I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit lately. I’ve basically been busy as hell lately, and I suppose the blog has taken a back seat. So this post will be a rambling one bordering on stream of consciousness. So grab a cup of your favorite hot, cold or lukewarm beverage, get someone to rub your feet, and read on.

The fitness side of things has been going very well. It has been mostly bicycling (more on that soon!) but I have also been doing some calisthenics, push ups, basketball and pilates. However I guess I am drinking enough beer and soda to negate any exercise progress I am making. I am still holding steady at my (healthy) weight but I’ve still got that blasted belly fat. I think at some point I may abstain from alcohol for a month just for caloric reasons.

Now onto bicycling. I am surely becoming better at it. My legs are getting stronger and I am becoming more confident in riding. I let myself go faster down hills and don’t mind small bumps as much. I am actually surprised that I have not gotten a flat from some of the huge goddamn pot holes I have unintentionally gone over. I have also somehow managed to not pierce my tube on all the glass I have seen on the street. Also, yesterday I participated in my second Critical Mass. It is quite an empowering experience. After spending all month being a second-class citizen on the roads and being scared out of my wits several times by inattentive or malicious motorists, it is nice to have the bicyclists own the roads for a change. Yesterday I especially had fun stopping for a few seconds directly in front of some cars in a couple of intersections to let the mass go through. I did have to break off rather early, however, to meet some friends in the Sunset for dinner. On my way there I kept running into break-off massers. I am not sure what you call it, but I went through a group of bikers who were using an intersection as their own personal traffic circle, stopping traffic in all directions. Beautiful thing. After passing through that I had all four one-way lanes of Fell Street to myself. I love Critical Mass. I wish it were two times per month, every week, twice a week, every day. Maybe some day…

By the way, a quick “shout out” to my friend Peter’s excellent San Francisco bike blog.

School has been going well, although I probably need to start working harder at it. Last semester I worked too hard at school; I probably worked twice as hard as I needed to to actually get an ‘A’ and ended up with super duper A’s. Right now I am probably working hard enough for everything to be borderline A/B and I would really like to get straight A’s again. Unfortunately this semester there are no term papers like last semester where we get to pick our own topic. I really enjoyed writing my paper Anarchism in Spain during the Spanish Civil War last semester and I wish I had the opportunity to do something like that again. Unfortunately it is mostly book reviews, midterms, and one term paper on which our topic is rather narrow. School has been rather tiring, for sure. 11 out of my 12 weekly class hours are packed between Monday at 4pm and Wednesday at 10am. With bicycling to/from school most of the time I am pretty exhausted by the time I get out of work on Wednesday. But I keep on truckin’. I think I can wait until December and January for a decent vacation.

In December I will be going to Maryland for about a week. I’d like to be back in San Francisco for New Year’s Eve, and then I’ll be off to Hawaii to visit Kelly, Conor and Caleb. Hopefully Tim will be home by then. I’m very much looking forward to this vacation. But the real doozy will be next summer when I plan to go to Europe for a month, couch surfing as much as possible. I should probably get on getting that passport…

Talking about Couch Surfing, I have been hosting a LOT. The vast majority of the days I will have one or more (sometimes as many as four) couch surfers staying with me in my studio. I am taking a several day break from it right now but I really enjoy hosting people. I have met so many people and I’ve stopped counting how many I’ve hosted. Besides the obvious social benefits of it, I am looking at it from an anarchist perspective. It is essentially a gift economy; the apartment is theirs to stay in with no strings attached. They also get to avoid spending money at a hotel and I get the joy of knowing they kept money out of the hands of the big hotel owners. And to be selfish, I am racking up a huge list of people than can host me in the future!

To change gears here, work is also going well. We are trying to spin off a separate company. I won’t go into the details right now, but it’s involved setting aside a few weekend days to get some work done on our project that we are trying to launch. I don’t mind so much; the solitude while I work is nice and it is what I was looking for when I volunteered all of us to work on the weekends. The regular during-the-week stuff is going fine but I am looking forward to this new company getting launched and hopefully working in that line a lot more.

Now onto the “having fun” part of this post. As I posted before, I have recently launched a San Francisco drum and bass blog where I am keeping track of the different drum and bass events upcoming in the city, posting pictures and writing event reviews. I had a tremendous time last Sunday at Compression at The Cellar. I hope to go to more drum and bass events now that I am keeping track of all of them for the new blog.

