed to bring me (and Central Texas) some much-needed drenching rain, but thus far… bupkis. So enjoy Bebe.  She’s hot.   And so is Central Texas.

Some may be saying, “What? Another video? Whassup w/that?”  To which I would answer, “I dunno.”

In actuality, Virgotext the blog, as you and I know it, has ceased production.  It will be replaced soon, hopefully with something better, by the end of September if not sooner. I’ll be setting up housekeeping on my very own domain.  It’s not quite the usual  Gone Fishin’ and take a break, though.  You know what they say about “Be careful what you ask for”?    Well, it’s true.  In the real world, I spent months fighting TBTB at my place of employment for some much-needed changes and I sort of won.  Now I’ve got a new title, a few more bucks, I’m supervising people, and I have to work when I’m at work, and when I’m not, I be one tired virgo fer sure.  So, in one sense, I am taking a bit of break. In the other, not so much.

Till the new improved Virgotext rises from the ashes, I’ll post a video or two or four here, plus I’m keeping the flame alive over at Nupac, blogging on Generation Kill. If  you aren’t watching this show, what’s wrong with you?  At the very least, go get the book.

Also, best for last, it seems all that crack van driving has paid off. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be posting over at First Draft on Wednesdays. I know! Can you believe it?