mandatory end-of-year business

let's face it folks, 2k5 was a year of misery saved only by album-after-album of booty-shaking pumped religiously through decimated ipod earphones. so here we go, it's the cold cowboy's top ten albums of 2005, whose slogan in time immemorial shall inevitably be "well, at least we got some good songs out of it.":

10. caribou – the milk of human kindness

well-crafted but weird crap for the most part, which is reason enough for me. first line on first song ('yeti'): "his greasy fingers strung together and stretching cross the sky..." like some kind of modern day shakespeare!

9. calexico/iron & wine - in the reins

8. bright eyes – i’m wide awake it’s morning

in the past i mostly couldn't stand conor oberst's wimpy-but-clever ramblings but i hold no grudges. naturally it has its far-too-emo moments... but she's a keeper.

7. new pornographers - twin cinema

it still pales in comparison to front dude a.c. newman's solo album of last year (the slow wonder'), but with some notable exceptions (see 'bones of an idol') this is even better than their first album. i think neko case is the weak link but on the albums i hesitate to admit that i like the dude from 'destroyer', arguably one of the most terrible bands i've ever seen live.

6. stephen malkmus - face the truth

speaking of terrible shows: pavement's "last show ever" at bogart's in cincinnati ranks right up there. dudes were drunk and sloppy and the "second drummer" stopped playing towards the beginning of the set in order to scream out of key, submerging malkmus's equally slurred lyrics in a sea of poop-slop. i don't know what happened, but somehow malkmus put out an album that totally rules after several that royally blow.

5. sufjan stevens - illinois

4. clap your hands say yeah - s/t

some slightly irritating a-hole mimicks david byrne with sexy results. it'd be a lot more awesome if it didn't have all the hipster buzz. but it's still awesome. you have to dance.

3. go team! – thunder lightning strike

in a year of booty-shaking, this takes the big ass cake. how can you not groove to this shit? there are only two ways: 1. you are having a stroke, 2. you are 200 years old. even zombies have to party when this record starts playing in the graveyard.

2.wolf parade - apologies to the queen mary

as mayor of rockachussetts, i hereby declare this record to be... awesome.

1. animal collective – feels

can't. stop. listening.

"just pizza" pt. 1

we woke at dawn. no clothes, no beds. no streets. no house, no telephones. just the three of us screaming at the molten sky above where a burnt orange canopy had settled and through which pierced only sparse bellicose rays which dotted the sloppy, scarlet landscape below. the unspeakable heat parched our throats and bore through our tender eyelids. we cursed the heavens, damning whatever cruel creator stole us from our precious earth and led us to this snakebit place until there was naught to do but lift ourselves from the spongy ground and carry on.

the three of us: carlos de los gatos, nicorette lewis, and i, vigo van der lapp, rose to our feet and scooped the warm, red soil beneath us to cover such body parts as made us comfortable, for we were hardly friends. we had met the night before at that strange party at dave's house. something there had gone so horribly wrong, but what...?

i fashioned a toga from the soil and carlos adorned some crude, chunky briefs. nicorette crafted a makeshift bikini. the madness of this place and the heat so tortured our being that each of us cried out in pain as we trudged frantically towards what destination we knew not.

it was hot, so hot. jets of steam burst suddenly through unseen bedrock holes at random intervals, searing our already sun-charred flesh, clearly not intended for climates so treacherous. the yellow-orange ozone above us, while blocking out direct rays, seemed only to magnify the sun's heat. great, foreign crags of such radiant colors - emerald greens, deep browns, bright reds and dark mahoganies - towered above us like violent, twisted everests, jutting through the caustic atmosphere above.

only this: it smelled delicious.

[to be continued!]

January 2, Y2K.

it's Y2K and we're at the rondezvous point awaiting the sentinels who
bear the flask of the millennium from which all must drink the blood
of the oxen. Our clothes have vanished and been replaced by togas made of donkey-cloth. This truly is the apolcalypse.

Earlier tonight in this den of beasts a goat approached me and
declared himself sovereign ruler of my soul. I am afraid. The insane
jugglers have arrived, preaching their dark prophecies and spinning
looms of the deepest blue. I fear a long winter.

In the night, three pipers passed our wayside camp, piping solemn,
greasy melodies that chilled our skin and made us hungry for blood.
The eyes of my compatriots now scream for my flesh-- but I shall not
be the first to dance to the rhythm of the twilight monks who erect
their monoliths in cryptic patterns about our camp.

DC: where innocence goes to die

in more ways than one.

Does your mayor crowdsurf?

if you answered "yes", congratulations! you live in minneapolis.

congress: who killed tupac?

H.R. 4210: "To provide for the expeditious disclosure of records relevant to the life and death of Tupac Amaru Shakur." a bill introduced in the house sponsored by rep. cynthia mckinney (D-GA).

update: at 22 pages long, this bill is a marvel you must behold for yourself:

Sense of Congress- It is the sense of the Congress that--

(1) the Attorney General should assist the Archivist in good faith to unseal any records that the Archivist determines to be relevant and held under seal by a court or under the injunction of secrecy of a grand jury;

(2) the Secretary of State should contact any other foreign government that may hold information relevant to the life and death of Tupac Amaru Shakur to seek the disclosure of such information, and report on progress on these matters to the Archivist in a timely fashion; and

(3) all Executive agencies should cooperate in full with the Archivist to seek the disclosure of all information relevant to the life and death of Tupac Amaru Shakur, consistent with the public interest.

call your congressman!

is my office director a four-year-old in a forty-five year-old's body a la tom hanks in big?

today we examine that pressing metaphysical question on everyone's mind: is my office director a four-year-old in a forty-five-year-old's body a la Tom Hanks in 20th Century Fox's 1988 classic, "Big" ?

let us begin with a disclaimer. i have no evidence to suggest that she has a) ever lived in or around new york's five boroughs, b) visited coney island amusement park*, or c) inserted the necessary exact change into the correct slot of Zoltar's wish-granting machine and stated her wish accordingly, thereby prompting the granting of her wish within a 12 hour period to be decided by Zoltar alone. in her defense, she was born in alabama, far from new york city, and now resides in the district of columbia. best i can tell, her idea of fun is two-fold, neither of which involves amusement parks or genie-bots: 1. leaving work daily for two hours for the express purpose of watching her 2:00pm soap opera, and 2. making my job as bone-crunchingly maddening as humanly possible --though to her credit, she executes both of these with the finesse of a well-oiled serengeti gazelle. further proof that she has not received favors from Zoltar is evidenced by her technological comprehension, which is roughly akin to that of australopithecus robustus. having said that, is my office director a four-year-old in a forty-five-year-old's body a la Tom Hanks in 20th Century Fox's 1988 classic, "Big" ? Let the grand jury convene--i present the following evidence:

1. Do four-year-olds engage in baby talk?:
Yes, on occasion.

Do forty-year-olds engage in baby talk?:
No, except perhaps during intercourse or when mocking a enemy.

