A Strange Mix

As many of you know who frequent this blog, I'm a hardcore Deadhead. Here we are more than ten years past Jerry's death and I listen mostly to the Grateful Dead Channel on Sirius, I can't get away from it to the presumed chagrin of my kids--but my son is learning to enjoy it so The Wheel is turning.

Anyway, I published a post about Bob Weir's 60th birthday and it got some play from the various Dead blogs out there. I always knew there were quite a few Heads such as myself who didn't fall into the leftist mindset. Like the Dead, some of us tend to be contrarians, people whose thinking doesn't quite fit into a category. Generally, we're moderate to liberal on social issues such as abortion, drug laws (shocka!) and religion. But we seem to expand outside the typical moderate paradigm when it comes to national defense, the War on Terror and how we perceived 9/11.

So...I started reading what these cool people wrote and read their comments which tends to give a unique insight when you take into account the topic or non-topic. The interaction between commenters is a blog phenomenon that the media has never really grasped.

This post is meant as a Friday night drunk post (although I've only had a few beers and some wine but the night is young) and is meant solely to give a shout out to the blogs I've described above. So here they are:

First, Knockin on the Golden Door who has a nice way of writing. The man described going to an Applebee's and I read the entire post. Now that's blogging, dude. What really got me was this post on my US Navy, how many Deadheads post about the Navy fighting piracy in East Africa. I love the blog, Mark.

Next I stumbled onto this blog. Chris is a hiker in Alaska via numerous places but NY is home. He, like alot of us old heads is seeing the world a little differently since 9/11. I particularly liked this as it is straight from the heart:

...maybe I'll look for a little opinion by BOTH sides of an issue (gotta see what the looney left is sayin'!) but 95% of what I want is just the cold hard facts without any freakin' editorialized spin. (Unfortunately that's how so many people get their news that makes up their mind about things. Yeah, that's brilliant.)

But when it comes to this blog, it wasn't really my intention for there to be pessimistic rant after pessimistic rant in order to push my ideas on people. Hey, some of that from time to time is okay but this was just my log of hiking & running, music & movies, not too much more than that. And that's how I kinda wanna keep it, for the most part, on the simple and light side. Then yesterday that dillhole from the All The Republicans Are Bad/Liberal News That's Fit To Print NY Times really got me so ticked off that I posted a video of Islamo-fascists cutting the head off of an American citizen. Man, that brought me down, and I am deeply sorry for using that video to illustrate a point, but Republicans and conservative values in the White House is NOT more dangerous than people who want to destroy Israel and allow their extreme brand of Muslim extremism to cover this planet from pole to pole and 360 degrees around the equator. Bush's foreign policy is not the cause of that way of thinking. I don't know how it can be stopped but to ignore it in order to socialize America -- that ain't no answer.

He got it like I did when I realized who we were up against. I don't know if he's Jewish but he gets the gist of just how fanatical these people are. He got pissed off by the Times and it prompted him to post a video of a beheading (been there and done that FWIW). For the record, I'm not Jewish but my wife is and I may tend to take the side of Israel but in my mind, the decison is pretty fucking easy.

I love the way Chris writes, it's an escape and a release. Same for me although I was picked up by AOL and it turned into a paying gig for a year. Keep writing and keep hiking and if you ever make it back to Jersey, I'll buy you a beer or eight. I live in the real part of the state--exit four--and am a Phillies fan, yet I'll treat (except if the Mets are in town that week--priorities you know).

Take a few minutes to read these two essayists and realize exactly what this blogging medium is about. You get to view someone's soul by their writing and how they see things.

On that note, here's a sweet, upbeat He's Gone from April 1972: