Show me what it's like/To dream in black and white,

...So I can leave this world tonight.

i don't know why the discover magazine is calling out to me.

it has been for a couple weeks now, every time i find myself in this waiting room at the center where nos. 1 and 2 have their therapy.

so today i pick it up.

and behind articles about space and the atom, i find a eight-page article about the world's first "nuclear" refugees and a return trip they are making to their home:

chernobyl. fucking chernobyl.

i remember 20 years ago sitting in a class and watching a recorded news brief on chernobyl so that it would generate a discussion amongst us teenagers.

i remember being horrified by the grainy black and white images of burned workers, the thought of the pain and anguish and ensuing uncertainty that this entailed. (and if you have been reading, and do the math, you will know that chernobyl happened in that period of time when i was sure russia was going to nuke us on a daily basis.) these people were supposed to be my "enemy" and yet all i could see were people like me suffering through something i could not begin to fathom.

the refugees are returning to mark the 20-year anniversary.

at the very beginning, this article gave me a glimmer of hope, as i love stories of displaced refugees returning to their homes (i guess i feel that earth is not really our home, that we are much lighter matter that really belongs somewhere else, and we are merely cosmic refugees displaced to this location to batter through until we can return to the place where we belong, or "home." or "heaven." or whatever you want to call it--and stories of displaced people returning to their homes gives me hope on some spiritual level), but it turns out that this isn't that kind of story.

these refugees aren't returning home, they are visiting a place they once lived for a day to recapture those lost memories and attempt to go away with something real.

because the town is still too chock-full of harmful radiation, and will be, scientists figure, for about another 600 years.

i am not even sure we, as a massive race that thinks it runs the planet, will last 600 years. i am not sure we will last 100. and maybe chernobyl is just one example of why i secretly believe that we won't last that long.

the present-day pictures of pripyat (the town closest to ground zero of chernobyl, and full of the workers and their families--called the city of the future prior to the explosion) aren't much better than the black and whites that were shown on the news in 1986. but rather than burn victims in hospital beds, skin sloughing, it is empty shells of lives that never were, paint peeling like dead skin, dust and debris accumulating like cancerous growths, the most malignant of which is possibly the giant cement sarcophagus built to contain the immense radioactive turmoil.

why was i so impacted by the footage i saw some 20 years ago? and why, today, when i read this article (discover, i seriously cannot find a date on the magazine anywhere, it is driving me crazy, but someone has penned "6/07" on the cover, so i am going to have to go with that, by maryann de leo) is that impact combined with new feelings of sadness and loss and confusion? why am i crying for people i never knew, will never meet, whose lives have been shifted, set aside, ground asunder? why, when i read about the one survivor who took the writer and her translator with him to find his family's apartment, and tapped himself on the chest and said "my home" referring to a shell of an apartment with a moldy pile of his clothes left in front of a window, why did i choke up and fight back tears, lest other people in the waiting room think something is seriously wrong with me?

maybe the real question is: why do we do these things to ourselves? why, when we are capable of so much beauty and passion and love, do we also insist on inflicting such cruelty, pain, and sadness? we are sparks of god, yet we hide down dark alleys to find our devils and spring them free. and why do these catastrophes that we exact upon ourselves seem so easily forgotten? why is this article not the cover article? oh, we can revisit fucking oj motherfucking simpson every year to see what he has been up to since the fucking "trial of the century" but we dare not keep the holocaust, chernobyl, and darfur at the forefront of our collective conciousness.

i pray to every god that will hear my cries that we all find our way home again, and when i say that, i mean the planets of light and happiness where we have all fallen from in the first place, so we might all stand together, barring race religion and creed, and tap ourselves on the chest, and say, "my home."

darth sardonic

rain rain go away,

come again another day,
all the world is waiting for the sun...

i don't want to build a fucking avatar, i just want the fucking lyrics! i'm not even sure what building a damn avatar has to do with lyrics of songs anyhow.

it should be a requirement for people planning on moving to western washington for any length of time to take a course on driving in the rain. fuck me sideways if i didn't see people nearly fuck themselves up about a million times on the trip out to my mom's house today. one of them was a single car accident. i think he didn't slow down while trying to powerhouse through an intersection and he fucked his car up on the opposite curb. the standard washington manoeuvre of trying to speed through the ass-end of a yellow light doesn't work when it is rainy.

why is it that the kid who can barely keep his eyes open at 4 p.m. will then play noisily in his room after his regular bedtime until about 8:30 p.m. before passing out on a stack of legos, and then pop from bed like a mongoose ready to kill the cobra at 4:30 a.m. and want to tell me at top volume about how grand it is to be alive and how much this new day means to him?