My office director speaks in baby talk several times daily, often in meetings with business and industry representatives, and with an upper register heretofore achieved by mariah carey only.

2. Do forty-year-olds drop all pending business when olfactory nerves sense the nearby presence of edible sustinence?:
Only starving ones, or ones training for competitive eating competitions.

Do four-year-olds drop all pending business when olfactory nerves sense the nearby presence of edible sustinence?:
"Mommy. Ice cream! Now!"

My office director once cancelled a meeting because she smelled a coworker's hot porkchop lunch. she is convincingly overweight and is clearly in no immediate risk of starvation. Though i would fully endorse such a career change, to my knowledge she does not eat competitively in any organized way.

3. Do four-year-olds have a defined sense of shame?
I once saw a smiling four-year-old kid run screaming naked from the girl's restroom, dirty diaper in hand, and plunge into the country club pool in clear and immediate view of hundreds of innocent bystanders. Shameless.

Do forty-year-olds have sense of shame?
Except for Michael Jackson, yes.

My office director has no sense of shame whatsoever. Every conscious thought is public knowledge. In a staff meeting following the departure of our ex-boss, she announced to us all "I don't care what you do. I want that TITLE and I want that MONEY!" At least twice daily, almost always during meetings, she emits the most bone-chilling, phlegm-encrusted, snort/hack heard by man, producing without fail nausea of varying degrees in all who have the terrible luck to hear. This is followed by a baby-talk "'scuse me!" and accompanying giggle. She eats with both hands. She eats everything. All things.

more news as it develops.

*last known whereabouts of Zoltar

on DeLay

the republicans are buried so far inside shit mountain they're cock-deep in the hemorrhoidal lava. the problem, as always, is that democrats are led by a bumbling junior-corps of invertibrate dongs-on-the-take.

despite all the hew-hawing about how similar the two parties are, we have a fundamental difference between the party strucutres - the republicans spent forty years building a massive power base of robust fundraisers, lobbyists, think tanks, and a giant echo chamber starring their very own news network, like one big-ass pyramid full of obsese, rich shit-wads.

during the same time, the democrats let theirs disintegrate and relied on the charisma and wit of whomever happened to be the man of the hour - thus gore and kerry were utterly worthless, even if bill clinton made it work (even the blind sow finds an acorn every once in a while). so the democrats are like one smaller, upside-down pyramid balanced on the backs of whining pricks. it is this frailty that allows for easy application of the 'flip-flopping' charicature. without your fundamental values outlined and backed up by think tank publications and persuasive-if-full-of-shit pundits, what have you got? your pyramid is upside down. you are the whining prick.

thus, whereas a scandal of DeLay's caliber would devastate democrats for a decade, thomas himself is really more of a figurehead that can be replaced. roy blount, his 'temporary' successor, reportedly already holds the reins to the lobbying juggernaut DeLay built. Tom's real contribution was the work he already did laying those myriad machine cogs. if and when he falls, someone else can and will take over. it will certainly hurt them but if they play their cards right, it will have a negligible effect in the long-term.

that is of course unless we can find a democrat with both proverbial testicles firmly connected to a strapping, disease-free vas deferens... still looking!

the good part is it's cascading down upon all of us with all this other shit like some colossal wave of stinking chum - the cronyism that mike brown and harriet miers have exposed, the herculean failure of that bullshit social security plan, the ever more obvious kowtowing to the rich, etc. because sooner or later, even the deaf, dumb and olfactory-deprived get pissed off about sitting in chum all day.

(disclaimer: this entry included excerpts from a letter to candycane sampson)

hait

you know you've had a good week when three of your best friends in the office leave, your favorite bar burns to the ground and your $300 suit gets covered in some asshole's neon green chewing gum...which reminds me,

the phrase "i hate..." has become regrettably abundant among the youths of today, of which i dare count myself a member. while i too am guilty of using it flippantly, like the bulk of my peers i feel it important to differentiate between the definitions of hatred. when used in the aforementioned parlance it might be defined as 'extreme dislike', or a 'feeling of animosity'. even in the most capricious uses of the word, these definitions generally fit. on the other hand, there is the more serious essence of "hatred," for which the english language lacks a fitting definition. one of the better ones i've seen was "a feeling of hostility so strong that it demands action" but obviously that falls far short of satisfactory.

it's easy to hate things in this latter way (pork rinds, the scent of fresh vomit, the ebola virus) but i'm more concerned here with that hate as it pertains to dudes and by that of course i mean people of both genders and any inbetween. this rare and perilous form of hatred is a delicious lotus fruit of unknown destructive power. it is one don succumbed to many years ago and through which i believe his downfall was paved. and though i may have certainly felt extraordinarily strong lesser-hatred in the past, the blossoms of hatred-major have for the first time ever begun to peek from the cold cowboy's carefully-fertilized hate-buds in recent months. though thus far i have managed to keep its cruel pollen-enrusted stamen from view, the subject of this ire, my coworker "wendy", now perennially tests my hitherto steely resolve.

in the interest of clarity, i propose we differentiate between these "two hates" by renaming the latter, more forceful one "hait" after the legendary dead vulture scum song of the same name.

and so lies the queston: to hait or not to hait?

