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It has been fairly entertaining listening to Republicans carry on about how closing Gitmo will result in terrorists roaming amongst us, living in halfway houses. What is even better is the parody this is inspiring. What is sad is the Harry Reid took the Republican’s bait.

I went to be after posting on the release of the torture memos feeling clear about things. I have been thinking about this for a long time. I have always been clear that abandoning legal protections for prisoners and breaking from established international norms like the Geneva Convention was a mistake of biblical proportions, but I never fully resolved myself with the idea that our interrogation practices since 2002 amounted to a regime of systemic torture. I am now fully resolved with this idea.

If I had any doubts lingering, they were swept away when I went to the NY Times and was greeted with this headline:

Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects

Emptywheel has a great post breaking this down.

Despite all the legal justifications and euphimisms, what we have is a carefully crafted program of torture. Waterboarding is a war crime and the United States has prosecuted it as such. The architects of this program must be denounced and held to account.

If the rule of law is to mean anything, then those that twist and contort it to the detriment of other must be removed from positions of power.

I read the Political Animal daily and through that I have become acquainted with Hilzoy, who posts at Political Animal frequently. But I had not read her own blog, Obsidian Wings. I highly recommend it if you follow current events at all.

The Obama administration released the torture memos yesterday to considerable criticism. The administration also announced that it did not intend to pursue prosecutions against operatives who engaged the practices detailed in the memos. In my opinion they made exactly the right choices.

Releasing the memos continues to put distance between the Obama administration and the criminal actions of the Bush administration. Opting against prosecuting operatives who were acting within legally sanctioned guidelines makes it possible to keep moving forward without abandoning the possibility of legal accountability for those who authorized the torture of detainees.

There can be no mistake that we are talking about torture here. Despite all the euphemisms and qualifications, the interrogation methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush administration were clearly beyond the bounds of accepted practice; otherwise it would not be necessary to justify them so exhaustively.

The clearest indication of our imminent decent down the slippery slope came when the it was announced the United States government held that enemy combatants captured in the so-called War on Terror were not subject the protections of the Geneva Convention. It would not be necessary to justify removing those protections if those captives weren’t in danger of needing them.

They in fact did need those protections as it turned out and the United States will be paying a large price for it choice to abandon the rule of law in favor of a specious need for expediency. There isn’t anything to be done about that now. We can only make real and honest attempts to correct our mistakes and to acknowledge the tragic consequences that been visited upon some genuinely innocent people.

Obviously there are some genuinely evil people who are in our custody and these people are to be held to account for their activities. This is not in question. But how we go about that and how we treat these people while we impose justice upon says a great deal about ourselves and nothing about them.

There was no decision this administration would make regarding these memos that would be entirely satisfying, but their release and the decision not to pursue prosecutions allows the United States to continue rehabilitating its reputation without engaging in the sort of scapegoating that accompanied the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

I have a small number of new paintings that are finished and I am in the process of photographing. It’s hard to say when exactly I will get them all up, but here is one I am particularly pleased with.

Buy the ticket take the Ride
Hunter S. Thompson

Two days ago, I stumbled across a blog post on the New York Times online that posed a very interesting question, one that I had never considered in this particular vein before. What situation or experience would be worth relapsing for?

Sacha Z. Scoblic is a Hunter Thompson fan and in recovery. In the post she relates a chance encounter a friend of hers had with Hunter Thompson. Her friend wound up at the Owl Ranch and spent a few hours indulging in various substances while Thompson read his work to the group. That definitely makes my list of cool-ass things to have happen to you.

Presented with her friend’s story, Scoblic concludes “obviously, in that situation, I would have to relapse.”

She goes on to ponder other persons or situations where she might consider what I call a relapse of choice. Simply put, a relapse of choice is a situation where if all things are equal, the experience of using or drinking again outweighs the risks. I have been abstinent from alcohol for 25 years now and the situations where I might choose to relapse to fully enjoy a certain experience have grown smaller with each year. Recently, I haven’t thought of a situation where I would take a relapse of choice.

However, Scoblic raises an angle I had not previously considered. I had always thought in terms of scenarios like the end of the world (which Scoblic also considers). I decided long ago I would prefer to face doomsday clear-headed and in the company of people I care about. For Scoblic, there are people with whom she might decide to drink, most of them being dead writers. This got me thinking about whom I might want to break my drought with. I abandoned any illusions that might minimize the gravity of the choice. The choice had to be made with the very real possibility that a quick and tidy recovery would be neither possible nor likely. No, the choice had to be made knowing that it might mean lifelong addiction or a tragic outcome.

