This is a haunting site: Modern Ruins.

It reminds me of when I somehow stumbled across pictures someone had posted of an abandoned mental hospital in Western Washington State. I looked for them just now, but this is the closest I could come. It’s the same structure, but a different photographer, I think. Not sure.

When I was small, my mother, brother, baby sister and I sat in the parking lot there, in our blue 1967 Pontiac station wagon while my father — younger than I am now — visited his mother there.

It was never really a subject of conversation in the family. They discharged her eventually. She received electro-shocks; medication too, I assume, why not?

Now I guess they must have moved the hospital somewhere else. What a sad, spooky place. How out of character for our modern, cutting-edge world, these modern ruins – places that were once new, in our own lifetimes. Forts, factories… the house where I was raised, windows boarded up, burned out by an arson fire, soon to be razed for a mall.

I went to work today and found out I had the day off for an Islamic holiday. On my way home I stopped at an art supply store and bought a cool hard-backed spiral-bound sketch pad. (just click “guest” if you visit the links).

Then I came home early. Surprised Beta by picking her up at school. Waited for her in the parking lot nearby. The outdoor ice rink next door was playing Lou Reed. Take a Walk on the Wild Side. The whole album. I stopped playing the tin whistle, even, and listened.

Headlice infestation at Raising Hell.

CIA veterans have warned the Bush administration not to go to war against Iraq, saying that doing so would further widen the divide between the Western and Islamic worlds and increase the incidence of terrorism.

I’d feel better if the CIA knew malaria is spread by mosquitos, not flies. [I can hear their unidentified source, a mosquito, telling a CIA field officer, "Flies, I tell you. It is the flies spreading the malaria."]

And, “…swamped with swamps…”? Who’s their editor?

It’s grey at the moment, although that can be a beautiful color too. Explaining to my teacher my impression that there are similarities between learning to ski and learning to play cello, and reducing my argument to increasingly general terms until we found a lowest common denominator we could agree on – they both involve motion, and motor coordination, and the “flow”: once you get going, you can’t stop until you’re finished.

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Brian Eno: American Empire as a gated community.
[Via Eeksypeeksy]

Last night I had a dream that a guy I haven’t seen in years told me I had to be a DJ on a local pop radio station “for the 8PM to 4 AM shift”. I worried about what to talk about for eight hours on air, then decided just to play eight hours of solid music.

Then Alpha called me at work and told me (this is back to waking life now) that REM is playing a concert this summer at Sch