the saga of dashing don part IX: in come the coppers

yes, yes, i know. for too long have i lain in atrophy while the sands of time pile up below like a great mound of teeming, soul-hungry fireants. but recess has descended and the glimmer of hope that i may have a day or two not spent in the throes of damage control has once again returned. thus:

...don, you see, is not an un-smart man. just a crazy, maniacal one who speaks fluent spanish. he knows, for dale has surely told him, that he is on the ropes in the office. he may also know that we no longer send calls to his voicemail, we take messages. me might further suspect, as is the case, that my coworker sven has been given the task of overriding his voicemail privileges. other than a few items of critical importance to the district, sven won't speak about what he finds and when i stop to think for a moment i realize i don't want to know anyway. the catch is: to fire somebody you have to be able to say you told them so. don will not answer his phones; he surely has call waiting. don will not respond to his personal email account. the boss calls don's parents, who must be over 70 years old. they say something along the lines of "welp, sounds like don!"

the minor bit about the thousands in merchandise on the office account is really not cool, 'specially since it's all public record. so we call the good ol' coppers who admit they can do nothing until we fire the dude. we know he will open no certified mail from the office address so we send it from a coworker's zipcode in maryland. three days later we receive confirmation that it was delivered. the letter says something along the lines of "dear don: here are the items you illegally charged to the offic account...(list)/please return them by the end of the week along with your ID, blackberry and office cell phone so we won't have to bring in the coppers! xoxo, thy now-former boss". well, t'was a bit more formal. i'm lazy.

the next week she gets a giant, unadorned package in the mail from you-know-who with the three laptops, the blackberry, the cell phones, no id, no printer, no fucking $800 worth of ipod + accessories. so we call law enforcement and now it's out of our hands.

what is in our hands is the largest sack of backlog ever wrought. and we spend the next two months sifting through and deconstructing piece-by-piece his monolith of crazy. the man saved everything. i mean this not in any loose or casual sense; he quite literally saved all things. and we quite literally threw out two dumpsters of worthless paper and trinkets and miscellaneous garbage such as mousetraps and an old bottle of rancid vodka stored somewhere underneath government-vouchered taxi cab receipts reading "3am saturday, august 24, 2003" in his desk bowels.

and oh how we danced.

until the new menace emerged; one truly as vile as the first.

and to his credit, don recognized her savagery early on.

from the beginning in fact.

her name:

wendy.

the saga of dashing don part VIII: i swear

so where were we...?

ah, yes. don is in china; the cowboy is the new sys admin and has cracked his emails and shut off his access to the system; an official audit of the system unturns copious abuses of security breaches; don remains unreachable in china.

this actually makes things quite easy on the cowboy and friends during the coup. we need not worry that he will rear his creepy face about the office as we have received confirmation from the hosts of the china delegation that the group will return in two days. during that time complete power is overturned to the cowboy and the new tech contractor juan, who helps the cowboy in meticulously dismantling don's fortress of digital power.

you may recall that every technical contract our office had up until these developments was with one friend or another of don's. our office website is no exception. going back through the records we see that they have been charging us an obscene amount for what is an unnecessarily complicated process of getting anything up on it. i call don's friend dale, who i know from personal experience is crotchbat royalty, (duke or earl?), and ask for a meeting to discuss the contract, etc. we invite juan to take part in the meeting.

were a human face to appear next to every noun in the dictionary, dale's would accompany "slime". i explain the situation - that i am the new sys admin and that juan will be assisting us with maintaining the website, ask about what we really pay dale for. dale is smug as a bastard. the first thing he asks me is "ok, now who are you?" then he asks me my title. after the meeting, during which he insults juan repeatedly with laughable tech-knowledge pissing contests, dale pulls me aside, "can i talk to you?" "yes." "what's happening? is don fired?" "you know i can't discuss that" "don is my friend you know." "yes, i know that. i can't discuss it."

dale leaves in a huff. poor dale! poor, poor dale! may he shed a tear for dear old nepotism!

the boss calls the cowboy. he is asked to please change the locks on the office doors. but of course, therein lies a problem: don is still an employee. we have no way of confirming that don has received any notice of being fired even if we had given him one, which we are unable to do at the present time. i explain that we can't exactly change the locks on someone without having fired them first and that the new contractor cohort juan assures me that the lengths we have taken in the preceeding days will make it unfathomably improbable that don will be able to get back into the system. so long as we all log out of our computers at the end of the night he won't be able to do much other than brute vandalism if he wants to fuck with our shit.

several days pass and we know don is back in the country but have seen neither sign nor scent of him. one morning two days after the homecoming, nadia notices her computer is on. she swears she had shut it off the night before. i call juan who comes in to investigate. juan apologizes; how could i have been so stupid! he seems to say. for don had a back up plan. not only had he given himself network access on all computers, he had also installed himself as a user on each individual computer! logging in as such requires a minor step generally overlooked by the average user, does result in reduced access to network files, but nonetheless can lead him to some. don it seems had come in the night to see what he could do about rectifying the damage done. some things are missing from his desk area, ostensibly belonging to him anyway. some files may have gone missing, ostensibly belonging to the office. juan and i delete the last vestige of his access.

then we set about trying to fire him. not as easy as it seems...

the rise and fall and rise of the cold cowboy

just when you think you've hit rock bottom your boss turns around and gives you an over 50% raise.

this place is truly crazy.

drinks are on the cowboy.

the rise and fall of the cold cowboy

friends,

it is truly a yank crime that i haven't been updating this record more often. over the past weeks my job environment has gone from mere comical ridiculousness to pure, vile insanity constituting a diarrheal elephantine shit-dump on three thousand years of human logic.

sadly, it seems cruelty of this magnitude has raised apathy rather than creativity in our hero. though to his credit he has managed to continue a long and flawless streak of nonsmoking, i am pleased to report that his use of alcohol is on the up-and-up!

brief hiatus...

it's appropriations time here on capitol hill and things are most unbodacious. inbetween vitriolic anti-stem cell research floor speeches by congressmen-cum-preachers, the cold cowboy has been hard at work trying not to murder himself and once and for all stop the pain.

thus: the continuing saga of our pal don will have to resume next week, when recess is in full bloom and the cherubs of apathy shall descend like pubescent testes into the generously roomy scrotums of government.

