Amadeo Sogni

“Well that’s great, that’s just fuckin’ great man. Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We’re in some real pretty shit now man… That’s it man, game over man, game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?”
Hudson - Aliens

I mean damn. The madness just continues even when it’s not in a war. It seems like just about everything is leading to death. Anyone remember that song…”Road to Nowhere”? It seems appropriate. I can’t think of anything I heard in the news that was good…maybe the temperature is going up, but that’s seasonal. We get our ass kicked in Iraq. China kicks our ass in the market so any faltering on their end rocks everyones boat. I’m waiting for conservative christians to start fire bombing James Cameron’s house. South Korea is trying to man up and say something to Lil’ Kim, let’s see how that goes. Also it appears that Chain Restaurants want to make you a fat ass.

Honestly I’m most pissed of that some Taliban pricks just couldn’t get the job done and take Cheney out. Damn, do we have to do it ourselves. As much as I like seeing Jon Stewart do the Penguin voice…I’m tired of Cheney being around.

“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894)

It’s not just the boots. I like them and think they look cool, but they are not the motivation. I was considering buying a motorcycle, not a crotch rocket mind you, and taking off. I was considering a list of places that I wanted to go and things I wanted to see. A motorcycle would make sense to me. It’s like the modern day horse. Anyone who had dreams of being a cowboy should buy a motorcycle. I would a .45 revolver to that, but I know I’d get stopped and searched somewhere in middle America. I think this is one of those times where being black would hinder me. It’s enough to be the strange guy who rode his motorcycle into town, but being the strange black guy who does that can’t improve my standing. It’s like leaving messages for apartments, I’ve considered taking the bass out of my voice and using my first initials and last name. That way they’d think I was a jewish guy. As it stands I think they usually can’t pronounce my name and just say the hell with it and call someone named Bob or Steve. My name is a street fight in Palestine and that would be the third thing to cause me some problems. Then again I could just do the biker thing and have a nickname. Of course…that means I’d probably have to bang a bunch of white chicks. I mean who wants to run through some podunk town trying to find the one woman of some ethnicity…who’s probably married to the dude in town with the most power or something. Plus I have to worry about the local folks getting mad cause “they don’t want me messing with their womenfolk”. Plus it might be hard to find Guiness Stout. Maybe I should just buy a Charger, paint it black with a red, black and green flag on top, call it the Hannibal Barca and call it a day.

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. “
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

On wednesday I’m going to my old school again. This time it’s to build with the business class of my former teacher. While I was in school I never would have thought that I would be someone anybody wanted to come and speak to students. This very teacher (while I liked her) had a class that I passed out in one day because I cut out and got lit up. When I say I passed out I mean my head was hanging off the back of the chair and my hand was covering my face with my elbow sticking up in the air. I used to use my Student Government Association ID to cut class and leave school in general. I was part of a notorious click that, although we really used to just cut and smoke weed, we got big reputation. Before the year was out we got into a beef with bascially the basketball and football teams, but that got squashed cause someone started a rumor that we were part of the Jamaican Mafia. That got started cause most of us had locks before it got popular and there was an incident with my man’ pops and his brother and a dude that hit his sister. Mind you I had good grades and I was liked by the teachers, well, most of them. I started smoking weed around the same time I was elected president of a club that spoke to younger kids about drugs. I used to walk the halls and because I knew all the teachers I could duck into different classes while I should have been somewhere else. Now I was in no way a bad person or student, but I wasn’t the one that was earmarked for success. It’s just funny to me.

She almost yanks my head clean off, shoving my mouth into hers so hard it hurts. An explosion that blasts away the dull, gray years between the now and that one fiery night when she was mine.
Dwight - Sin City

Ahh…how women can change things. Even the prospect of one can add color to your world. The mystery. The chase. Hell, the anticipation is half the fun. To borrow from a movie they’re, “Another whirlwind to spin you around and around.” It’s like living in black and white and have color splashed into your world. I miss the color. All of them don’t do that. Some of them are like T.V. shows. Good to watch for a few, they provide a nice distraction. The rest are elements of change. New life breathing into your lungs. They are a stiff drink…spreading fiery wings in your chest. I think about A Bronx Tale, when Sonny says you only get three great ones. I never look to see if one is coming…when they arrive they usually announce themselves. Hell it’s hard not to notice. That’s the fun. Wanting to let yourself be swept away while fighting to remain the man you are. Every now and again you consider losing the fight and just getting lost. I wouldn’t mind gettin lost for a minute.

“My warrior woman. My Valkyrie. You’ll always be mine, always and never. Never. The Fire, baby. It’ll burn us both. It’ll kill us both. there’s no place in this world for our kind of fire. Always and never. If I have to die for you tonight, I will.”
Dwight - Sin City

Vice Principal Wolters: I care about these kids just as much as you do. And if I’m forced to choose between Mozart and reading and writing and long division, I choose long division.
Glenn Holland: Well, I guess you can cut the arts as much as you want, Gene. Sooner or later, these kids aren’t going to have anything to read or write about.