A few fun things that are upcoming for me: Next weekend I am going to Monterrey for a night with a few friends for a birthday. I’ve been to Monterrey a few times but never spent the night. I think I won’t go to the aquarium again, even though it was great last time. I want to check out other parts of Monterrey, whatever they may be. The weekend after that I’ll be in LA visiting Alyssa. I haven’t been to LA for a while and I’m looking forward to it. I’m sure we’ll have a great time.

Now just some comments on our current political atmosphere. I become more and more turned off by mainstream politics every day. I am especially jaded by the Obama campaign. I can’t stand to see Obamamania going on here in San Francisco. If I had more time (how many times have I said this?) I’d challenge the Obamamania. I want to put up posters that say “Obama is a warmonger.” I want to make t-shirts to the same effect. I want to challenge the Obama street table volunteers to an impromptu debate.

What, you didn’t know that Obama was a warmonger? He has voted to fund the war in Iraq. The same war that has killed an estimated 1.2 million Iraqis, many more than you may know who have been killed directly by American soldiers. The same war that has made five million Iraqis flee their homes, internally and externally. Well, surely, you might think, Obama will change all of that when he takes office. Think again. He plans to keep thousands of troops in Iraq, including in the Green Zone, thus completely ignoring the will of the Iraqi people and destroying any hope of Iraqi sovereignty. Obama also seems to think the Iraqi people should be paying us money for our war that is essentially no more than mass murder. Should someone with this mentality be our president?

But it doesn’t stop with Iraq, of course. Obama’s effort to be “tough on terror” includes sending more troops to Afghanistan. Send them there for what? What are more troops going to do over there? It doesn’t take tens of thousands of troops to combat Al Qaeda, who are evidently holed up in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. I’ll tell you what more troops will accomplish however. They will, intentionally or not, murder more Afghan people, like the close to 100 that were killed a couple weeks ago by an American bomb. Is this who you want to be president?

This is the same man who thinks it is wise to leave “all options on the table” with regards to Iran. The same Iran that several years ago agreed to stop all nuclear activity if we would only promise to not attack them. We reprimanded the third party diplomat for delivering the message. Are we really going to consider bombing Iran, too? Or maybe we’ll just starve them out like Bill Clinton did to Iraq. 1 million dead Iraqis thank Clinton for that, and the rest of the Iraqis thank Clinton for making them more dependent on their dictator, making it extremely difficult to overthrow him. And this is who the San Francisco “liberals” are so excited about?

This is the same man that actually wants to increase the size of our military. Our military expenditures are already higher than the rest of the world combined. This is our idea of a presidential candidate that stands for peace, that wants to use diplomacy to settle our differences with the world? Diplomacy at the barrel of a gun, maybe. Change, my ass.

And just a bit on the economy here. I am actually kind of excited about the state of the economy. I think economic collapse would certainly be painful in many ways but it would also be a time of opportunity. An opportunity to make a change in our lives on an individual level and also an opportunity to replace what we have on a systemic level with something at least slightly better. We’ll see what happens, but my opinion is that the current bailout plan will make the decline of the American economy happen slowly rather than suddenly. Either way it’s going down the tubes.

Lastly, a quick comment on some stuff I am reading right now. I am reading Living My Life by Emma Goldman, an autobiography if the title didn’t give that away. An excellent book so far, talking about all of her travels, lectures, romance and more. I certainly like Emma Goldman much more than Lenin after reading his biography. Lenin was essentially a mass murdering elitist who did it all in the name of the working class. One thing I am getting out of all of this, however, is that I think I would admire someone much more for their actions rather than their words. Emma Goldman, until this point in the book at least (I think she’s about 30) has mostly done lecture tours. Anarchist lectures are generally meant to agitate the working class so they take action. Seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. But I still like Emma Goldman.

I also started reading a journal I subscribed to, Anarchist Studies. An article in the current issue discusses Leo Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism, which is something I had never heard of until now. There’s a lot about laws, slavery and non-violence in the article. I am skeptical of some of Tolstoy’s arguments, especially the one that declares that laws are slavery. I think the term slavery is cheapened when it is used so broadly like this. Having said this, I’d like to read some of Tolstoy’s books and articles that this journal article mentions.

