SemiConscious Dot Org

To celebrate our first anniversary, the Special Lady Friend and I took a getaway trip to the small island of Monhegan, ten miles off the Maine coast. There, far beyond the insidious reach of teevee, cell phones, and the Interweb Tubes, we enjoyed several days of excessive public drinking rest and relaxation. Monhegan might just be one of the most beautiful spots on earth.

Here are a few pics. (Full set nyah.)

As of tomorrow, it will be one year to the day since the Special Lady Friend and I arrived in Maine, fresh off our 4,300 mile odyssey, moving back from Seattle. (Although, if you want to be pedantic about it, this is a leap year, so technically today is exactly 365 days. Luckily, I am not pedantic.)

It’s been an eventful year. Since setting up shop back on the East Siiiide, I’ve

• Gotten married
• Changed careers
• Reached the statistical halfway point of my expected lifespan
• Cheered for not one, but two championships by professional franchises from my general geographic area, which of course covers me in vicarious, unearned glory
• Been bitterly disappointed by a third. (Yes, I realize I’m ridiculously spoiled. It’s not as if anyone from, say, Seattle would have any pity for me at all)
• Posted treasonous, objectively pro-Elitislamohomoliberofascist insults of Dear Leader on no fewer than 19 occasions (ok, so maybe that’s not a big change)

After being away from my home state for the better part of a decade, I can say it’s changed quite a bit. I used to curse the place for being too conservative and claustrophobic, but an interesting thing happened while I was gone: Mainers have loosened up quite a bit. There’s state-run health insurance for the poor, every 8th grader gets a laptop, the Green Party has official standing, marijuana laws are fairly lax, and George W. Bush is staggeringly unpopular, even in Kennebunkport.

In fact, given its large size, low population density, large swathes of pristine wilderness, and odd mix of rednecks and hippies, Maine less resembles its urbanized, overpopulated Northeast neighbors than a large, Western state.

Except, of course, that here, the sun rises out of the ocean, instead of setting in it. As it should be.

...for some happy news. On Saturday, the Special Lady Friend and I traveled up to Boothbay Harbor to attend the wedding of one of her childhood friends. It was foggy, but luckily not rainy, and the outdoor wedding went off without a hitch. Not surprisingly, the fogbound tip of a rocky Maine peninsula is quite conducive to picture-taking:

More pictures nyah.

If you happen to live in Maine or Massachusetts, tomorrow is Patriot’s Day. In honor of the holiday, I decided to take a drive down to Kennebunkport and let the President know what I’ve thought of his job performance these past 7+ years:

Yes, I’m fully aware that Dear Leader was not actually home. Had he been, the road for miles around Walker’s Point would have been closed off by the Secret Service in order to prevent various and sundry riff raff like me (otherwise known as “voters”) from showing up and pestering Our President (otherwise known as “our employee.”)

I’m pretty sure that under Article 666 of the Patriot Act, making fun of Dear Leader constitutes treason. So if I happen to disappear and none of you ever hear from me again, you’ll know why.

Welp, the votes from Maine’s Democratic caucuses are just about all tallied up, and it looks like Obama won by a landslide. I had planned to attend the caucuses, but it snowed all day, so I stayed home. However, so many people braved the bad weather that the official turnout broke state records. These people are obviously all far better human beings than I am.

This, the latest in a string of consecutive wins for Obama, has triggered chaos and shakeups in the Clinton campaign. It should also pull him just about even in total delegates, despite the most Herculean efforts of those scrupulously dedicated professionals at Fox News to convince everybody otherwise:

In other fantastic news for Democrats, John McCain has received the official endorsement of George W. Bush. Amazingly enough, even at this late date, Dear Leader remains so well-insulated from the undeniable fact of his own staggering unpopularity that he doesn’t seem to realize that his endorsement of McCain’s campaign represents the kiss of death:

Regarding attacks on his performance from Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, Bush said, “If the Democrat party feels like they can win an election by focusing on me, I think they’ll be making a huge tactical mistake.”

Of Obama, the president said, “I certainly don’t know what he believes in.” In response, an Obama campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, said: “Of course President Bush would attack the one candidate in this race who opposed his disastrous war in Iraq from the start. But Barack Obama doesn’t need any foreign policy advice from the architect of the worst foreign policy decision in a generation.”

Of course, this could all be a ruse. Perhaps Dubya is actually smarter than I give him credit for, and knows full well how disastrous his “endorsement” is for McCain’s chances. Perhaps this is just George’s way of delivering one final kick to the balls of the man he smeared into the ground back in 2000.

Regardless of the reason behind DubYa’s endorsement, the die is cast: he has put his official stamp of approval on John McCain’s campaign, where it will hang like a poisonous millstone for the remainder of this election season. If you think these pictures won’t be showing in every Democratic television ad after the convention, you’re nuts.

   
(Above: candidate, albatross)

Face it, Republicans: this is the final nail in your political coffins. You’re going down like the Hindenburg in November. Granted, your imminent election defeat, while immensely gratifying to those of us who actually want the human race to survive the next four years, is far less punishment than you all deserve for having spent every waking hour of the past eight years doing everything in your collective power to run this country into the ground and turn it into a sick mockery of everything it once stood for.

But it’s a start.

A friend of mine who lives in Southern California has recently begun to talk about moving to Maine. She’s been here many times before on vacation, and asked yours truly, the recently repatriated native, to give her the 411 on the Pine Tree State. I felt it was only fair to show her what this place looks like after the tourists leave.

