Three Minnesota guardsmen were killed just outside of Basra yesterday. Young guys, none of them former clients, but I felt some real unease until I saw the names.

This is the beginning of a dangerous time. Leaving won’t be easy and I’ll feel better after we’re gone. Still, ever since Obama took over each death seems more terrible, more wrong. Before we were losing soldiers because of that mad man Dick Cheney. Now we’re losing them because extricating yourself from a quagmire is a lot harder than getting into one.

These are the saddest deaths, the young men who died most needlessly. Waiting. Waiting to leave so Iraq can fuck itself back up again.

This monument on the mall should be a shit colored bronze statue of Dick Cheney feeding young men into a meat grinder.

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Methland is about an Iowa town. Oelwein, but when I first read the article I thought of Ottumwa instead, a much more likely place to find meth.

Iowa is full of O towns. Osceola, Oskaloosa, Oelwein, Osage, Orange City. All meth towns but, in Iowa, all towns are meth towns.

Meth is a smart drug. It’s not smart to take it, but when you’re on it, you are smarter. Your brain runs faster, things are clearer. Or more complex. It depends on whether your brain is racing forward or getting caught up in rabbit holes spinning and slowing as all the myriad alternatives present themselves arms raised high waiting to be called on by teacher tweaker.

Eventually the forward progress stops altogether and all that’s left is the klangbirding as your mind gets sucked into concentric circles within concentric circles each ending in a klang that sends you back to the tray for another line.

But the literature doesn’t lie. Your first few times on meth you are GodAlmighty and Poland beckons. Once you’ve taken Gdansk, the Soviets look ripe for the taking but by the time you make it to St. Petersburg your teeth start falling out.

Absolutely without a doubt the best shit I’ve ever done. Nick Reding’s book sounds like he understands Iowa. Iowa’s not like Minnesota. Some days I even miss it despite the lack of clubs, good music, and great restaurants. Meth fills that void quite neatly. It’s the official state drug, right alongside the eastern goldfinch, wild rose, oak trees, geodes and bluebunch wheatgrass.

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It wasn’t an Iowan who crashed the Wienermobile.

There are, however, a lot of smashed liquid soap dispensers in Iowa. Shit that intense has no place in a public restroom.

I mean, what the fuck were they thinking? Soap is fat and lye and potassium hydroxide and it can be made from Jews and that’s a WWII thing and we all know what that’s about now don’t we?

Klang.

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Rain, rain, gone away

Browning lawns, the price we pay

For half the precip

Of the usual drip-drip

Call it — here’s a thought! —

“A little,” or “unallot.”

From Friday’s Opinuendo. An odd poem for the coldest July 17th (64°) in Minnesota history, imho.

The Strib’s weather guy is from St. Ansgar, Iowa, just up the road from one of those O towns. I’ll bet he knows about meth.

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I woke up to loud mufflers driving past my bedroom window. Repeatedly. Finally woke up, made some coffee (a little more today, more than yesterday which was more than the day before but with coffee it takes two pots minimum to get anywhere near a klang).

Started reading the papers and found out it’s the Car Craft Summer Nationals at the fairgrounds this weekend.

They’re louder than the Minnesota Hot Rod people. The post office janitor on the ground floor will have his lawn chair out in the parking lot tonight for sure.

But it’s all OK. The piledriver’s been gone for over a month now, traffic’s flowing normally and now that it’s the weekend, it’s kinda quiet around here. Once upon a time I would have put tinfoil over the windows, taken the phone off the hook, cranked up the Yes and a few lines every few hours would have made for a memorable lost weekend.

Now I’m at an age where I should be restoring old cars, but blogging fills that space just as well.

But I miss thinking about Poland.

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It took since January, but I’ve finally attracted as many followers as people followed. One group is Yin, the other Yang, but now that they’re tied again I guess it doesn’t make a difference which is which.

The restaurant started tweeting in May and already has twice as many followers.

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Charles Blow counts up all the Republican klangs from the week gone by.

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Gail Collins on Palin klang and klanged spouses.

Good quiz, btw. I got 5 out of 9, which shows how much attention I pay to my own links.

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They love Sarah Palin in Unalakleet, but just wait until they get the next batch of two-week-old newspapers delivered.

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Dick Cavett on interviewing Richard Burton.

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NYTimes Cronkite klang coverage:

WaPost Cronkite klang coverage.

Walter Cronkite, R.I.P.

I remember him more for  that Prudential sponsored news hour on Sundays than I do the evening news.

But that was yesterday. Today is Nelson Mandela Day. Maybe not South Africa’s greatest leader, but easily the greatest man to ever live there. Nelson Mandela inspired me to get arrested. Walter Cronkite never did that, altho he did encourage me to go from being a war supporter to a draft card burner.

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