Until next time, faithful readers…

Patrick Citroni, my brother Rich’s campaign manager, died yesterday at the young age of 29 in a tragic motorcycle accident. Rich had the following to say about Patrick (full post here):

I read this post on the way to work from school today. It really hit me like a ton of bricks. I had met Patrick twice and I could tell that beyond being an energetic, bright and skillful political worker he was a genuinely nice guy and a pleasure to be around. I’ll certainly miss him.

After taking some time to collect my thoughts I read an article about a US raid on an Iraqi village in which eight members of one family, all innocent, were killed. A connection was made between Patrick’s death and the deaths of the Iraqi family for me. Rich’s campaign, and this speaks for Patrick as well, is against the war in Iraq. Iraq also happens to be the issue that I am most passionate about.

I am sure Patrick would not want us to simply go on with our normal lives, not putting forth any extra effort towards ending the war. With one less brave soul counteracting American imperialism and its extraordinarily high human costs, that means that we all have to step it up. Take what we are doing right now and add to it. For Patrick. For the innocent Iraqis.

I’ve launched a new blog, sfdrumandbass.com. From the first post:

Thanks to Joyce for showing me this one. Spectacular and educational.

As you saw earlier I got a flat tire this morning on my bike. Not a good way to start my day. After class today I discovered a $70 parking ticket on the City Carshare car. This was because I forgot to put the parking voucher thing in the dash - I had paid for the whole day but they didn’t know that. So overall my flat tire cost me at least $150.

So I get home and for the first time in a while I am looking at my blog’s statistics. There, I notice that there have been 0 visits and 27 hits from an…eyebrow blog. (Jesus, they really have a blog for everything, don’t they?) 0 visits and >1 hits usually means that someone is using an image on my site. So I follow the link and…

BLAM!

My eyebrows are the feature picture on a post talking about how more men should thin their eyebrows! Hahahaha. I think that is hilarious.

Since they are using the image off of my site without the courtesy to ask (just as a politeness thing, I don’t care about the law on it), I have taken the opportunity to update the picture with a barely legible note.

It was great bicycling weather: cool and overcast (so I don’t sweat). At Valencia and 24th I got a flat. I noticed some glass earlier and tried to avoid it but it seems I wasn’t able to. Sure enough, pulled a piece of glass out of my tire.

I left the apartment with plenty of time to spare and I had just packed my bag with maintenance stuff: needle nose pliers, inner tube, pump, pressure gauge. So I go to replace the inner tube. It seems that the person and Valencia Cyclery did not sell me the correct size. That was a very annoying and costly mistake. Thankfully I was right at a City Carshare pod location. I reserved a Prius for the whole day and off I went. Of course this was not all great as it will end up costing me over $60 just for the car.

And now I get to go to Ocean Cyclery during lunch time to get the correct size inner tubes. Maybe have them install it for me and show me the correct procedure to do so.

Moral of the story: I don’t often get pissed. But the person that shattered glass in the street really pissed me off. And to a less extent the person at Valencia Cyclery that sold me the wrong size tube pissed me off too. Something else that pissed me off? The automated phone reservation system that City Carshare uses.

Update: The inner tube was not too big. It turns out (surprise!) that I just didn’t know how to put it on correctly.

As some of you may know, the Democratic National Convention is currently ongoing in Denver. Sounds like a great reason for a protest.

So far, over 100 people have been arrested. I have been following the progress on Colorado Indymedia and on Submedia. Keep in mind that both of these sources are openly pro-anarchist/activist. But the videos, they don’t lie.

I was having a great bike ride this morning from my apartment to SFSU and back. It looks like it will take about 40 minutes each way.

On the way back, I was going eastbound on Market Street, wanting to go left onto 7th St. So I started to get over. I tried to go diagonal over the street car tracks. I made it over the first one fine, but the second one, my front tire decided it wanted to align itself into the track. Down I went. OUCH. I banged up my left leg and scraped my left elbow. I got up pretty quickly and walked across the street into UN Plaza. Then something weird happened. My hearing was pretty much shot for about a minute. After that I was fine. I think my body was just like “What the hell just happened?”

As of now my leg hurts but I am sure it will be OK. And I will have some nasty scabs on my elbow.

The bike is mostly OK. I just have to put the chain back on and straighten the handlebar.

For the last Friday of every month: San Francisco Critical Mass
For the last Saturday of every month: Really Really Free Market