the saga of dashing don part VII: when all else fails it's china tyme

yes, after a week of don's absence, during appropriations time no less, we deduce that he has left the country on a delegation to china sponsored by what appears to be a chinese business government relations firm. we have a week until he returns.

yes, the due date for fiscal year 2006 appropriations has come and gone and only don and jesus (allegedly) know what (if any) projects we've submitted. the phones are ringing off the hook, i might add, from city and state government officials, other lobbyists and so on who had lobbied our newest ex-pat with funding requests.

by now the four office cell phones purchased for office staff so that they can communicate without funds coming out of their own shallow pockets have gone missing. they have been missing for months in fact: for during my tenure at the front desk don had gradually acquired them all, giving me and only me the knowledge of which he was using that day so that no one could contact him. by the time the crazy train derailed he answered none of them, nor emails sent to his blackberry.

add to all this the timbuktu fiasco, the rampant missing of scheduled meetings, and general creepiness, and we are finally able to convince the MC to take action. her first order? that the cold cowboy become the new systems administrator and cancel all of his access to the server. meanwhile my coworker nadia is to cancel all cell phones, blackberry, and access to the office credit card account.

nadia and i schedule a secret meeting with outside contractors in the cafeteria during business hours, not yet having realized don was weekending in the orient. we strike a deal with them for computer and web site support and cancel our contract with don's pals at war profiteerz, inc. in the middle of the night we bring them into the office and crack his access, giving them administrator status before eliminating don's own access. they spend three hours wading through boobytrap after boobytrap he has planted in the event of such a coup, but are successful. don, of course, does not show up. he is in shanghai. now that i am systems admin, i request an audit of our server. the result is an abyssmal failure of nearly every security and ethical standard measured by the audit. one of the first things we do is change our password - setting it ourselves this time. we also change don's password so he can't login through the VPN client from his laptop(s) or tablet computer(s) at home and/or in china.

and ha-ha-ha, nadia's audit of our finances uncovers the following items purchased on the office account that are unaccounted for: four (4) laptops, one (1) tablet computer, one (1) ipod purchased in 2001 including accessories totalling $800 in value, one (1) industrial office printer valued at well over $1000. in all, several several thousands in hot, steamy merchandise. all hanging out at don's bungalo and/or flying with him in the Middle Kingdom.

meanwhile i have discovered the following: on every workstation, the inbox and sent folders, calendars and contacts in each staff member's outlook has had don added as an owner. this means of course that don has read each letter received and each sent by each staff member for shit-knows-how-long. his own account features everyone's mailbox alongside his own so that he might read them at will. our first clue-in to this trick was the discovery in the fax machine of an already-faxed sheet of paper printed out from outlook with don's mailbox name at the top. the email itself was written from the boss to a staffer in the district office who happens to be one of the most irritating people i have ever met..we'll call him lionel. the text of the email is, generally, as follows:

Lionel-

Three people - Three - came up to me seperately yesterday complaining about your BODY ODOR at the event yesterday. Please, please, please, Lionel. For God's sake take a shower.

-"MC"

don, in his madness, had forgotten to remove the evidence from the fax machine. who really knows to whom he was sending this unauthorized (albeit highly entertaining) document.

i am given access to don's email and network harddrive. there i discover: 1) recent crudely written cover letters and embellished resumes for chief of staff jobs. missing of course is any mention of a reference from the office he works in currently. we all hate this man. 2) a concealed list of all included approps requests, which i immediately distribute to the office. we discover that he has added a paltry number of requested projects and has left out the most important projects at least on issues of concern to the cold cowboy. i am to this day meeting with city officials to apologize for their previous relationship with mister mcnuts.. and for not getting them those millions that would have been a piece of cake had some jackass bothered to fax them over to committee instead of faxing emails about lionel's stinky pits to the FBI or whoeverthefuck. 3) a solitary small-and-creepy black-and-white jpeg of a grimacing, spread-eagle topless woman with comically fake breasts and a black leather garment that could only loosely be considered "underwear" that succeeds only minimally in hiding her pubis from view.

ok, there's more and more. to be continued.

the saga of dashing don part VI: don's marbles go missing

in january of 2005, the cold cowboy is finally promoted to leg. assistant and vacates his front office post for a spot in the back. no more smiley cowboy greeting visitors. no more screaming cowboy shooing away irate larouche youth with lean and hungry looks in their crazy brainwashed eyes. now the slumpin' can begin.

in my new role i am responsible for advising the MC on certain (undisclosed) legislative issues, meetings, writing policy letters and press releases and talking points and speeches and working with the city, state and other groups to secure fed funding.

by now don has clearly lost it. even his love for the pain of others seems to have cruelly subsided. he no longer speaks to his staff, even when spoken to. he arrives in the office around 11 if at all, leaving by 3. he takes all meetings out of the office, to avoid 'eavesdropping' presumably. he has not spoken to the MC in months.
no longer does he even ask for money. this is generally regarded as a good thing by the cowboy and his ilk, since dislike of don has reached previously unheard of levels and willingness to take part in his greedy carnival of crazy has reached an all-time low.

paranoia appears to be the most obvious feature of don's psychosis - the eavesdropping fears have driven him to seclude even the most mundane of lobbyist meetings from the insidious ear of the cheerful new front desk girl (who knows what cruel plan she may have for the trade secrets to be offered don, like a trophy of platinum-and-gold, by the nervous-and-stuttering-lower-east-side-new-york-jewish washington representative of 'americans for acupuncture'?!) the cave of terror grows ever thick and creepy.

in my new role i have allowed myself the luxury of avoiding don's madness. i have quite a bit of work after all - immediately upon taking the new position i am charged with securing federal funding for local district projects matthew lesko-style. this takes up several weeks, meeting and calling with folks in the city to make sure everything adds up and is germane to the bill. finally i'm done and i've talked to the MC and we've set the priorities and allotted the funding appropriately. but when i submit it on the due date i get an immediate call back. why, they ask, have we submitted two requests? and why, they ask, did we simply ignore over $20 million in available funding the first time around?

