This post may trigger. On September 28th, 2008, my life changed. That was the day Wyatt killed himself; that was the evening Susan and I found Wyatt’s body on the third floor of our communal house. A year later, the grief has abated somewhat, although there are sharp moments of pain. The anger’s still pretty strong. So is the determination. In 2006, 33,000 people killed themselves in the United States. Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death for adults between the ages of 18 and 65 years in this country. (15 to 24 year olds? Third leading.) Last year the rate of military suicides increased for the fourth year running. More than half of all violent deaths are suicides. ...

Once upon a time, we had a handle on tuberculosis. We had good drugs to fight the disease, we knew how to use them, and when we used them right, the disease was cured. Not only did people stop dying of TB, we were maybe going to be able to stamp the disease out entirely. Good stuff. In the 80s, it turned out that we were probably never going to be able to get rid of TB, because we screwed up. To treat the disease properly, you have to keep treating it even after you feel like you’re all better. This means that if, say, most of the TB treatment centers in New York City close down because it’s a solved problem, the couple of hundred people who still get TB have to trek across two boroughs to get to the sole remaining center and they have to keep on doing this every week even after they feel like they’re not sick any more. ...

As always. Thank you, countries of the world.

I finally coax eMusic into letting me download the bonus tracks from the new Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs. “Marquee Moon” is one of the songs. That’s most of why I wanted them. I play it. For a moment I’m worried that my headphones are broken, as the guitar is isolated in my left ear. Then the rest of the music comes in to the right, echoing through my skull. Two guitars twine back and forth like snakes kissing. It is abbreviated, terse. Every time the chorus occurs, the notes extend out, bridging across austerity with sudden melody. Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd alternate solos… wait. ...

Because at times I grow concerned that common sense is dead on the right side of the aisle, I refer myself to The Next Right. Ruffini and Henke don’t agree with me on all that much, but they’re forthrightly critiquing World Net Daily, birthers, and conspiracy theorists of all stripes. Meanwhile, Little Green Footballs is taking aim at the people who don’t want Obama giving speeches to schoolchildren and calling Michele Bachmann a loon. ...

His story was one of the great US political stories, and his accomplishments were legion. So were his flaws. I think that in the end, the former far outweighed the latter. Biden mourns, in a manner I find tremendously affecting. As does Massachusetts.

“That suggests to me that a tendency for male homosexuals to drift into the darker corners of domination sex is still wired in beneath the modern homophilic construction. It might take actual genetic engineering, of a kind we don’t yet have, to fix that wiring.” He manages to go on for an entire post (original) about how male gay behavior tends towards pederasty and domination, while lesbians are blissfully free of such problems. The evidence boils down to the historical record, which is of course a perfect transcript of human behavior, and “a how-to manual written by homosexual SM practitioners for newbies.” Seriously. The manual said the male homosexual murder rate was 26 times the norm, so that’s where his suggestion above comes from. ...

I’m not entirely sure what I think about the trend of carrying guns to political events. On the one hand, I don’t object to open carry. It’s the old security versus freedom debate, and I try hard to come down on the side of freedom. I’m also pretty sure the Secret Service knows what it’s doing around Obama. I’m edgy because it is not the primary job of the Secret Service to protect, say, liberals. Or Congressmen, for that matter. Emotions are running high at the healthcare town halls, and I don’t trust everyone on either side of the issue to be stable. ...

Rose Madder? Nah, probably not. But spoilers, definitely. Mad Men is back. As the Anglophile in me decrees, everything’s better with Brits. The office politics are going to be sharper and, probably, meaner. And funnier, since we’ve now got a world of misapprehensions and bad cultural assumptions to play with. Since this is Mad Men, we even get that point thrust home with a Don Draper metatextual commentary. Not his only one this episode, either. Consider the implications of his London Fog tag line given that he’s just seen Sal with a half-dressed bellboy. “Limit your exposure.” He’s quick, that Don. Whereas Mad Men is pleasantly slow. It took three seasons for Sal to get even a taste of the sexual release most of the cast has already seen; but it worked. A slow build is good. Good for AMC, as well, for not shying away. ...

I am currently the proud owner of the Twitter accounts SarahPalinUSSR and SarahPalinEU, to offset SarahPalinUS, but I’m not quite sure what I should do with ’em. Any ideas? Although now that I look at it, she seems to have gone back to her old account (original). Darn it.