Danny Doom’s Booze Cabinet

No, I will not be commenting on any fringe groups or fringe activity here. We have high standards here at The Booze Cabinet! High, high, high standards. Now, off to another booze-filled picture shoot. This is Serious Business!

I didn’t know that Dennis Hopper is apparently on his deathbed? Sounds tabloidy, but yet real. Bummer, man. Makes me wanna watch “Apocalypse Now” again.

The man’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he’ll… uh… well, you’ll say “hello” to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you. He won’t even notice you. And suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say, “Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you”… I mean I’m… no, I can’t… I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s… he’s a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas…

This may be one of the saddest headlines I have ever seen: “Arlington Heights approves warm-beer law”

What kind of a sick world is this? That’s what you get for living in Arlington Heights, I guess, wherever that is. Oh, suburbs, you amuse and befuddle me.

Another shot, coming home from Michigan under apocalyptic skies.

Words can’t do it justice! Simply…unbelievable.

UPDATE:

Meanwhile, Drudge race-baits: “White Student Beaten On School Bus; Crowd Cheers.” This is a movement that is just showing off now! Why wouldn’t we want to put them back in power?

Last night I saw some old Bulls game on, I guess they’re replaying Jordan’s great games to mark his Hall of Fame induction or something. Wow, man. One of the games was from 1987 and it was a one-man gang. Amazing that they got it together to win six championships, but Jordan was truly great. Best ever, no question. Basketball isn’t even worth watching anymore without someone like him to watch. So glad I saw all of that, from right around that time on, the early Jordan years up through number 6 in 1998…eleven years ago? Sheeee-it…

Eight years ago it was a different story. I woke up today and happened to catch the replay on msnbc, not from the beginning but after the second plane hit.  Watched the first tower go down, then the second. Unbelievable. Tim Russert is on there too, which is weird. If only people had not reacted with such fear and instead with resolve. Resolve would not have invaded Iraq or set up torture prisons or carried bogus terror alerts, but Fear would, and did. How different it would have been without the fear-mongering.

Of course it was scary, at least for a while. I would ride my bike downtown to work and expect to see a plane at any moment come flying into the Sears Tower. It’s still odd to see a low-flying plane anywhere near here. But that doesn’t mean you have to panic. And it feels like we panicked. (Re)-elected a dumb ass. Shouted down dissenting views. Bunkered down and lost some freedom. Acted exactly like they hoped we would.

Kinda feels like those same folks are still shouting today.

Donny: Are these the Nazis, Walter?
Walter Sobchak: No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

A great column by Joe Klein in Time about The Party of Nihilists:

The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus…are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don’t retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.

It is a very different story among Republicans…they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush’s presidency has been obliterated. The party’s putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama’s political prospects…There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009. The same people who rail against a government takeover of health care tried to enforce a government takeover of Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life decisions. And when Palin floated the “death panel” canard, the number of prominent Republicans who rose up to call her out could be counted on one hand.

I have been hesitant to even write anything here about the loons in the GOP and their hypocrisy, because I simply am having a hard time believing that they are relevant to this debate. Well, they aren’t. The bipartisan hope–which I believed was a slim possibility in the election of Obama–is a myth. It is clear that the only principle on the right is to bring Obama down, much as it was with Clinton.

There is no solution, no compromise, no debate at all with these people. Obama deserves credit for trying but as everyone seems to be saying now, it is time to fuck ‘em. Go your own way, like Fleetwood Mac. There’s problem enough with the conservative Democrats, who needs the Party of No?

I still think that these crazies are a very small minority of people, the 20%ers, and hardly worth the time or the coverage that they receive, but realize that cable tv news is nothing without this kind of garbage. I just hate to waste my time or this verrrrrry valuable space in The Booze Cabinet on such wackjobs. Not when we could be posting beer pictures and fictional tales of existential misery.

Walter Sobchak: Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.

I say up there that in The Booze Cabinet you will find beer, ideas, fiction or ice, but rarely do I come through with the fiction. There’s lots of beer and ideas and ice…but no fiction. So here’s an excerpt of a longer piece, completely out of context and only explicable if you read the whole thing. Which is not finished of course, but godammit, I’m working on it. Enjoy, or scratch your head:

Such sadness, to be cognizant of all of life’s missteps and undiscovered treasures before the end, enough to put it down on paper. Poor woman. It was unfair. I don’t know that we all deserved better but she certainly did. And so where had I not been and what had I not done? The list was endless. The rain slowed to a drizzle with occasional flashes of lightning across the night sky and my head swam with dark thoughts, the gloom of unfinished business. I talked to Ben about Sandy and how I was pushing her away and then there was Dora, and I tried to explain about the magnet she had placed squarely in her crotch. “You’re hopeless,” he said, of course.

He was right about me—it was sick how easily I fell back into it—but I was all caught up in the drama and I had no intention of figuring out why or trying to change. It made things more interesting, to pathetically hop from one failure to the next, getting burned or burning it all down, the romantic arsonist. She was right, that sweet innocent at the Courson House, it was a world on fire, and no wonder I loved that falling star. Ben didn’t understand at all and to his credit he simply ignored me and got to the point.

