If you live in a suburb in a place that grass doesn't naturally grow (SoCal, Phoenix, etc), and you have to seed your lawn every spring and water it all summer, the picture above is the part of the equation you're missing out on, but provides us with endless fun every year. Linn County, OR (where I live, not coincidentally) is where the vast majority of the grass seed used on lawns all over the US comes from. The way they grow grass seed is thus:

Step 1: plant a field with grass.

Step 2: let it go to seed.

Step 3: harvest the seeds, leaving all the rest of the shit on the ground.

Step 4: burn that shit.

Step 5: rinse and repeat.

We're in Step 4 of the yearly process right now, and, I'll hasten to add, I live in a canyon. The wide mouth of this canyon, to the west of us, opens on to the Willamette Valley. Particularly, the part where all the grass seed is grown. The end of this canyon is up the road a couple miles to the east of us. A basic knowledge of weather patterns in the U.S. would tell you that prevailing winds push all the smoke from all these hundreds of fires in to this canyon, where it stays.

Long story short: you seed your "lawn" in the spring, and in the fall, old people in Mill City get emphysema. Thanks. The word for the day is "hardscape."

If you think about that, you'll realize that's why we don't see any pictures of soldiers that have been killed, even though there would logically be quite a few. The Times finally said "fuck it," and put up a photo essay showing some powerful images from this current war. Note that these are pictures you're not used to seeing from this conflict, and are as disturbing as any from Viet Nam, and perhaps somewhat more so for the fact that the people in the picture are your peers instead of two or three generations ago. In many cases, these people are younger than you.

People in the 60s and 70s saw these sorts of images in their newspapers and on television every day, which goes a long way towards explaining the heavy fatigue that war caused in the public consciousness. In the five years of this war, despite the fact that I read several major news sites every day and watch television news almost every day, it occurs to me that I know more about Anna Nicole Smith's various liaisons than I do about the human cost of this war. I don't recall ever seeing any pictures from this particular conflict that were this graphic prior to this morning; in all honest, I'm sure they're out there, and I never really looked, but even so.

While I'll leave general "support" for the war or the argument thereof to others (I'm not so stupid as to think it's as simple as being about oil, or that it can be ended next week, or won if we only had the willpower) I think it's important to know what you're paying for, and in some cases what you voted for. You, as an American taxpayer, probably spent more money on the war this year than you did doing most anything that you enjoy for yourself like going to the movies, eating out, having a drink at a bar, etc. Looking at the percentage of the Pentagon budget that goes directly to Iraq, and the percentage of my taxes that go to the Pentagon, I personally directly spent more on this war than I did on rent, electricity, broadband, phone, and natural gas combined in 2007. And the third picture in that photo essay is what it bought me.

If you need a cell phone that costs $299, chances are good that you have Shit To Do.

Conversely, in order to obtain that phone, you can't have any Shit To Do, because you need to wait in fucking line for an hour. A WEEK after it was released. Are you kidding me?

I'm normally pretty sensitive to the type of person that would wait in line the day of release for new technology. I'm not that sort of person myself, but I know a lot of people that are, and I understand them to a certain extent. But check it out:

If you're still waiting in line a week later, you're just a fucking loser. Plain and simple. Go get a job.

Happiness is a cool mojito. In a Chococat glass.

To put this in perspective, if you don't feel like reading the article, for the foreseeable future, you won't be able to buy a house unless you're paying cash. You won't be able to buy a car unless you're paying cash or your credit score is 800. You won't be able to get student loans unless your credit score is 800. For the short term, at least, you won't be able to borrow money.

At all.

Now, this might not affect you that much, but two of the biggest industries in this country are automaking and homebuilding. Both are effectively at a standstill, and will be for some time. This will affect everybody.

Bummer.

More importantly, we'll be going with the general flow of things on this release, and trying out how the current wind blows with respect to our own business, and release this album for free. How we'll do it is thus: if you want the high quality VBR MP3s and the FLACs, the album can be purchased in the normal way via the Posi store. If you want to access the album as part of any service (Rhapsody, et al) that you use, it will be available in the normal fashion in those services. However, if you just want 160kbps MP3s, those will be free to download.

This is just going to be a trial balloon to see how things work in this regard. If it isn't too ridiculous, we'll continue in this fashion. If it is ridiculous, we won't. Simple as that.

In any event, I have 2/5 of the album mixed, and 5/5 of it written and recorded, so it won't be long.

It's odd, because before I essentially stopped playing live, I had a lot of stamina. Doing an hour and fifteen minutes on stage is just about the most intense aerobic workout you can get, and at around 130 degrees, it's a sauna simultaneously. Do that a couple hundred (or in my case couple thousand) times and you'll be in pretty good shape for the rest of your life.

However...

Since I haven't actually done that for, what, four years, I'm in nowhere near the condition I was in when I did do it. While I'll be thin and reasonably strong my whole life as a result, it seems the stamina part doesn't stay with you.

Long story short, I didn't break any bones my first trip out, but I just about wrecked the SUV on the way back due to the fact that I was seeing double. Nothing but fun 'round here.

And oh, hey, two of the five tracks for the new Micronaut record are mixed and done. Three more to go.