With that happy consideration factored in, the list grew short. Scoblic considered and rejected Amy Winehouse as did I, but probably for different reasons. If I am to abandon sobriety altogether, then the person I am going to hang with has got to have some skill and a long record of survivability. Winehouse is like a young pitcher with an amazing arm; the potential is there for everyone to see but it will be years before we know if the potential is realized. My guess is that Winehouse will be a burnout and hitting the talk shows with her recovery story before she sees 30.

The criteria quickly became quite clear. The person must be clearly addicted to at least one substance for at least two decades. They must be nationally known. They must be unrepentant.

I figure it like this. This person needs to know what the hell they are doing, there should some cool factor for potentially flushing my life down the drain and I really don’t want to listen to a bunch of whining and sniveling that might kill my buzz. Nutt up and crack the bottle.

At this point, there are only a few names on the list. Jackson Pollock, Hunter Thompson, Bela Lugosi, and William S. Burroughs all would be easy choices but they are deceased and so could not be considered.

So that leaves two names; Bob Dylan and Keith Richards. As much as I wanted to keep him on the list, I had to ultimately discard Dylan. His conversion experience in the eighties leaves open the possibility, however unlikely, that he might have some hallucinatory religious vision while we are running the table in Las Vegas and I don’t want to have to make those kinds of explanations to what would be a hostile mob. Degenerate gamblers may be looking for salvation, but not of that sort.

Keith Richards becomes the only person I would seriously consider picking up the bottle with. His credentials as a junkie are impeccable, his tolerance is legendary, there is an extremely high cool factor, and I can’t think of anyone who better exemplifies unrepentant.

The sad part is that if I am completely honest, I would ultimately pass at the chance. I might well enjoy a fascinating few hours or maybe even days in the midst of a full-court binge with one of the most notorious addicts that ever lived. But just as easily as I can imagine the amazing stories I would have to tell of my adventures with Keith Richards, I can see myself at a bar in some hell hole telling those stories to no one in particular, those two or three days long past. Unlike my dream relapse with Keith Richards, that seems a likely possibility.

Update: While doing a search for quotes of Keith Richards, I came across this brief piece where Keith Richards warns Amy Winehouse of the danger of drug abuse and its impact on her career. Good advice from the man who said ““It’s an addiction, … and addiction is something I should know something about.”

About ten days ago I found Winston acting like he was trying to cough up a hairball. After a final loud hack, he settled back onto his bed. Then he went through the process again. Afterwards his breathing was very shallow and strained, but eventually he dozed off again. Monday morning he started coughing again and this time he went through the cycle a few times but it passed. His breathing remained a little shallow. I called the vet.

Winston has had a heart murmur for a few years now but he didn’t seem to be bothered much by it. Hell, he was blind in one eye and had bad sight in the other, he couldn’t hear a thing, and occasionally he seemed to lose track of where he was. He increasingly ran into things, but on the whole remained quite independent and mobile. Considering he was sixteen he was doing pretty well. There were increasing signs of decline though. Rather than standing at the door and barking when he was ready to be let in or out, he would lie on his stomach and bark. He jumped onto and off of things less and slept more and more of the day away. But he was still Winston.

Dr. Karen came and said that he was having trouble breathing and that it was probably his heart. She thought there was fluid in his lungs obstructing his breathing (if it wasn’t a tumor) and she prescribed medication to absorb the fluid. I was to double the dose if he hadn’t improved in the morning. His cough persisted the next day and his breathing continued to be labored. I doubled his dose and called Karen to let her know. We decided to take Winston to the animal hospital for x-rays and possibly an injection to help with the fluid, and made an appointment at the animal hospital for their earliest opening, the next morning. There was talk about what signs might indicate that it was time to intervene, but generally the situation seemed hopeful.

Winston was one of those good things that happen when you aren’t expecting it. I had talked about wanting a lap dog for months and one day I came home to him. My girlfriend caught me completely off guard with her present. His left eye had a nasty cataract and he possessed a pronounced overbite, which made him a little funny looking up-close, particularly in later years. But he made up for it with an endearing, irascible charm. I was taken with him immediately.