His mother’s note requested a desire to be littered across the “dry death heat and cactus landscape” of the desert, never having visited such a climate, not once in her life, never even crossing the Mississippi to the west, it was like some fantasy foreign land she had only seen on television or in pictures. I sat there thinking about it and grew more and more depressed. There was no way anyone could properly fill up a life. There would always be something left, always somewhere else to go, and in the end we would all have to accept that the world held places we would never see, pyramids, jungles, exotic locales; mountains, skyscrapers or a burning hole in the ground where a satellite fell. Somewhere was a girl I would never meet, standing at the foot of the Great Wall or walking the beach on a remote island in the Pacific, or maybe just around the corner on a street I sometimes walked. She would close her door just as I went past and go inside to an empty house and I would see a shadow behind a curtain and then a light switch off. It was a world too big, a life too small, and I could hardly move, paralyzed with despair.

Ben shook me out of the haze and demanded that I accompany him. “I can’t do this alone,” he said, “I need a witness. It would mean a lot to me if you came.” I wondered if his mother had simply given up waiting for the course of her life to change, given up on anything but the routine and invested it all in her son. The Burden of Benedict. And were we living the life she was never able to? I had a hard time believing that, not this life.

“A son has to fulfill a mother’s wishes,” I finally said.

We were living within limitations. Why? Why follow the guide? Why allow the cock to rule the mind? I was angry at God for not existing and for allowing me to exist. It was going to have to end somehow—and alone and without warning—and who would I leave behind? I thought of Walter and his false sense of comfort. What part of the equation had he left out in order to find peace? Eternal happiness and proper salvation and superstition and empty slogans. Another conversation, never started, never finished. I wished to have never lived and to never have to die and I could feel the fury building and the terror and the misery and all the while Ben stared at me slack-jawed and maybe even slightly amused.

“Is that a ‘yes’?”

Whoa! What happened? Just updated my Word Press and it turned into this craziness. We’ll be back soon, hopefully!

In lieu of a booze picture today I give you a snap out the window of my car as I drove past one of those cheap carnivals on Fullerton. And then I gave it a little apocalyptic haze for good measure.

No photoshop, just another day in Logan Square.

You may remember I recently wrote about the paranoid delusions of Glenn Beck and his “War Room.” The Colbert Report dissected it last night in this fine segment and then took it to a whole other level. I now bring you…Stephen Colbert’s Doom Bunker!

So we were supposed to get cable yesterday but of course it didn’t happen. Let’s hope this isn’t a sign of things to come from Comcast. They did hook up the internet, which means that we had, for the first time ever in the history of switching internet carriers, a smooth transition. This is probably because of the transition team that I set up last November in order to ensure that not one minute went by where we were vulnerable to any possible internet outages.

No, it was simple, really: we waited til it was hooked up and then canceled the old one. Could it be that easy? We’ll see when the bill comes. Anyway, cable is scheduled for Thursday. Why? Why did we give in after all these years? I think it had something to do with the prospect of babysitters staring at a fuzzy television while the baby cries, vowing to never return for a second time.

A side note to the fuzzy television: I ordered my digital converter coupons back in the summer, or whenever they first announced it. I figured I would really be on top of things when it all went down and so when they came in the mail I stored them away, confident that I would be ready when the bunny ears came down.

Right around Christmas I decided to go out and get the converter(s) and so I grabbed my coupons–worth $40 each–and went out to buy two of them. This is when I noticed that there was an expiration date on them: June 2008. I had no idea. I ended up ordering two more coupons through an outside source, but last week we said screw it. We’re getting cable. Now I get to watch the Cubs collapse in the comfort of my own home. The bunny ears are coming down! A new era is coming! Twenty-first century, stand back!

I’m glad I’m not a McCain supporter or a White Sox fan right about now. Mostly, though, I’m glad I’m not a McCain supporter right about now.

McCain’s dismissal of Obama brought back memories of how advocates of the war arrogantly dismissed those who insisted (rightly, as it turned out) that the conflict would be far more difficult and costly than its architects suggested.

Yes, what we need now is another hothead with shitty judgment who doesn’t listen to anybody else.

UPDATE:

A headline that speaks volumes: “McCain Takes Credit For Bill Before It Loses”

The rush to claim he had engineered a victory now looks like a strategic blunder that will prolong the McCain’s campaign’s difficulty in finding a winning message on the economy.

Good thing he suspended his campaign! But wait–how do we know when he un-suspends it? Oh, he did? Huh.

Relax, Cub fans and Obama supporters, all is not lost. The Cubs have less time than Obama but they hold the biggest lead of any team besides the L.A. Angels (4.5), and their magic number is 15. So just win, baby. Win!

As for Obama, I do find it odd that after he spent the past year running on the “Change” theme, it is now McCain who is calling for change, despite his own party’s eight-year domination of Washington. Usually it is the party out of favor that is calling for change, yeah? Are people that dumb to fall for it? Yeah, I know, stupid question. Of course they are.

But hey, how can you tell a 70’s porno from the 2008 Republican National Convention?

The amount of Bush in it.

Thanks, I made that one up myself.

So liberal America, let’s celebrate our firm grasp of reality (when we’re not drinking or taking any illicit drugs). The GOP is running on bio, not issues, and ultimately lack the substance to lead. Obama’s got the bio and the issues, and that has to count for something, for once. It HAS to, or we’re all doomed.

Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.

- Bob Herbert, NY Times