The recent tragedy that occurred in Fort Hood, Texas is a devastating example of what I was talking about here. George W. Bush (our former fearless leader) marched our troops into Afghanistan and Iraq to make America a safer place. And many Americans bought it. And many Americans think it was the right thing to do.

Here’s the problem with that. It’s a lie .

The wars in the Middle East have nothing to do with terrorism and the protection of American lives. They do have to do with oil and the desire to control the pot o’ gold.

Meanwhile, the war against terror isn’t really happening. Because if it were, they would be focusing on protecting us at home. They are so focused with fighting for control of oil, that they are neglecting the war on terror. Neglecting the war on terror means American blood is spilled on American soil.

I’m not optimistic or naïve enough to think the war for oil will come to an end in my lifetime. I’m just asking that it be called what it is. By misleading the American people that we are over there fighting a war on terror, we slip into a false sense of security at home.

You want to fight terror? Focus on defense. Notice the warning signs within our own borders. But I don’t expect most of you to get this. You don’t care that 44,000 of your neighbors die each year without health insurance. What’s another dozen or so here and there?

I never really feel like I fit in. I never have. For some reason, wherever I am, I just don’t feel like I belong. (I take that back. The only place I’ve ever felt like I belonged was wandering anonymously through the streets of Paris with my wife. But other than those 2 days, I typically feel like a square peg.) I’m not sure what the problem is. I just have this strange inability to form a bond with my environment.

It goes way back. Through my life, I’ve had very few friends. I just don’t have the social grace necessary to keep a stable of acquaintances in my back pocket. This isn’t because I lack the ability to like people. I actually like quite a few people, and in certain settings will refer to them as friends. But would I help them move? Probably not. Nor would I ask them to help me move. So I guess it all evens out.

Having just an intimate collection of friends and not spending too much time hobnobbing through various social scenes, I am deficient in the ability to fake comfort in crowds. Or more accurately, I don’t do well in crowds of people I know. I function just fine surrounded by strangers. Perhaps this is because the pressure to mingle isn’t there. Perhaps I just do better as a random face in the crowd. I’m not sure.

All of that being said, I have friends that I have not seen in years. Friends from elementary school, high school, and college. Friends that I have not seen in 3, 5, or 25 years. And when we get together, be it over beers in a bar or through e-mail on Facebook or showing up to hear him play drums in front of the City/County Building surrounded by polygamists, we always pick up right where we left off. As if time and distance and life didn’t exist. Those are real friends. They are with you always. And you recognize this in each other when you occupy the same space.

What exactly am I getting at? I don’t know. I guess I’m just feeling nostalgic today.

And I’m wishing there was a way that everybody could see me in the same light as my close friends. Because that person is funny and smart and likable. Because who I am on the outside isn’t necessarily who I really am. I’m not quiet and shy and withdrawn. I’m not. Despite what my third grade teacher would have you believe.

Anyway, just a moment of contemplation. Carry on.

We are cockroaches. None of this matters.

Don’t believe me? See if you can find just one person at the grocery store to move their goddamn cart out of the way when you are trying to get to the milk. Just one.

I hate Utah. Not for the reasons you probably think. I mean, the religious right that dominate the politics of the state and the general attitude of the holier-than-thou faction is extremely annoying but one learns to adjust and live with it. What I can’t seem to get used to, however, is the weather. And lately, it seems, we are given no warning. The typical four seasons that used to make the state somewhat bearable have dwindled to two. Hot and cold. And yesterday we made the switch.

The weather changes, the air turns cold, and my atoms slow to barely an idle. My body moves in slow motion. Life sits frozen, waiting for June.

This is when depression sets in. It’s not anything that a prescription can solve. It’s a depression that results from loss of daylight and restrictions on fresh air. We have battened down the hatches, winterized the yard, and pulled out the winter coats. We’ve abandoned the air conditioner for the heater. We’ve added chili and beef stew to the menu. We’ve done our best to prepare. But a nip of cold on the nose and the sight of bare trees reminds us that we have been wrongly imprisoned by the elements. We are innocent victims of winter. The Judas sun has betrayed us.

Like all winters, I realize it will pass. And I also realize that I have the option of moving to a place with a warmer year-round climate. And believe me, I’m considering it. But for the time being, looking out my window at the steam rising from roofs and a sky as gray as cats, I am stuck in the moment. Sinking in the tar pit. Trudging through the dismal abyss that is the absence of a Utah autumn.

Oh winter, you are a miserable bastard. And I will never forgive you for your tyranny against the sun.