the answer, of course, is that don secretly sent in his own jolly request for his buddies back in the district, leaving out those projects that might go to those he knows not! and who could conceivably be plotting his doom and are most likely in cahoots with "the fat one", after all, whose feculent lard is by all available calculations some kind of brain wave receptor channeling don-thought to the underground soviet army which even now approaches don's suburban villa in upper marlboro, maryland...

he even went so far as to intercept calls destined for me and tell lies to the committee staff. which leaves the cold cowboy to make up equal and opposite lies to mask the fact that he works with a certifiable lunatic crazy man who nearly cost the city, once all calculations are complete, $22.5 million in project funds. after the cold cowboy saves the day the MC has raked in by far the most funding in the state and is the envy of her peers. one can smell the boggy stench of seethe pumping in billows from the looney cave.

i know i'm a wanted man by now. nevermind that his pals still got their funding (albeit in slightly smaller amounts): nobody treads on don! never more did a word leave don's mouth in my general direction. for the first time i become concerned in a corporeal sense. would don's hysteria stop before physical pain was wrought at the cowboy's expense? i decide some sleuthing is in order.

and timbuktu comes to mind. timbuktu is a program that allows a user on one computer to remotely connect to the desktop of another with full control of the cursor and full access to all files therein. since our systems support contractor (a giant arms manufacturer) operates out of virginia, this allows them to manually fix most problems without coming across the river. every workstation in the office is equipped with timbuktu for this purpose. in case of a problem, tech guy asks for your ip address, you give it to him, a window pops up asking if you'd like to grant them access, and all of a sudden they can control your mouse too. you see what they're doing and when they're done they log off or you kick them off and everything's back to normal.

not knowing the program well, i open 'er up and do some sniffing around. there's an activity log. many of the entries are years old. they aren't in chronological order. i arrange them thusly. i see five entries attributed to the computer named "don". they are marked "control", meaning he did not merely observe my computer, but gained the use of my mouse as well. from the cave, don was snooping around on my harddrive. i further discover that he has set himself as a permanent user to be accepted at his own whim at any given moment in time, without the obligatory accept-or-deny option granted to us when dealing with the war-profiteer tech guys. the latest entry was from the day before at 3:30pm. i was in the office but had gone with the MC for votes on the bill containing our projects. she was in her wheelchair following that accident and i had to accompany her... remember the "you go, girl!" run-in with my former MC? same time.

so i discover how to delete this capability and alert the rest of the staff to his plot - of course he has set himself up on every station in the place -- including the MC's -- and we go through one-by-one to delete them. upon completion we remember that he knows everyone's password anyway, having given them to us upon hiring and denied us the ability to change it, which naturally violates house ethics codes.

and within two days i know that don knows that i know about his little secret and therefore that everyone else knows about the secret including the MC, who as you can imagine is ready to bust some genitals. that's when don disappears for a few days...

...and turns up in china...

brief note on the capitol evacuation

on wednesday, may 13, 2005, as you may have heard, some shit went down on da' hill. it went like this:

the day is busy. wednesday is generally the busiest day of the week since it's one of two full days on which votes occur during your average week. it's also when all of the committee/subcommittee hearings are scheduled. my boss has four such hearings that day and i am her aide for two of them. lots of work. very hectic.

our office is several floors up off the street. there is one lonely window in the legislative assistant portion of the office. it's hot and the window is open as myself and my coworkers are fully absorbed in our 'puters around lunchtime.

some sounds come from outside - nothing out of the ordinary for these parts. police barking a few orders. then some loud crowd sounds. our first instinct: it must be a protest. we return to our work. roughly ten seconds later the bullhorns are brought out. by the police. at this point i lean out the window to look across the street at the capitol building and see a flood of pedestrians running from the capitol building with capitol police, true to form, frantically urging them to "RUN!". no need for keeping the calm here in our nation's capital. this, of course, makes one uneasy. but there's a very intricate post-9/11 annunciator system installed in each office and it hasn't yet gone off. here's how it works:

there are 2 to 3 annunciators in each office. in the event of an emergency, or, more often, a false alarm or drill, an officer at the capitol police command center can speak into one microphone and contact every annunciator within a several mile radius, keeping every staffer informed as to what to do next, even if they've evacuated to the other side of town. each annunciator can be detached from its station and clipped to the belt or put in the pocket when orders are given to evacuate. when it goes off it's a series of high-pitch rapid, abrasive beeps followed by a stern-sounding policeman. usually: "this is an evacuation drill..." etc., with instructions on what to do.

last summer during the reagan funeral, the republican governor of kentucky flew his private jet into restricted washington airspace, forcing one such false alarm evacuation of capitol hill. a friend of mine in the capitol building was forced flailing down the stairs by secret service who were hoisting our rotund speaker of the house away to his tinted motorcade so that the third-in-line for the presidency, an illinois wrestling coach, would be secure should the rest of us die a terrible, painful death. a comforting thought. "make way for the speaker!" these guys yelled, pushing staffers down the stairs who for christ's sake could give a shit less about the damn speaker when they hear the annunciators telling them, literally, "TWO MINUTES TO IMPACT!"

but even then, last summer, nobody but the secret service seemed too frantic. it just didn't seem so urgent, even though the police were taking it as such, and people were joking as we ran down the stairs. in short order the annunciators told us it was a false alarm and we returned to finish the day.

returning to the present week: probably three seconds have passed and by now myself and two coworkers are leaning out the window wondering what the fuck is going on and watching police grow ever more irate with pedestrians and pedestrians growing ever more hysterical. the following takes place over the course of two seconds: a glance across the way reveals another stream of running people pouring out of another of the three house office buildings. still no word on our annunciator. sirens blare and a black suburban motorcade screeches out of the capitol and down independence avenue, nearly mowing down fleeing bystanders: the speaker's motorcade. simultaneously: a jet engine heard overhead.

fuck.

we all run down the stairs, nearly forgetting the annunciator, which goes haywire as we hit the first stair - since every office has two, the whole building lights up with the beeping and echoing policeman: "THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. ALL STAFF MUST EVACUATE THE BUILDING. AERIAL THREAT APPROACHING." the halls are packed with people running already when the annunciator tells us not to forget our biohazard escape hoods, ha-ha-ha. nobody does this. because it's stupid.