I went to my old school on tuesday. I’ll never be the same and the changes I saw are not just at my school. I went to Lake Clifton/Eastern High. The school that they joked was sinking because it was built on a lake. The one they also joked (though it wasn’t funny) that 80% of the students had A.I.D.S. I would have never told you that my school was a very good school. As a matter of fact I had tried to go to The School for the Arts and gotten rejected. If I had known that would happen, I probably would have tried to go to City College (the high school). I used to think I went to a pretty suck-ass school. After going back 10 (o.k. 11) years later, I’m glad I’m not a teenager. Mind you, I had to go to a few schools this week and all of them sucked. It was just going to a school that I had known and having an understanding of just how much has changed that cuts so deep. The first thing is: School just ain’t school no more. When I went it was a school. I knew people at other schools. Now most of the high schools are broken down into at least two schools, my school will soon host a third. The things that I took for granted have been swept away. I know when school money gets tight the arts are the first thing to go, but it worse than that. I majored in business at that school, a dept. with about 10 - 15 teachers. Now, my former Homeroom/major teacher is the business dept…literally. There used to be the Academy of Finance who were kind of our rivals. No More. But it’s beyond anything that might seem grand as these. We used to have a printing class at our school (like a print shop)…gone. There isn’t even Auto-Repair anymore. That was a class that people in “gen. pop.” would take…gone. All of the things that my stupid friends would take aren’t even options anymore…much less the ones the kids with “drive” would get into. There’s something else. The kids. There wasn’t much light in there eyes. I mean when I went to school there were thugs and they weren’t just in gen. pop. The difference is the ratios. It used to be: 5% student who don’t care, 80% students who want to graduate and 15% students who really want to become something. Now it’s probably more like this: 3% students who really want to become something, 44% who want to graduate and 53% are like “meh”. People have gotten poorer and as a result more kids just don’t see the point of…trying. What’s worse is that schools aren’t really giving them much to get excited about. I realized yesterday that the school system is helping me keep a job and that’s sad. This city should be striving to make sure I have to find a new career. When one of the two schools at Lake has a total enrollment equal to my freshman class things are bad. All of my class didn’t make it to graduation in 4 years. As a matter of fact a class that started with over a thousand kids only graduated 300 (on time). So if the whole school now has 1400…how many kids graduate? Walking those halls I understood further how kids could be apathetic. I didn’t like school as a whole, but there were always things going on that I could become interested in. At the least I knew that people would be there…now kids know that at 16 they can just stop going and get dropped from roll. I didn’t feel any energy in that place. My old teacher just keep saying, “These kids aren’t like you guys were.” She was one of the teachers that kept me on point…it seems like she’s losing the energy. When she goes the business program will go with her. When I was young I knew we weren’t given all that others had…now I know that these kids don’t even get what we had. I thought that was the point of life. To give the next generation a little more. Schools remind me of a company that’s slowly stripping away as much as it can, dumping employees and benefits, becoming automated where once there was vibrancy. To quote Souls of Mischief, “Tell me who profits?”

“First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt

I need to stop hearing the following phrase. “_________ will embolden the terrorists.” This is the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. First of all let’s examine embolden.

em·bold·en (m-bldn)
tr.v. em·bold·ened, em·bold·en·ing, em·bold·ens
To foster boldness or courage in; encourage.

To imply that we will embolden them says that they are not already bold. I’m very sure that terrorists are not cowering in their boots at the threat of the U.S. military. First of all these people brought it to us. No one has done that since The Japanese and they had Germany and Italy backing them up. Besides, do you know they took over China in the past? You ever seen China and Japan on the map? Anyway these cats went even more hardcore than the Japanese and hit us in our midst. Second, we’re not even concentrating our efforts on the guy who said “I did it!” We’re in another country. There are some troops in Afghanistan, but no discussion has come up about removing them. Third, when someones favorite tactic is suicide bombing…there isn’t much you can do to make them even more bold. I mean our troops will do alot, but they like to go home afterwards and deal with their issues either in therapy or in front of the T.V. with a cold brew. These cats will take themselves out and not even on some “I can die and end the fighting” tip. They will take themselves out to kill 20 people. If you believe that your God will reward you for killing yourself in the name of your cause…there isn’t anything after that to “embolden” you. Hell people here have firebombed abortion clinics cause of their belief in God, though they were not bold enough to die in the process. There are two other things that disturb me about this. FDR had a good point. The only thing we should fear is fear. We should be afraid that we will allow our fear to back us into a corner. We should be scared to make the wrong choice. The City Paper had an article that mentioned how we will back out of any bad choice, save for war. When you play poker, if you have a bad hand you don’t throw good money after bad. You fold and wait for the next hand. Here were tossing lives into the pot. That’s what we should fear. That fear will cause us to sacrifice more young people so we can “Stay the Course”. Terrorists are afraid!!! If we leave they’ll…what? Keeping bombing and sniping our troops? Keep blowing our helicopters out of the sky? Keeping fighting? We wouldn’t want them to get the impression that we have any intelligence at all would we? If we just keep plugging away…what? We’re talking about a group of people who have been fighting for a long time. When they couldn’t fight at home…they went to where other muslims were fighting to help out. These guys are like the little quiet, dirty kid that can fight. Leaving him alone doesn’t make him act out. He goes off when people mess with him. Right now he has us in a headlock and is bashing our face in. It may be a good idea to push out and stop and think.

“Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears. “
Robert W. Sarnoff

Being that it’s tax time and newswise I’ve been caught up with the crazy-astro-lady, I thought this story was just special. What’s even better is that other than the Daily Show the only info on this I’ve seen I had to do an internet search for. Now being that I work for a non-profit I know how funders tend to go over things with a fine tooth comb to make sure the money is spent in the right manner. So I really don’t understand how a government, or anyone for that matter, loses track of $12 Billion in cash. Keep in mind this with the oversight committee only looking over 10% of contracts in relation to Iraq. Just think how much might be lost after the other 90% are looked into. I’m saying I’ve misplaced a five spot. I’ve looked over my statement and could recall where a dub went. But $12 billion in Cash!?!?! One person can’t even carry that. You can’t fit that in the trunk of your car. How the hell do you lose $12 billion? There aren’t that many people that can produce that much and I’m quite sure none of them would ever lose it. The messed up part is that’s your money. That money came out of your check…and mine. In a country where $10,000 could change the average persons life, it’s hard to concieve that our country would only notice such a large amount gone in oversight. It seem like the Crazy-astro-lady was just something else to take our attention away. Honestly I give up on the news. I get more information from Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher than I do actual news sources.

“Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.”
John Russell

To quote Chris Rock, “I told you that bitch crazy!” Go ahead and read the story, it’s entertained me alot recently. I will say this though I know cats that got caught with a gun and got some ridiculous bail set so they couldn’t pay it or they were considered flight risks. How the hell does someone have a wig, a trenchcoat, 3 feet of rubber tubing, a knife, a steel mallet and trash bags and still get off on $10,000 bail?!?!?!?! If I had that they might have hung me or shot me on sight. Not to mention when you make up your mind to wear a diaper so you can drive 12 hours non-stop, that’s some premeditated shit. I keep asking myself about the rubber tubing though, was she going to go Marv from Sin City on shorty?

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.
Harper Lee (1926 - ), To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960

Ehren Watada is hardbody. Alot of people feel like he feels or believe what he believes, but he went the distance. Dude, after starting a promising military career, basically upon learning that he would be sent to Iraq followed a lesson he was taught. Dude studied the stituation so that he could better lead his men. After reviewing the situation he made is his mind up that the administration falsified information and the war is immoral and illegal. So unlike the troops (that we don’t hear about) who have gone A.W.O.L. Watada first tried to resign, then ask to be sent to Afghanistan. When both request were denied he considered filing as a C.O. (Conscientious Objecter), but since he didn’t have a problem with bearing arms he figured that wasn’t the right thing to do. So money refused to go…publicly. He stated as follows:

“Though the American soldier wants to do right, the illegitimacy of the occupation itself, the policies of this administration, and the rules of engagement of desperate field commanders will ultimately force them to be party to war crime.”

Dude made it clear that he did not blame the military, as they are doing what they should following orders. This makes his position that much more unique. By taking a stand in this manner he knows he’ll face court-martial. He has a complete understanding of what the military will do. This is a case in which public sympathy will mean nothing. He will be found guilty and he will have to serve time. He is the only soldier to publicly refuse to go to Iraq. The only time a soldier has faced similar charges was during the Vietnam War, however, he was simply caught at an anti-war rally. Watada basically went as hard as you can go. Saying no to the military after your enlisted is not something people do. I’ve known cats that just bounced and went A.W.O.L. and I know someone who was caught and sent to jail for it. Officially declaring that you will not participate in a war is something else though. No sneaking, no running. To paraphrase Hamlet, money took arms against a sea of misfortune. Though his opposition has not ended them. Perhaps though he has slain the demons in his mind and spirit and that may be enough for him. Understand though…this is a Japenese movie ending, the hero does not avoid jail, he does not get the girl…as a matter of fact this is one of those movies where he fights to the end and still dies. I always respected those endings and I gotta say…I respect Ehren Watada.

“We’ll do what we want, when we want and how we want, you got that?”
Err
Boston is stupid.