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My opinions of Obama have just stepped off a rollercoaster. Their feet are firmly back on the platform and they are trying to decide if they should climb back on. But after a ride or two, I’ve come to my current position. President Barack Obama is a brilliant man.

And here’s why.

Unlike your typical American, the guy has patience.

So what does this mean? Well, it means that he is able to let a problem ride out its course without making any rash decisions based on emotion. He is able to make the most rational decision because he makes his choices without clouded eyes.

Look back to the election. When it looked like other candidates were going to take off with the votes, he kept his cool and just kept on course. When Hillary came out punching and tried to fluster him, he kept his cool and just kept on course. When McCain looked like he might be gaining ground, he kept his cool and just kept on course. The result, as we all know, was his victory.

The same goes with health care. For the past few months, we’ve seen how emotional the right can become. They’ve been taking over town hall meetings and coming out in droves with stupid signs and ridiculous claims. And what has Obama done? He’s kept his cool while they got it out of their system. Meanwhile, those of us on the left have been screaming at our televisions begging him to do something. We thought all was lost. Here we are today, the emotions have cooled. People have had the opportunity to get the real facts, and it looks like we might be on track for real health care reform. He just knows what he’s doing. Because of this patience, he allows the American people to siphon their emotions through a strainer of rationality. What we have left, is a creamy soup of progress.

The same thing goes for Afghanistan. Right now, people are critical of Obama’s seemingly inability to make a decision. But what he is really doing is letting the emotion drain from the situation so the right decision can be made.

Look at how we got into this mess in the first place. A group of terrorists (mostly from Saudi Arabia) flew a couple of planes into the World Trade Center and killed 2,000 people. We, the American people, wanted blood. We demanded it. And rather than waiting for the dust to settle and emotion to dissipate, George W. Bush, marched our troops into Afghanistan. Being Americans, we wanted instant gratification. We didn’t get Osama bin Laden. So we let emotion back in and demanded action. Bush took us into Iraq, where we were promised an easy victory. We all watched the televised attack on Baghdad and thought we would have our quick revenge. We didn’t. By not thinking through the situation and acting on pure emotion, we’ve been stuck in an 8-year clusterfuck.

America, with George W. Bush as President, was the world’s OJ Simpson. We couldn’t stand the thought of our wife with another man and killed them both. We thought we got away with it for a while, but in the end, just like everybody knows that OJ is guilty, the world watches us with astonishment as we barge into hotel rooms with guns demanding our memorabilia back.

Let me ask this. What if Timothy McVeigh didn’t blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City? What if instead, he drove his Ryder van to the coast, put it aboard a boat, and unloaded in the Persian Gulf. What if he then drove that van to Baghdad and parked it in front of one of their buildings and killed 2,000 Iraqis. Would you agree that Saddam Hussein would have had the right to attack us and kill hundreds of thousands of U.S. civilians in retaliation? I know it’s not the same thing because Al Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq until we got there, but for the purposes of discussion, would Saddam Hussein been in the right?

No. Of course not. But because we like to take rationality out of the equation and only operate from emotion in this country, we think that we have the right to do whatever we want while the rest of the world bows to us.

Unfortunately for us, the self-righteous usually fall.

Fortunately, we now have a President who allows emotion to play itself out before making a decision. It just might be our only hope at survival. This is why people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are up in arms. They make a living feeding off of and into people’s emotions. A President who refuses to do the same is not something they can comprehend.

I guess in the end, time will tell. I just think it’s time for Americans to let go of their demands for instant gratification and learn a thing or two from a man who understands that evolution is a slow, methodical process. Progress has never happened overnight. The fall of Rome might happened overnight. But it sure as hell wasn’t built in a day.

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So they arrested Tarek Mehanna. Congratulations are in order and lives probably saved. But what this mostly serves to illustrate is that we are fighting pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The War on Terror™ isn’t something that you fight with old-school mentality. This guy was from Somalia. Fighting wars against countries isn’t going to have any impact on the reduction of terrorism. So let’s call the wars in the Middle East what they really are. Wars for oil and regional control. And that’s fine. Let’s just call a spade a spade. I mean, if we were going to go to war against governing bodies who have allowed terrorists to reside without any interference, we should go to war against Montana or Kansas or Arizona.

If we are going to fight the War on Terror™, we need to do just like we did with Tarek Mehanna. We need to flush them out of wherever they are. Be it just north of Boston or be it the hills of Afghanistan. What that means is diplomatic relations with these Middle East countries to get them to allow us access to track down the real “evil doers.” Not bombing the shit out of a country. That’s no way to get other countries on your side.

