Before I sleep: day 6 without coffee

...or Coca-Cola, or Mountain Dew or even non-herbal tea. Since I had cut out sodas last December (down to one a week, anyway), it hasn't been hard to avoid them. Well, sometimes I think hard about Mountain Dew. Some say the stuff is vile but it's the only soda that delivers a ton of caffeine and still tastes the same when lukewarm and stale.'Oh dear... my brain is reminding me of the smell of Mountain Dew right now, so I had better change the topic.

I'm still free of coffee. The biggest thing to note is that I feel tired differently. I get tired and my muscles don't ache to augment the point. I don't feel "bone tired" -- just totally ready to sleep.

Today at work I was chillin' with the goofy guys I like in the next row. One of them had a PSP and I got to play with the default Tetris-esque game. It was fun. One of the guys was totally tripping on how chill I was, that it was like "the quiet Dante" and "it's like he's baked. This is so cool."

I got to thinking that it did feel like that. I crave caffeine very strongly right now but I also crave bed right now. When I'm not hungry otherwise (note to self: you probably put on a couple pounds during this process. Less candy, okay?) I feel happy. It's a good feeling.

I'm too tired to explain stuff. Lemme talk tomorrow.

-spaceboy I miss you, Dante

Nailing a few theses on the door

I'm on my second work-shift weekend. This one has been so much quieter that I'm watching TV and commenting to my LJ. Day seven without coffee has been quiet and leisurely. Last night when I posted, I had just dealt handily with the only call of the day. I slept like a log last night.

I started watching the PBS special "Get Up Stand Up", which claims to be about protest music. More than 70% seems to be "charity concerts of the latter Twentieth Century. I keep cringing as Chuck D has to make the Eighties sound activist. Then they throw Liz Taylor on the screen saying how beautiful giving is and I want to melt her face with a hair dryer.

So I gotta ask: is anyone else getting tired of Baby Boomers telling their story of the Nineteen Sixties? Naw really, let's bury them as they retire. Let's take all their money and cure a few diseases, the first of which being Obsessive Televised Nostalgia Disorder (which we can pronounce "aught-nid").

I am tired of seeing honkies pontificate about the meaning of the Black Panthers.

I am tired of hearing about how bad the Vietnam War was when the same people can't get their shit together to end the two wars we're running now.

Why do millionaire musicians go chugging? If they get ten bucks from ten thousand of us, that's $100,000. If one of them gets an accountant to shuffle some income to a charity as a tax dodge, it actually funds that accountant's family and keeps him from working the docks with his package tucked in.

It's clear that Chuck D may have only had influence on the last 40 minutes of the two-hour special. It's not not clear that he could be cringing about the middle, crummy 40 minutes of "here's a lot about Live Aid".

I want to be involved. Then I hear these dolled fauns talk and even when they make fun of themselves, I would rather use my energy to extinguish theirs. That's not constructive.

Bono admits one thing in this special: "I'm a vain person. I know it." I'm glad he did do at least one useful thing for the world by selling debt forgiveness to political leaders. It's more than you can say about a lot of musicians. He found the right audience to get done what he believed. Still, he is never going to be human again but I suspect he'd never planned to be.

So yeah, I'm figuring out my energy now that it's decaffed. I'm taking that slowly. I want to help fix the world but it's hard to know what is a good idea besides building and fixing computers.

-haven't finished this thought yet, Dante