Today was an average day.  I woke up, got in the shower, and in the 20 minutes that I was in there, guess how many songs I heard on the radio.  Give up?  Two.  The rest of it was all commercials.  Now if the average pop station plays its main songs up to 100 times per week (do the math, it’s 13 times a day), to jam them deep into your head, how is that I listened to 14 minutes of commercials?  I love music, but I was so fed up with the radio, that I actually contemplated paying the fee for satellite radio.  Then, I went paranoid and thought that they would somehow use my listening choices against me.  Then, I went anarchistic and decided that airwaves wanted to be free, man.  I thought I could set up some sort of pirate radio station and take down the man.  Then, I got distracted by something shiny in the kitchen and lost my train of thought.

I walked to through the kitchen to the living room, and found Fox News on the idiot box.  Usually, Fox is the most unbalanced, right wing, “news” that one can find on American television, but today, the fat, loudmouth “reporter” filling the screen was decrying the DNC’s ridiculous “Free Speech Zones” as razor wired internment camps for free speech.  I found this very surprising, even refreshing.  Fox news promoting free speech?  Was I dreaming?

As I walked away from the TV, I remembered that this was the Democratic National Convention, and of course a right wing “news” source is going to decry any attempts to protest it.  Republicans are going to be the ones in the protest zone, and they’re going to be sealed into the plastic coated, razor wired area with Anarchists and other lunatics.  So, Fox is not against “Free Speech Zones” in general (did you ever hear them point out Bush’s use of free speech zones?), but they are against this particular free speech zone because they’re party will be forced to use it this time.

I started thinking about not only what it means to have a free speech zone, but the sheer audacity of the individual(s) that suggested and built it.  I can’t understand how the idea even got past the suggestion stage without having some major outcry.  Growing up on Rocky fighting the Russians, The Wolverines fighting the Russians, and Rambo fighting the Russians, I for one can’t even comprehend a free speech zone.  When I was a kid if someone told you that you couldn’t say something, you shot back “Oh yea, buddy?  This is America and I can say any godamned thing I want.  If you don’t like it, move to Russia!”  And that was it.  America was for telling people off, and Russia was the place where the secret service would send your family to Siberia for reading the wrong book.  In America we said what we wanted, pissed where we wanted, and protested any place we pleased (until the cops or the goons moved in and cracked some skulls, of course).  We didn’t have “protest zones” or rules of free speech or political correctness.  I was an American child, and I thought that I was free to speak, free to act, and free to play kickball on whatever sewer cap that I could find.  The Russians were the ones that kept information on their people and suppressed them, not us.  Yet every year, more rules are made that favor fewer and fewer people in America, and we don’t seem to know how to stop it.

Then, I started thinking about a giant Free Speech Cage match…

Laaaaaaadiiiiiiiieeeees aaaaaaand Gennnntleeeemeeeeen.  In the anarchists corner, hailing from the city sewers, weighing in at 225 pounds, Butch “The razor” [Naaaamee Wittthhhhhheeelld].  And in the Republican corner, hailing from Hingham, Mass, weighing in with a net worth of $542,000, Thurston “The Director” Piiiiiieeeeerce the thiiiiird…

Then, I saw something shiny in the kitchen and remembered it was time for me to go to work.

Then, for 8 or so hours, I worked.

Then, I stopped working and went home.

Then, I tried to surprise my GF by taking her to the movies, but she didn’t want to go (which was good because I didn’t really want to go, either).

Then, for 20 minutes we just played the “No, what do you want to do?” game.

Finally, I formulated a quick plan, and threw the GF into the car.  I drove us to a sub shop, which, according to the hand-written sign on the counter, was closed for the evening.  Then, I drove to another sub shop which was so closed that there were ladders in the window.  I finally drove to a third that was open, but had an albino lobster and some fishing nets on the wall.  After grabbing couple of subs, we walked down to the beach and sat on the sand.  The breeze had picked up, making the lingering heat of the day much more bearable.

And we sat.  And we ate.  And we watched the surf.  And the tension of finding something to do vanished.  Once we found that we could fully relax, we accumulated a nice crowd of gulls around us waiting for hand outs.  Rule 1: Never feed the gulls before you are finished, because once you start feeding the gulls, you are finished.  Once we got to the point in our sub eating journey that the work outweighed the benefit, we began throwing the bits of leftover food to the gulls, aiming mostly for the weaker ones that got pushed out of the way by the mullet-wearing, jock asshole gulls.  As my GF likes birds almost as much as I like sharks, I was intentionally throwing some of the food waaaay inside, for which I was nervously chastised.

Then, we just walked.  And we laughed.  And we found that running shoes let in water as easily as they do air, and souls let in peace as easily as they do stress.

Posted in #1GF!