And if you say that we don’t need other countries on our side, I will know that you don’t know what you are talking about.

Terrorists aren’t just hanging out in the streets of Kabul. They are everywhere. With the money we’ve thrown away into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we could have done some incredible things to fortify our own borders and make our own nation a stronger, safer place. These terrorist cells need to be picked off one by one wherever they are in the world. If they know we are going to attack Afghanistan, they will just go to Pakistan. Wait, too late. If they know we will follow them wherever they go, they might actually start to worry.

In other news, the oniomaniac is extremely upset in this current culture. Where else is he/she supposed to buy rat cheese if all the rat cheese stores are closing? The Internet? And be scammed? I think not!

One year ago today, Hollee and I got married in the San Diego County Courthouse right after a middle-aged gay couple and right before a young, hip lesbian couple. We were right where we wanted to be. Happily in love in a gay sandwich. It’s a shame what happened with Prop 8, but that’s another post for another time.

After we got married, we went had the most wonderful meal I’ve ever eaten at George’s at the Cove in La Jolla. We spent the next couple days wandering around San Diego and finished off the trip seeing Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band at SOMA and getting an incredible tarot reading by some lady and a serenade by an armless guitar player at Balboa Park.

A year later, our lives have changed a little. Paige and Ian have come to live with us, along with their disgustingly fat and smelly geriatric dachshund, Milo. We’ve done some remodeling, we’ve been to Europe, we’ve considered moving, and we’ve been on some pretty wild road trips. It’s been a journey unlike anything I could have ever imagined in my youth.

I’m not going to lie and say every day is peaches. We’re both passionate people and when we disagree, we argue with panache. But I will tell you this—and I mean no disrespect to any kind of love that you think you might have or have had or could ever hope to have—our love is not like anything you will ever experience in this lifetime. Unless you are a vampire. I understand that their love unparalleled. I might put our love up against vampire love but I’m not entirely confident that we’d walk away the victors.

Hollee, you are my nemesis, my alter ego, and my best friend. Thank you for letting me come crashing into you life. And thank you for jumping on board and hurtling through space with me. And thank you for showing me that it really is possible for me to love and be loved. You are an amazing person and I am the luckiest man alive.

I’m not sure you can get it unless you have kids of your own. Maybe to a certain extent but certainly not all the way. There’s something about being a parent that tears down your walls as you do your best to build up defenses. You want to protect them and make them happy, all the while, they are killing you with their eyes.

I never knew real pain until I had kids. And the pain doesn’t come from anything they do. It comes from looking into their eyes and seeing their pain. What depresses me the most—what keeps me up at night—is my inability to absorb my kids’ pain. If I could find a way, I would take it. I would take it all. I would carry their pain in my chest and their burdens on my shoulders. If I could find a way to make sure they never experienced anything bad, I would go through life taking it on. I would experience 10,000 times the pain I’ve already endured if they didn’t have to feel it once.

But I can’t. The human condition is suffering and like all that came before them and all that will come after, they are forced to carry their own pain and suffering. Even though I would take it if I could.

It’s not until you have kids that this desire to leave the world in a better place for future generations starts to mean something. The thought of my kids grown with their own families, wondering how they are going to pay the bills or feed their kids makes me crazy. The thought of someone teasing them or one of them falling down and scraping a knee or any of them feeling anything even resembling loneliness is almost too much to bear.

So we do our best. We try to provide. We try to teach lessons. And at night, we lie awake and hope we’re doing enough. At least the parents I know do. Or I think they do. Maybe they don’t.

I guess what it comes down to is how do you protect them while at the same time letting them learn? And did my parents stay up nights worrying about the mental health of me like I do for my kids? It’s hard to say. My family isn’t known for our communication skills in the ways of showing love towards each other. But I give them the benefit of the doubt and think that they did. Because the thought of my kids feeling the same sadness that I’ve felt over my life kills me.

So tonight, for all you parents out there, go give your kids a kiss on the forehead. Even if they are already asleep. And if I can find a way to take on the pain of others, I’ll take your kids’ pain, too. Because nothing makes my stomach turn more than looking into a sad child’s eyes.

Somewhere along the line, the American dream has been molested. And if that weren’t bad enough, it’s also been bastardized and abused to a point beyond recognition.

What do I mean? Don’t worry, I’m about to tell you.

Lately, I’ve heard people worried that Obama and socialism (as if he could actually implement anything resembling socialism here) will destroy the American dream. Certain people close to me have said things to the effect that the American dream equals being able to own as much as you can. To not be restricted to the size of your home. To someday be one of the elite 1 percent.

