tanned, rusted, and Helen Reddy.

hey, back from a week in nawlins, staying at the French Quarter Suites, which, bizarrely, STILL doesn't have Internet, wired or -less.  mleh.  i have the porno journal started but it needs filling in with details and URL'd pics... probably early next week.  (meanwhile, icon pic is the view from the balcony at Cafe Lafitte in Exile, where i sucked at least two cocks last weekend.)

immediately upon returning to DC i felt the first little tickles of a head cold (zicammed early but it's still settling in); and even on the way (i guess i shoulda just stood in nawlins) i almost passed out in my seat on the plane for no good reason. (well, one possible culprit was the coffee that the friggin Praline Connection served me at MSY--it was decidedly wrong, and the best i could figure was it was really old vintage coffee and had grown some unhealthy-style fungus. otherwise no clue.)

my (and eloquentwthrage's) 90-year-old grandmother broke her hip this morning and is going into surgery now.  meanwhile i have at least 5 days of furious proposally business in store at work, and if i split for NJ to see mi abuelita i don't expect my job to be here when i return.  yikes.

in other news, TSA went through my luggage yesterday without leaving me a note informing me they did so.  is that legal?  oh, who cares what's legal or what "legal" even means.  we're all fucking ants to be swatted by this govt if we get to near their Dew.

also, the asshole taking the boarding passes at the gate ordered me to dump my coffee--the second (and much better-tasting) cup i had purchased, from a different airport concession, and of which i had taken maybe 5 small, still-too-hot sips.  this is presumably either because (a) i was possibly in cahoots with the radical islamic owner of the Jester Express concession that sold me the coffee (since i couldn't possibly have brought it through security with me); or (b) i was planning to use the hot coffee as a weapon (since of course you can't ask the flight attendants for hot coffee on a morning flight).

fuck this goddamn motherfucking bullshit.

More on Southwest Air's theft of my morning coffee.

of course i heard about the liquids thing. well, my carry-on bags didn't contain any liquids or semi-liquids—as ensured by the hired fascist thugs at the security checkpoint. the only place my cup of coffee could have come from was a vendor in the terminal and past the security checkpoint.  the ban on liquids is explicitly about preventing explosives in the form of liquids/semi-liquids from entering a plane; therefore, the only possible way my coffee could have been dangerous was if the in-terminal Jester Express food vendor had willfully sold me explosives in a styrofoam coffee cup.

as usual, it's a case of really, really stupid people (worser even: corporations, the stupidestest people of all) enforcing the letter of some random law or rule and besetting the regular person with inappropriate restrictions/behavior modifications.

my brother tells me more and more cities are passing curfew-type laws that restrict the freedom of movement of US citizens up to the age of 25. i mean, the federal drinking age was bad enough (you're an adult at 18 but...); this is unconscionable. besides artificially inflating the onset of adulthood even further (what's next? raising the age limit on taxation dependency clauses to 30? the age of consent to 23? 17 years of mandatory public schooling? kee-rist!), it's clearly—clearly—an unconstitutional curtailment of the civil liberties of one group of legally responsible adult citizens.

oh, but it's our freedom the fundie muslims hate. yeah, that still plays.