I suck at updating this thing. I try and I try, oh how I try, but in the end I end up waiting months, writing 50 pages that no one wants to read, then falling silent again for another month or so. So I'll give a brief recap of recent days and leave it at that.

Travelling to NoCal this coming weekend. I AM vending at the Sebastopol Celtic Festival after all. Our disinclusion was an oversight. But this is likely to be the last festival we ever do. I've give some thought to just jettisoning the mail order/Internet sales part of the business and just doing festivals, but I haven't reached a decision there.

This'll also be the first such trip that I've made for the festival where I'm not staying with my friend Chris. Enough is enough and he deserves a break. More specifically, his dad deserves a break. He's done a great deal for me, and not gotten much in return, so it's time to visit just to say 'hi' and to take back the stuff they've been kind to keep for me since I moved back to Phoenix.

But it's also gonna be kind of a vacation, with a couple of days' padding on either side of the festival. I need a vacation. Badly.

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On that subject, sorta, had a really, really, really unpleasant weekend. Spent most of the longest 24 hours of my life (4pm Saturday to 4pm Sunday) figuring I was going to be single at the end of it. I shan't discuss details in this forum, but things are generally all better now. In a way, we're closer. But I'm kind of distracted even this week, so if I seem grumpy either in this journal or in person, that's why.

More soon, hopefully in small, digestible chunks. Make it a great day.

I had a mini-epiphany the other day. It's really actually not anything new, but I guess the full force of it hit me the other day and it's kind of a unifying theory. I like unifying theories.

It seems to me like a dominant theme in just about every current in society right now that worries me is fear. Well, fear and fear-mongering. It permeates everything from Paradise Valley's building a park but not calling it a park because they're afraid that would attract homeless people, to the backlash in Canada against gay marriage, to the War on Terrorism(TM), to gated communities.

And I know why it is, too. When you convince people to be afraid of something, you can mobilize them against it. You can control them.

Yeah, I know. Blinding Flash of the Obvious. But how do you counter fear? What's the antidote?

And for g-dsakes, I've been puzzling over this one for years, why are conservative Christians afraid of gay people? And make no mistake (sorry, Dubya, had to steal that phrase back). They are. Very. There's more to it than a simple moral objection or concerns about scripture. I mean, there are various scriptures that forbid eating pork, getting a divorce, wearing a red dress in church, etc., etc., etc. We don't hear much about that stuff.

What are they afraid of?

I refuse to be afraid. I refuse to be afraid of Bush, of the fearmongers, of The Corporation in toto that wants to turn us into mindless worker-drones and consumer units. I refuse to fear even fear itself.

Now I've just got to work on fear of failure. Hrmph.

The new Phoenix Coyotes logo and uniforms.

Nice new arena, though!