Well, that’s not the American dream. That’s not why immigrants have flocked here for the past 300 years.

People have come here for centuries in search of the American dream, which isn’t being a rich white man. It’s being able to survive and support your family. It’s having the right to practice religion as you choose and to get a job and make a living for yourself.

This is why people who have fairly high-profile jobs in other countries (such as doctors and lawyers and helicopter pilots) come to America to clean toilets and install roofs and plant trees. They aren’t here because some day they want to have a high-def big screen and have the word JUICY splayed across their asses. They are here to escape oppression and breathe a little. They want a freedom that isn’t afforded in their country.

This is why our ancestors came here and took the land from the Native Americans. To have some religious rights and make an honest living.

Unfortunately, that idea has been warped by greed (I mean even more greed than coming here and claiming this land as our own). And now it’s become necessary for our government to step in. Otherwise, we will eat each other in the name of this new dream. Some of the playing field has to be leveled so that every American has a chance to live the original American dream. The one that’s kept us a united, powerful nation. The new dream destroys the middle class and divides the country into rich and poor. It creates the foundation for collapse.

The real American dream has always been a comfortable middle-class life. With a shrinking middle class, it’s no surprise that the dream has morphed. The problem is that what it has morphed into more resembles a nightmare than a dream. It sets expectations too high. It sets the average person up to fail. And when they do, they end up at health care rallies with guns. And that’s not the American dream I’m willing to kill for.

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This past weekend, Hollee and I hopped in the Element and took off an another semi-impromptu adventure. Our big 1-year anniversary is next weekend, but finding ourselves sans children this weekend, we decided to celebrate a week early. Somehow we decided on Capitol Reef. We thought about Denver and Vegas and a few other places. But for some reason we went with Torrey, Utah. And I’m glad we did.

Torrey is a strange place. It’s nearly deserted and the people aren’t too friendly. They aren’t mean or rude, just not friendly. I don’t think they smile in Torrey. They just do their job and don’t want to engage in small talk. And I guess I can respect that.

Capitol Reef is pretty amazing. Its landscape changes around every turn. One minute you are surrounded by red cliffs jutting up on either side of you. The next, you are in a fertile valley with aspens changing colors and green grass. Go around another bend, you might as well be on the moon.

We took the Burr Trail on Saturday. It starts in Boulder, Utah and takes you on a 75-mile ½-paved, ½-dirt road through the heart of Capital Reef. This backcountry road was amazing, and we only passed a few other cars through the whole drive. Other dirt roads jutted off the main trail, and we found ourselves deep in the desert, where the clean air purifies your lungs and the silence reminds you that you don’t really matter.

On Sunday, we got a tip from one of Hollee’s friends that there were petroglyphs you could walk right up to. They didn’t advertise the trail in an effort to preserve them, but he said if we talked to Scott at the ranger station, he would tell us where to find it. Scott wasn’t there. We asked the lady at the information desk and she took us into a back room where we were informed by another woman that any information pertaining to the whereabouts of this trail were confidential and if we even wanted to go out in search of it, we needed to sign a log with our names, phone number, and where we learned about it. We signed in and thought we’d give it a shot on our own. Then right before we left, the very nice ranger drew an arrow on a map that showed us where the trail was before ushering us out of the building.

So we set off. It was the highlight of the trip. The drive back into the trail was beautiful. The hike up to the petroglyphs was incredible. We wandered into a few slot canyons and wondered what it was like 800 years ago when the Fremont Indians roamed the area. Then we found what we were after. We later learned that these petroglyphs date from 700 to 1200 A.D.

Of course some defacing had occurred. Humans cannot stand to leave something as it is without adding their names to it. What is this power that anything old and beautiful has over most humans. I can’t understand the thought process. “Oh look, thousand-year-old Indian writing. Let’s scribble PIG over the top of them.” Some people had put their names with dates, some going back to the late 1800 and early 1900s. Some girl proclaimed her love for Landon in 1998.

They say that Torrey, Utah is the quietest place on earth. And as we stood there near the petroglyphs, a flock of small birds flew over us. You could hear the woosh in the air like an airplane. I’ve never witnessed anything like it. Then a bald eagle soared over the top of us. It was as if the spirits of the Fremont were letting us know that they were still there. Watching over the sacred site.

It was a great weekend. It’s always great to just stop what you’re doing for a while and get outside and see new places. I get so tired of spending my life traveling from building to building. I’m thinking next summer, I’ll take a week or two to travel through Southern Utah, seeing as much as possible. Anyone interested?