confusion

On the 18th I got home and there was a notice from the post office that I had a letter from C███████ at the post office that I had to sign for in order to pick up. Well the post office listed was Columbia Heights, which is not my normal post office but… Anyway, I tried unsuccessfully to find the place on Monday afternoon. Turns out I read the map wrong—Seventh st. turns into Georgia ave, not Seventeenth st. So Wednesday I headed out of work a little early to try again.

By the time I got to the post office at Columbia Heights it was pouring outside. Inside the woman behind the counter told me that they had left the wrong notice, that my package was at the 14th and T st. office. Now this is irritating because I could walk to the 14th and T st. office (that will be important in a sec.) This is by no means the first problem I have had with the post office in DC—packages never being delivered, packages being delivered but never arriving, packages taking days to arrive (i.e. things shipped on the 14th from two hours away arrive on the 30th?)

Anyway, I get back in the truck and pull out of the parking space, roll up to the parking lot exit, look right and left, and start to pull out. And suddenly there is a gray Ford Taurus in front of me. BAM! I took out his front corner panel. This so pisses me off—guy driving in the pouring rain, in a gray car, at high speed down a narrow street—and with no lights! I repeat gray car, in the pouring rain with no lights! Anyway rather than report this to insurance it cost me a couple of hundred dollars. The end result of which is I am very, very broke this month.

I blame this all on the post office! If they could get their shit in order and do stuff right then I would not have even been there!

The media keeps calling the fighting in Iraq a ‘war’ but as the congress has not actually declared ‘war’ on Iraq it’s not officially a war. In fact we have not fought a real war since WWII. Now it’s one thing to go into a country under UN mandate—as in Korea to fight but it is another to go into a foreign country without that mandate and without the congress, the elected representatives of the people, declaring war. I know that it has been stated that this ‘war’ is not with the people of Iraq but with the government, but still, Bush should not have had the power to send our troops in without UN support unless the congress had first declared war. I think the war powers act—which allows the President to get congress approval after the fact should be repealed and the power to send us to war should be given back the congress so that one person cannot make the decision. Lets get back to the way the Founding Fathers wrote it in the Constitution. I know the who is it really war? is academic since war is an adjective here, but to refer to this as ‘The Second Gulf War’ bestows a feeling of officialism on the military action, officialism that is not truly there.

— find yourself
— express yourself
— amuse yourself (just a little offensive…)
— relax!

There is much that I would like to say about the state of the world, but these thoughts mostly come to me as I sit at home in the evening. Without my computer I fail to capture them—I could write them down, but for some reason I don’t. The end result is that by the time I get to work in the morning and have a few minutes to record my thoughts here they have become lost words… elusive shadows that I cannot catch, hovering at the edge of my conciousness.

a declaration –from codejunkie.