on the way down several flights we realize: by the time you hear an engine six floors from the ground, you're pretty much fucked if it's coming for you. still- staffers are being pushed over, police are screaming at them to run faster and down in the street it's a sea of commotion - most of the staffers have been through the business last year and are relatively calm once outside. one tourist in front of me with his wife and kid is about to soil himself with fear: "MOVE! FASTER!" he yells at the giant sea in front of him. cool it, buddy. poor bastard... other tourists are equally frantic - asking while running if this happens often. i tell one of them it happens all the time even though my own heart rate is boomin'. we are being forced south, away from the capitol, down new jersey avenue and south capitol street. by now it becomes clear to those of us with common sense remaining that the jet engine must have been from a fighter jet going to intercept the "aerial threat". everyone has their cell phones out. none of them work. i left mine in the office along with my wallet and everything else i brought with me.

we come to our senses: if anything was coming for us it would have gotten here by now. so we head to the bar, man: every office must designate the official office meeting spot in case of emergency and one particular bar is ours. so that's where we head, to slow down the heart rates with some hard liquor. around the time we sit down at our table someone in the crowd gets through via cell phone to someone who tells them it's two jackasses in a sessna. the all clear is given over the annunciators. by now we have learned it's two dumbshits from pennsylvania on their way to an air show in north carolina who seem to have thought it would be no big deal to fly over downtown washington. they claim to have gotten lost. "oops". those poor bastards must have blew a new asshole when the twin fighter jets came at them head-on and fired warning flares over their wing. holy fuck! they were diverted to frederick maryland and arrested, questioned and released when it was discovered they're simply idiots. an FAA fine is pending apparently.

as for us, we remain for drinks... which are free for the cowboy since he left his wallet in the office.

score.

the saga of dashing don part V: don vs. "the fat one"

ah, donald! how we together longed for the day when wendy, a.k.a. "the fat one" would be fired for her obvious lack of intelligence, for her fourth grade writing level, for her sheer inability to comprehend the legislative process which was her very job, for her bold allegiance to oprah and soap operas and daytime visits to church at the expense of any kind of actual, well, "work."

but dearest, dearest donald! how you singlehandedly destroyed that dream of dreams with your cruel, cruel madness! the obsession with bringing 'the fat one' down has taken its toll on our hero.

see him: it is fall of 2004 and don, the systems administrator, is laughing in his cave. don has spent the last two years sabotaging wendy's computer components in steady, calculated increments. and once again, wendy is slamming her mouse against her desk in futile despair. we must excuse her kind, you see. like an irate small child or frustrated bonobo chimpanzee with no concept of cause and effect, blind flailing seems the best, the only course of action. for wendy is not merely "computer illiterate". wendy is the veteran of roughly seven house technology courses offered to staff but still requires my assistance when "saving a file" or "using word." to use an analogy that may or may not appear on the graduate record examination, computers are to wendy what plate tectonics are to the three-toed sloth.

see don through the wide crack in the bookshelves! how he giggles softly, gleefully. from her start he has limited her server access for fear she would, for instance, write a letter and be able to send it off, attributing the boss's name to a document easily written by a kindergarten spelling bee runner-up. now it is done purely for sport, as a toddler tortures flies.

each computer is in theory protected through the house firewall. but spyware and adware must be eliminated from the rest of the office computers on a weekly basis - not hers. judging from the state of her workstation, i suspect that one of two things has occurred in the past five months: 1. she has become completely and incurably addicted to internet pornography and gambling, with a particular interest in penile enhancement. 2. don has purposefully slowed its operations such that up until recently it ran similar to a damaged commodore 64 - minus the kick ass game cartridges. this week it has all but ceased to serve humanity in any meaningful form. once booted, a pop-up window will display a series of incomprehensible messages. this will repeat every six seconds, so that, unless you are able to close them quickly, which wendy is most certainly not, you are soon buried in an inescapable jungle of them. the CPU is so overridden that no other program can possibly operate with success.

whereas previously she could send crude typo-ridden messages roughly every four minutes, now she is absolutely powerless. her daily routine can be broken down thusly: arrival. far-off grumble and/or malicious sigh from don's cave. turning on of computer. tapping of manicured fingernails on desktop. more tapping. series of ever-more-frantic mouse clicks building to feverish pounding of mouse on desk. repeat.

don laughs; it is one of the few moments when don can be observed in a state of happiness, and for that we as anthropologists are thankful. back in his cave he is playing solitaire and chuckling. smiling.

but the cold cowboy sees nothing to laugh about now. for if the boss has one trait, it's sympathy for those who are wronged by others in positions of power. and this is most certainly an example of that. wendy is a tattle-tale, and will complain to the boss once more. in a few months, she will receive a new computer to replace don's frankenstein model. but wendy shall not be fired. not now, not ever. don has endeared her to the boss despite her clear disregard for knowledge, labor, intellect, the written word, and arguably civilization at large.

wendy exits, defeated. it is nearly two o'clock and time for her soap opera. not but a minute after, don leaves his desk and walks past mine towards the door, smiling still. on his way out, he leans over my desk and with a sparkle in his eye instructs me: "if her fatness returns, call me."

ah, don, sweet don! how the dream has died!

the saga of dashing don part IV: what crazy looks like

it's fall of 2004. the front office takes up about half of the total office space, which is not large. i sit at the front desk near the door and bookcases block the conference area in the front office from the desks of nadia (the scheduler), "wendy" (the legislative director aka 'the fat one'), and of course, good ol' don, who has a seat by the window on my side of the office but who blocks most of it with a looney pyramid of old office furniture pieces. it's quite honestly an insane thing to behold. he began building his den of solitude i'm told when wendy moved in and got the desk across from his.

