one question

Dov'è il tedesco?

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fuck you, indiana

Ind. joins legal challenge to health care overhaul

By RICK CALLAHAN (AP) – 1 day ago

INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana is joining 13 other states in challenging the nearly $1 trillion health care overhaul signed into law last week by President Barack Obama.

State Attorney General Greg Zoeller (ZEL'-ur) said Monday that Indiana will be added to an amended version of the lawsuit targeting the law that's expected to be filed soon.

Zoeller says the 14 states that will then be plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed in a federal court in Florida will split the costs of the legal challenge. He says it's unclear how much Indiana's share of that bill will be.

Zoeller says the federal health care law raises serious constitutional questions, including whether Congress has the authority to enact the law's mandate that most Americans purchase health insurance.

chordae tendineae

I'm alone on a Saturday night. Several glasses of cherry-flavored vodka and cola have brought me here. I am here to provide an update about my current self. Things are not good. (Typical situation, right? Yeah, well, fuck you.) About ten days ago things began to slowly drift southward. Now I am here. At the bottom. My heart strings (anatomically known as the chordae tendineae) are heavy this late evening. Heavy because yesterday I spoke to mother, and her health hasn't improved; in fact, it has worsened, although she may finally be nearing a diagnosis. I have previously written, albeit briefly, about mother's ailing health, so I will not rehash the details. She's lost nearly 60 pounds since the onset of the illness last October. She believes she has found a name for the sickness that has left her unable to ingest practically anything. The condition is called gastroparesis, and it occurs when the muscles of the stomach fail to properly propel food into the small intestine. The food consumed goes nowhere and ostensibly rots in the stomach. Because there is no cure for gastroparesis, she may have to rely, possibly exclusively, on a feeding tube to deliver necessary nutrients. She will hopefully know more after she visits her doctor – the doctor who thus far has been unable to diagnose her illness – on April 12.

Me: I submitted my applications for the ______ and _____ ____ Registered Nursing Programs last week. Each program accepts 40 applicants, which are accepted on a 223-point-scoring system. I scored 212, so I should be a lock for at least one of the campuses. I should be excited about this potential development, but I am not. It's difficult to maintain a gasp of optimism when everything is suffocated by pessimism and dread. This hopelessness is frustratingly elusive, because when I attempt to define what drives it, I find nothing but a maze of fragmented ideologies, concepts that seem sensible but simultaneously have no foothold on my reality.

Is this contrast a result of the fact that life has no discernible purpose?

I have wrestled with nihilism for years, yet it remains. I still wait for the individual (and his accompanying religion) to convince me that our species has an irrefutable purpose. A beaver, for example, possesses an innate sense to construct a dam so that it may then build its lodge in the resulting pond. Are we stripped of sense and purpose because our consciousness floods our existence with questions? Yes. The beaver does not question his dam building activity because his survival depends on that activity. And what about us? Is our sole purpose survival? If so, then why is survival a relative question based on class and wealth? I could use this question as a vehicle to question capitalism, but the hour is late and my eyelids are heavy.

I'll close with this: I would like to believe that our purpose is simply survival – survival of the individual and his fellow man. But in this country and throughout the world, the system of capitalism dictates otherwise. As Karl Marx wrote in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III, "Production comes to a standstill not at the point where needs are satisfied, but rather where the production and realization of profit impose this."

Are we stripped of sense and purpose because our consciousness floods our existence with questions (and thereby motives)?

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finally

Now that major health-care reform is just a president's signature away, I thought I would share Sen. Dick Lugar's response (complete with facsimile signature), which I received last December, to my letter about the importance of real health-care reform. I realize the body of this letter was probably a blanket response to all health-care reform inquiries, but it symbolizes why the Republican party will never be a serious voice in the arena of health-care reform. For example, Lugar offered that as an alternative to the Democratic legislation, "health promotion and disease prevention" should be considered; further, he believed in programs for young people that will aid them in healthy decision making.

The services and concepts he mentioned are obviously important, but the matter at hand was health-insurance reform, not bolstering health and wellness programs. Nowhere in his response did he offer a solution for the 30 million Americans who don't have health insurance. Preexisting conditions were not mentioned. Nor was access to affordable, quality health care. The bill that awaits the president's signature is certainly a huge step forward, but I and millions of others wanted more aggressive legislation, most notably a public option. It's no coincidence that the S&P 500 Managed Health Care Index is up nearly 60% over the last year. Senators, Congressmen and women, PLEASE DO NOT LOSE SIGHT OF THE PUBLIC OPTION.

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two great albums

How fucking good is the latest from The Brian Jonestown Massacre? For those who find nothing appealing about TBJM (yes, the three of you out there, somewhere), give Who Killed Sgt. Pepper? a listen. And turn it up. Loud. I love the tribal-like textures that slither throughout the album; the rhythms prevent the music from falling into shoegaze-electro territory -- it rides the crest of that wave and keeps your head bobbing in the process. I especially love the nod to Joy Division in "This Is the One Thing We Did Not Want to Have Happen." I highly recommend Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?. (Listen to the entire album at brianjonestownmassacre.com.)

Another album you should be listening to is the debut from Phantogram, Eyelid Movies. This duo, from Saratoga Springs, New York, is the States' answer to Massive Attack. And that isn't hyperbole. Eyelid Movies strikes a perfect balance between hip hop, electro, post-punk and rock, and it's easily my favorite release of this young year.

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three for thursday and two for the weekend

A goodie box from Amazon arrived today:

Bukowski because I've neglected him for too long.
The Marxism is for enlightenment.
And Reality Hunger because I read this.

My Netflix weekend will be fulfilled by The Panic in Needle Park and The Hurt Locker.

My presence here has been limited by a lack of inspiration and desire. I haven't written anything creative for months (August 12 of 2009, to be exact); I wonder if the bridge between imagination and the written word will ever be repaired. In the meantime, this blog has mutated into "just another blog." When I began this space, I wanted 80% of the material to satisfy my creativity, that primal need to express myself; the remaining 20% was to function as a soapbox. I suppose I wanted this blog to be an open journal, something intimate, unique. I didn't want to fill it with opinions, because we all have those. What all of us don't possess, however, is the ability to express the unspoken essence of life and memory, and, in my humble opinion, I have, in a few posts, accomplished that. Some of those posts were fiction shorts, and others were real, raw expressions of my reactions to my life. Perhaps I've become too self conscious of who I am in life and what I am at this address. (Should there even be a distinction between the two?) Or maybe I've simply lost the spark of creative expression.

I don't know where my creativity is, and I can't seem to find that perch of observation. Maybe Bukowski can shovel me out.

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