i believe i told him from the cocoon of my warm bedclothes: "foodle shagga obb, figgle nappa 'k, nenn wanna b' sappy, wigga?" (if you don't shut your gob, i'll fucking snap your neck, and then you won't be so happy, willya?) (early morning darth is an evil bastard and should be left to his own devices until he crawls from bed like the first fish to pull itself gasping from the primordial ooze.)

i'm ready to go back to hot and humid any damn time. i have been loathe to close the windows and turn off the fans, cause i know it is coming, but the house is a frigid 60 degrees most of the damn time now, and anyways, it is fucking july! i mean i know it is western washington, the gray, dreary drizzle capitol of the known world, but c'mon already!

that is more or less it on the sardonic front for now. i predict some yahtzee against my mom in my near future, as well as drinks and dinner and brooke-ogling with s, but much beyond that i can't really say.

darth sardonic

mini blogs

tacoma can't handle a simple concert

got free tickets to see breaking benjamin/three days grace/nickleback at the tacoma dome. it should be said here that the band we really want to see is breaking benjamin, which, it appears to us, the casual observers, was treated like the bastard redhead stepson on this tour.

we left at 6 to catch them beginning in the vicinity of 7. we live a mere 15-minute drive from the dome. we didn't get into the concert till 8. yes, 8. 8 fucking o'clock, two motherfucking sodding hours later. why? because apparently the parking lots at the dome were full already at 6. and tacoma's finest was letting no one anywhere near the dome, which meant we had to drive several miles out of our way in stop and go traffic (and i mean no-shit stop and go. i rarely put the car into second, and every time i did, i had to slam on my brakes shortly thereafter) to pay $10 to drive up four levels to park and nearly run five blocks to the dome, only to find out that breaking benjamin had already played some time ago.

we decided to fuck off for dinner instead, and heard maybe two songs by three days grace while all this occured, which, i might add, sounded like refried shit, so i'm guessing the rest of the concert would've bit dead donkey nuts.

headline on the tribune the next morning: more parking needed for tacoma dome? no fucking duh.


just rewards

for some time, my faith in kharma had begun to fail. that is to say, i was beginning to feel that the cosmic scale had gotten it reversed: for every good thing you did, bad things happened to you, and for every bad thing you did, you were heaped upon with blessings.

but my faith has been renewed.

the doss cunt that was a former roommate/bandmate who put his shit in storage to fuck off to the desert and left us with a hefty fine for breaking our lease after assuring us that he was "good for it" at the signing of the papers returned recently from his deployment.

now, in his absence, we have happenchanced upon several other people he has fucked over/hurt in some way. turned out this douchebag only befriends people for what he can con them out of them.

but he appeared to thrive.

until recently. he's apparently hard-up for friends upon his return, as he has tried to contact my wife a few times since returning, to no avail. and he apparently can't understand why she won't talk to him. furthermore, he has been hanging out at work (all day), which he "hates" with people he "can't stand" during his time off, most likely since he has nothing else to do.

and he was recently called in along with one of his other buddies to have his ass chewed by three different and seperate supervisors for being insubordinate and lazy whilst deployed in a war zone. i know for a fact that he had to dye his hair back to normal from some ungodly color (the last one was green) for this "meeting" because every time he comes back from a deployment, he bleaches and dyes his hair.

and his direct supervisor, which he has always been sure he could bulldoze (she is one of the other fuckees of twatboy), made it abundantly clear to him that he is to come in, do his job, shut the fuck up, and quit fucking about. and this was backed by the rest of the supervisors up the chain. in not-so-nice words. at not-normal-conversation volumes.

yeah, his life currently fucking sucks.

and i am laughing my dipshit ass off.


random lines from the past few weeks

it's the instant my face hits the windshield, followed by my face hitting the brick wall, that is what would do it for me.

all we can hope is breaking benjamin goes on late (this was still an hour before we actually got into the venue).

he's gotta be hatin' life. and j.c.'s had an amp for sale that is exactly like the one he spent 1200 bucks buying. i can't help but think he had to hock it. at least that is how the story is gonna go in my head.

stah war' lego. yeeeeaaaaah!!!!

i've been recording music, which means i am going to have to break down and start a fucking myspace to get it out there. (yes, soon i will have a link to my music myspace, god i hate myself hahahaha!)

even though we didn't get to see them, i still had a great time hanging out with you.

i don't care if you don't see it my way/i don't care if you see it at all (low pop suicide)

if you two don't quit fucking fighting, i will turn the goddamn game off.

(this is actually a whole, though short, funny story. i tell the boys i am going to turn the game off if they can't play as a team. in unison, they shout "no!" then begin bickering between the two of them again. click! no. 1 proceeds to have what i can only describe as a mixture of a seizure, aneurysm, thrombosis, and constipation all at the same time. his face is purple, his ears are red, his eyes are huge and moist, his body is vibrating like a chimed bells, and his fists are clenched. no. 2 just began bawling. wonder where he gets that? hmmmm. must do more research...)

darth sardonic