first he stacked three shelves on his desk (which faced her). that's about three feet or more for a dividing wall. then he put a series of those "inbox/outbox" things on top of the wall for extra seclusion. nothing was ever placed in the boxes, which were wooden, not plastic. the shade was always pulled down most of the way over the window at his desk, and what little light that was let through below was blocked in part by his computer monitor, which he placed on the window sill rather than the desk, and the small pyramid of otherwise useless wooden desk components that were filled with preposterous lobbyist trinkets: a paper clip dispenser from 1998 from an ohio waste management company; a squeezable mini police car from an indiana patrolmen's association, etc. another small bookshelf was brought in to make the avenue to crazyland just a little more difficult to maneuver into.

but from my desk, i can see to don's computer monitor through an obvious hole in the bookshelf perimeter created by the need to access built-in file cabinets on the wall that don and i share. so i can see quite clearly when, after bitching out other staffers for "not doing shit" up front, he proceeds directly to the cave for an hour-long bout of microsoft solitaire.

towards the end of a work day, it's common for don to approach you and ask, in creepy monotone, "so where you buyin'?" implying of course that you are to buy him drinks somewhere. while this may work at first when you're new and don't fully realize the extent to which this man is bonkers, it fails by fall of 2004. when you decline you may be asked "now: where's my money?" which, incidentally, was one of the first things i was asked in my interview and neglected to mention in part I. this is a classic component of the dashing don repetoire. the same deal happens with interns, some of which were in high school, mind you. it goes like this:

don: so where's my money?
victim: what?
don: my payment.
victim: what payment?
don: well i got you this job, didn't i? so where's my money?
victim: ...
don: cash. no checks, no credit cards. cash. where's my cash?

as you can see, this could go on forever. and it would, until he was distracted or otherwise interrupted. it was offensive to be on the receiving end of, but far more creepy to see happen to, for instance, a 16 year old intern in the office with the 2-week girl scouts congressional internship program. granted, not as creepy as the legislative assistant who was fired in fall 2004 for looking at hard core pornography during office hours at a central, visible computer while this intern and others were working (and, frankly, any given hour of any given day)... but creepy.

to get back to the program: it's fall of 2004 and it's election time so the whole office is to fly to the district for about two weeks of campaigning ... and quite a bit of drinking as well. but when nadia asks don when she should schedule his ticket for, he ignores her and leaves the room - a tactic he had always used with wendy but only recently he perfected with the rest of the staff. after similar experiences she decides he's not coming and schedules the rest of us. the campaign is fun - but the boss is pissed as hell that don didn't show. then on election day, mid-day, he shows up for the victory party. he's got a girlfriend out there, see. had flown in earlier we learned after the fact. and in a conversation with the boss quite recently she mentioned he had done the same before - once the boss tried to call him and he wouldn't return her calls all weekend. then she ran into him at the grocery store at home in the district and he looked at her and just nodded and took off without saying anything. just left the store. that apparently happened right around when i got hired in may 2004.

but by election time, don almost never answers her phone calls and ignores her emails. just like he ignores the rest of us unless 1) asking for money 2) asking for free drinks 3) ordering us to get back to work before playing hours of fucking solitaire.

oh, and it's none of this 'spider solitaire' bullshit. it's the old skool, baby. and he has the card style set on the "haunted castle" theme - with the bats. isn't that creepy? that's fucking creepy.

the saga of dashing don part III: "she hates homies"

it's mid-week in the summer of '04 and don has closed the office early after "the fat one" leaves for an alleged doctor's appointment. the rest of the staff knows that it's really time for her soap operas, which she has been caught screening on a downstairs television in the past. this time she has presumably left to view them at home. the next saga will most certainly be devoted to her. she's really not fat, though she does like food. this is neither the time nor the place.

since she's gone she will not be able to tattle on us for leaving early to the boss, who's back in the district. four of us head out to a minor league ballpark in suburban maryland to watch some AA ball - don made plans earlier in the week to go since today is $1 ticket day. my fellow coworkers "sven" and "nadia" take nadia's car, leaving me to travel in don's lexus.

in the car, don leans back in the seat with one arm on the wheel and istens to hip-hop of the most feculent variety. it's one of the radio stations where the dickless d.j. cuts in every few seconds to regale the audience with "oooooh! feel that groove!", "this is my joint!", et al. don is working it - his head is bobbing and moving with a 'soulful' dip from left to right in time with the music. he is totally serious about this and every so often he glares at me as if i should be joining in the lexus dance. it's clear this is meant to intimidate the cracka sitting to his right. i am surprised at my ability to hold in hysterical laughter.

don asks about the old office - he knows most of the staff members that i worked with from his days there, about three years prior to my arrival. he asks about our mutual friend the office manager, whom he calls "mama". mama's fine, i tell him. she's good. he asks about one of the legislative assistants whom he calls "fat boy". fat boy is not remotely fat. i respond that fat boy is the same as usual- gabs it up on the phone, gets the appropriations done, never writes a letter so i wrote them all for him. he nods in approval - always good to have more vindication for ol' don's hatred.

we cycle through the staff members and eventually come to our mutual ex-boss, the MC. like all members, she's nuts; on this we agree. has little connection to humanity, is fully concentrated on the political arena, etc. i ask don why he left - his answer is two-fold:

1. "i hate the bitch"
2. "she's afraid of homies"

i ask for some elaboration on the second point. don says she never really spoke to him directly except on four or five occasions in his seven or eight years of employment there. she asked intermediaries to ask him. she was also upset, he says, that he tended to come in late and stay late. because after hours was when she liked to snoop around her staffers' desks (this is true). she did have a way of skirting around sensitive issues and, true, her midwest district had less than its share of non-white folk. i bought the story, which was later substantiated-in-part in a recent run-in on the floor of the house -- brief digression:

my current employer had been in a car accident and was in a wheelchair. the bill on the floor of the house her first week back was my issue so it was my job to wheel her down and make sure she votes right. so i'm on the floor, just the cowboy and the MCs (staffers are normally not allowed). i'm standing with her after she votes and naturally the MCs come up, one after another, asking what happened. she explains the story a thousand times. finally my old MC comes up (refusing to acknowledge her former employee of nine months i might add) and nervously asks for the story. so my boss lays down the same spiel. and old MC sits there at the end, gears turning but taking a long ass time to produce some product. finally, she settles on this as a closing remark, and keep in mind my boss is black: "well... you go, girl!"

my boss looks back at me and rolls her eyes. amazing.

moral of the chapter is: yes, i buy the "she's afraid of homies" line. but the issue of why he left the office is opened anew several months later when i explain this story to my old legislative director, still in the old MC's office, who doesn't agree. quoth the LD:

"yeah, he would say she's afraid of homies. she would say he's a crook."

the saga of dashing don part II: don's nuts and don's bolts

in may of 2004 my d.c. street cred rises ever-so-slightly as i become a professional staffer, albeit the designated pawn of the rest of the office (provided there aren't interns around). by mid-summer, these are the things we know about don:

1. don is in his low forties. he is mostly bald and shaves what remains of the hair close, as is the fashion.