Winston was a ladies’ man. I think he liked me well enough due to frequent feedings and walks, but in mixed company he went right to the women. Needless to say, women loved Winston. He was a fiercely independent dog and outspoken about his needs. I rarely wondered what Winston wanted. While he got along very well with all animals, it was also clear he was more or less tolerating them and didn’t mind gruffly putting them in their place if needed.

Winston went through a phase where he was very determined to get out of the backyard. He found a couple of places where it was easy to dig and he burrowed his way out. I only became aware of this when I heard him barking with his “let me out” bark. I knew I had put him outside and I started to go look for him, confused. As I passed the front door I heard him bark from the front porch.

I opened the door and he scampered in. I was perplexed. This happened a few more times over a couple of weeks. I mentioned this to my neighbor, J.D. and he started laughing.

“You know what he’s doing dontcha?” I didn’t have any idea and said so.

J. D. laughed again. “He’s digging out under the fence so he can go to sleep on the other side. We seen him digging the other day and I went around to the other side and he was just laying there in the grass happy as all get out. I never saw anybody in such a hurry to not go anywhere.”

He was digging out of one side of the fence so he could nap on the other. When he was ready, he came to the door and barked so I could let him back in. I’m sure he had his reasons for not wanting to nap in the yard, but I knew better than to figure it out. Just as inexplicably, one day he stopped digging and started napping on the back deck. Winston always had his reasons for what he wanted, though they usually remained a mystery.

His last night was a little difficult and he was increasingly restless and uncomfortable. He spent the night upstairs dozing fitfully and finally passed around 5:30 am. Helen and I sat together for sometime sharing our favorite stories about Winston and trying to wrap our heads around the idea that he wouldn’t be coming to door to greet us anymore.

I’m still not entirely reconciled with this.

On something of an impulse I ordered “Living Out Loud” by Keri Smith. I have also been making a point of reading through her blog archives to get a better sense of where she is coming from. The more I read, the more I like her approach to art and creativity.

In her book I quickly came across an illustration called 10 (small) Ways to Shake Things Up. Panel 7 is captioned View Your World from Upside-down (which is actually written upside-down). The reminded me of the many times I spent turned over so I could see the world the wasn’t being used. That was how I used to think of it. What came to me today about this is looking at everything upside literally changes your perspective and forces you see things differently. I’ve decided if I have four or five more little flashes like this while reading the rest of the book, my money was extremely well spent.

Reading her journal the Wish Jar, I came across a recent post about uniforms. She wasn’t speaking of actually uniforms but rather of utilitarian ways of dressing.

about a year ago I started writing notes on what constitutes my Uniform.

I prefer multipurpose items. (works in the city or the woods)

they must be very durable and last for several years.

they must be comfortable.

I must be able to perform any task in it, (hiking, biking, walking, etc.)

must be made out of natural fibers.

it must travel well, (look good wrinkled)

I have heard of artists who adopt and particular manner of dressing. O’Keefe famously wore only black or white clothing. The reasons vary of course. This particular post caught my attention because I have recently formalized a process that began unconsciously three or four years ago. I began wearing cargo pants almost exclusively about three years ago. They are comfortable and extremely durable and have lots of pockets which alone is enough to recommend them. Whether I’m working in the studio, the garden or just lying around, I have not found anything as comfortable or versatile for daily wear.

Sometime last year I went shopping for clothes and was going a little crazy trying to find some good work cloths. After an hour or so trying to find the “right” shirts, I decided to just go for simplicity and comfort. So I bought six pairs of pants and six shirts, three black and three off-white of each. That has been my work “uniform” since. I now have six slacks either black or beige and about ten shirts either black, brown or beige. They are all the same brand and I buy them at the end of the season when they are 50 or 60 percent off.

The final piece was to clear out the closet and my drawers which I did in the last week. I have about fifty percent of the clothing I had before I started. I kept a few pieces I couldn’t part with but I did dump everything I hadn’t worn in a year.

This might not sound like a big deal but I have found this to be fairly liberating. I don’t spend any time thinking about how I might dress and whatever I put on is going to be perfect for what I’m doing. It doesn’t get easier. Form does indeed follow function.

I not sure if anyone should be surprised that I was asked for pictures of the injury to my thumb. But I did get requests and someone at work thought it was cool enough that they took a picture on their cell phone when I went back to work. The original post has been updated with a picture. Right now I am considering ideas for a tatoo for the thumb. My favorite is a dotted line with the works CUT ABOVE LINE. Please share your ideas if you have them and send them along to my blog name at comcast dot net.

tsm

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