Above: “Hey, you rotten whippersnappers! Git offa my snowbank-covered lawn!”

Ah, there’s nothing like the Maine in December: the snow is deep, the natives, ornery. Back in 1947, Christian missionaries first ventured into Maine in an attempt to win us all over to The Lord. Unfortunately, they made the mistake of starting their mission in the middle of January. We sure were awful hungry that winter. (But, on the bright side, you can substitute missionary for ham in your baked bean suppah, and no one will be able to tell the difference.)

And to think, winter doesn’t even officially start for another two days.

Never let it be said that folks in my home state are averse to taking direct action. When a right-wing crank in the town of Lewiston found a sex education book at her local library offensive to her delicate sensibilities, did she work within the established system and fill out a complaint form asking the Trustees to review the book? Did she hold a protest outside the library? Did she file a lawsuit to force the book’s removal, like the loonie in Georgia?

Hell, no! She just stole the books!

A Lewiston woman who was upset by the content of an acclaimed sex education book published 14 years ago has checked out copies from two libraries and refuses to give them back.

“Since I have been sufficiently horrified of the illustrations and the sexually graphic, amoral abnormal contents, I will not be returning the books,” JoAn Karkos wrote the Lewiston and Auburn public libraries last month.

Each letter was accompanied by a check for $20.95 to cover the cost of the book, “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex & Sexual Health.”

“This has never happened before,” said Rick Speer, director of the Lewiston Public Library. “It is clearly theft.”

You gotta love that pretzel logic: The way to protect your children from “amoral” influences is by demonstrating to them that it’s okay to steal something you disagree with. (And yes, it is stealing, whether she offered to pay for them or not.)

Thankfully, neither the library nor the surrounding community are taking this idiocy lying down:

Speer told library trustees that Lewiston police will issue Karkos a summons if she fails to return the book. She faces library fines and a $25 penalty. The library issues at least one summons for overdue books each week, he said. That’s been standard library policy for the past 25 years.

Karkos’ protest has made the book more popular, and requests for copies have increased, Speer said. He said he received several phone calls and e-mails from people around the country applauding the book and offering to buy the library more copies.

“I turned them down,” he said. “We have plenty of copies now. Instead, I suggested they donate a copy to their local library.”

My library has received two donates copies of It’s Perfectly Normal in the past day and a half (as well as multiple requests to check out the book.)

Congratulations, lady. Like all censors, you have only made that which you wish to stifle more popular. And just in time for Banned Books Week, too. Thanks for all the free publicity, dipshit!

Good news! As of today, I am once again gainfully employed; I was offered and have accepted a position at a public library here in the Portland area. The folks who work there all seem nice, it’s only a ten minute drive from home, the pay’s decent (for Maine, anyway) aaaand – best of all – there’s already a Tech Services Librarian on staff!

Oh, thank you Jeebus, Buddha, Allah, Krishna, Zoroaster, Confucius, the whole buncha ya. No more messing with domain servers and mail servers and file servers and firewalls; no more showing library staff how to cut and paste for the zillionth time; no more listening to people bitch when the internet connection goes down. IT’LL BE SOMEONE ELSE’S PROBLEM!!! AAAAAAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAA!!!

As of next Monday August 13th, I will be working again, and the money will once again be rolling in. I’m rich, beeatch! No more government cheese for me!

It’s always been hard to make a living in my home state, so this article isn’t particularly surprising. It’s still depressing, though:

Fishermen on this rocky, pine-studded peninsula have felt a creeping unease in recent years, as real estate prices leapt skyward and stories circulated up and down the coast of fishing piers sold to make room for million-dollar vacation homes.

Two years ago, in response to growing concerns on the coast, state officials and researchers set out to map the waterfront access of Maine’s working fishermen. What they found was more alarming than anyone expected: Along Maine’s 5,300-mile coast, only 20 miles of shoreline remain open to commercial fishermen, according to the study the Island Institute released last month.

With our move back to Maine less than two weeks away, it’s sad to realize that the only reason we can afford to go back at all is because our house is inherited. The state’s traditionally poor economy, combined with the skyrocketing property values, mean that we’d never be able to afford to buy a house on our combined salaries.

Of course, most people aren’t lucky enough to have a relative will them a house.

I suppose it’s just indicative of the dreary, authoritarian, secrecy-obsessed times we live in: less than a week after finding out about Microsoft’s efforts to crush all innovation in the software industry by suing the Open Source movement out of existence, I learn that there is a movement afoot to throttle access to artistic works by excessively extending copyright. Bills to extend copyright are already pending in Great Britain, and on our side of the pond, no less than an authority than the Paper of Record is editorializing in favor of extending American artistic copyrights – forever.

A pox on all their houses. Curses and fulminations upon money-grubbing whores and corporate swine who want to reduce all artistic, cultural, and technological progress to a dollar figure. How far have we sunk when this slavish dedication to “the market” and “free enterprise” leads some shitheads to believe that it’s perfectly acceptable for someone to monopolize access to an idea, in perpetuity?

But maybe, just maybe, the backlash against the privatization of information and information access has begun. A bipartisan bill currently working its way through the Maine state legislature would make my home state the first in the nation to legally enforce net neutrality. As the concept of protecting net neutrality gains widespread notice, more public figures are taking up the banner, most notably Al Gore.

(You know, it’s a damn shame that this Al Gore didn’t run for President in 2000. If he had, he would’ve won by a landslide, and the unmitigated disaster that is the Bush Presidency never would’ve happened…)