2. don is a divorce. he hates his ex-wife, "darlene". when she calls i am to put her to voice mail. they have three children. he complains about them constantly.

3. in fact, the only time he doesn't complain, huff, or otherwise bitch and moan is when someone he hates (approximately everyone, aside from three or four buddies) is going through some kind of agony: emotional, physical, any. preferably both. the more misery the better.

4. don is the systems administrator as well as the chief. he apparently helped develop the mail management program our office uses, which has a reputation as being the most difficult-to-use, most error-prone bag of rat parts on capitol hill. when he arrived as chief his first executive decision was to sack the popular program the office used to use and replace it with this monstrosity. luckily he had done the same at my old office, so i was well versed in its ludicrousness.

5. don is neurotic and obsessed with power and uses his systems admin status to that end. we are not allowed to ever change our passwords, which he issues to new staff upon arrival. our permission to do so through the server has been erased. the legislative director (or, as he calls her, "the fat ho" or just "the fat one") has no control over her own computer at all -- interns have more access to the server and mail program.

6. don has a small ring of close friends - equally shady characters, all of whom are paid off in some way or another by big don. one is "quincy", who works for a giant defense contractor that also runs our internal server and mail management server. he is paid directly by our office for his services. another is "ben", a shifty-eyed fellow who does both the congressional and campaign websites for the member of congress, at outrageously inflated prices.

7. don has many electronic toys purchased through the office account. a series of four or so laptops/tablet computers, blackberry, office cell phone, even a 40GB ipod purchased in 2001 when it was even more of a pricey beast. including accessories this racked up an over $800 bill to the office account. don pays nothing!

despite all this, sometimes don can be fun...sort of. when the capitol buildings are frantically evacuated because the republican governor of kentucky "accidentally" flew his private jet into restricted capitol airspace for the reagan funeral, (quoth a nearby capitol policeman: "five minutes to impact! run!") our office avoids the hysterics and goes straight to the bar where we remain for the entirety of the afternoon. trips to the bar are what he calls "staff meetings", an apt description since he rarely speaks with anyone during the day. that's where the seeds of promotion are planted, i'm told.

when the cold cowboy goes to the democratic convention in boston, don meets him there and gives him a floor pass. don isn't going to the convention. don is going to the bar instead. it seems don likes the cold cowboy alright. enough to talk to him in any case, which is more than can be said for the rest of the staff by the fall of 2004, when crazy don turns to totally crazy don - a tale for another chapter.

why this ain't yeehaw.blogspot.com:

it was already taken by youngster tiffany hill: "i wanna talk about ME!"

saga of dashing don part I: the interview

almost exactly one year ago i interviewed for a position with my current employer, a member of congress.

i had been interning in a congresswoman's office for nine months, three of which were unpaid, the remaining six paid only in the loosest sense of the word. my $700 rent comprised well over half of my monthly income. the remaining balance was reserved for nourishment and beer. very few frills.

naturally i had been applying for "real" jobs for quite some time, with remarkably unsexy results. i sent out a veritable old growth forest of resumes and writing samples, cover letters that over time became so refined they would make shakespeare weep with envy. on the hill, as in many fields, what you've done and what you know have a comically minute impact on whether or not you will be hired. who you know and/or how your caboose looks in a skirt seem to play a decidedly larger role. the cold cowboy was failing miserably in both arenas.

i did land a couple of interviews beginning around the six-month mark. the first was with the office of a senior congressman from wisconsin for a staff assistant position (the obligatory entry level capitol hill job). having had little interview experience, i could tell i made a poor impression. but in all fairness the chief of staff who interrogated me was equally unimpressive, with questions so asinine and a mr. rogers voice so smothered in stinky velveeta...well, you get the idea. excerpt:

HE: what would a competitor say was your greatest fault?
ME: ...do you know something i don't know?
HE: answer the question.
ME: probably that i'm monomaniacal. and i murder people too much.

well, it was sort of like that. anyway, the guy had a moustache -- so fuck it.

a couple months later i landed my second interview with a congresswoman from michigan. this time it was for legislative correspondent - slightly more prestigious than staff ass (responsible for handling all constituent correspondence and making sure legislative assistants take care of their letters). i was much more relaxed in the interview but it became clear that i wasn't going to make it pretty early on. having interviewed other people on the hill by now i'd say they selected me for interview thanks to my midwest pedigree, since every democratic applicant is now from massachusetts and/or califuckingfornia.

then: the breakthrough. my office manager finds a staff assistant/legislative correspondent ad for another midwest office and is friends with the chief of staff. i know the same mail management program they use. i now have an absurd amount of experience for a non-permanent employee. i arrive at the interview with a gentleman we shall refer to as don. it went something like this:

He: don.
Me: cold cowboy.
He: the pay is $23,500. you still in?
Me: yeah.
He: you're not afraid of homies are you?*
Me: no.
He: good. the legislative director - don't listen to the ho.
Me: ...
He: if she asks you to do something, just tell her to see me. she's afraid of me.
Me: ...
He: and when it's feedin' time, get out the way. bitch can eat.
Me: um. ok.
He: can you start monday?

against my better judgment i took the job. and in the coming days i shall briefly outline the 12 stupid months that followed, resulting in my ultimate triumph over evil.

viva el cowboy frio!

*don and the boss are black. the cold cowboy is not.

ahoy ladies and gentlehookers

greetings earth creatures. the cold cowboy has embarked on a solo blog mission. destination: great justice.