I feel so 21st century, I swear. I am sitting in a world art coffeehouse working on a wireless connection off my laptop, while drinking iced coffee and reading Lyndon LaRouche. Okay, I own up that the LaRouche part is scary, but he's getting hot again with the West Coast agitated youth set. Then again, these were the backbone of the doomed Deaniac movement, useless and futile political gestures being a truly Pacific experience. Not that I feel particularly hip, since as I have said before I am so square, I've passed right into octagonal. I'd more likely call myself a sellout, but then again, I don't see myself running off to the woods, living in a shack off a diet of squirrel and beans, and writing the Talmud for the new age (which no-one would read unless I committed acts of even more futile violence.) I am least certain, unlike some I know, that I am living in the right time and right place. Going backward to claim some affinity with a romanticized historical epoch is clearly pointless, as a Jew, I'd be kicked out of whatever country I lived in, or mowed down by the conqueror of the month, and as a homosexual, I would be the centerpiece at one of the Church's gala sausage roast or other civilized moral mixers. They call these past days "simpler times," which means unsimple souls need not apply, please take a number for the next berth on the prison ship, thank you. Now we shouldn't underappreciate those who came before us, because if you think living with traffic and smog is bad, try bubonic plague and open sewers. No matter how fucked the people and the planet seem to be these days, least we live with an understanding now of the possibilities higher than a just king and a merciful afterlife. Or so I hope. Then least I have the comforting measure of knowing that I will be laughed at by those future students of history as I laugh at those who came before me for being uncultured neanderthals.