'Bama buries LSU in upset for bookies nationwide!

Wow, what a performance the Alabama Crimson Tide turned in tonight against its nemesis, No.1-ranked LSU! Must have been a satisfying feeling for the Tide, especially since the defense skunked LSU's vaunted "high-powered" offense. The Tide's defense produced the first shutout in BCS bowl history! And yet, it was predictable! 

Too much pre-game hype was laid on the LSU players and as the clock wound toward this night's battle, and with the national title on the line, it was just too much for the LSU players to handle. At least that's my opinion. Of course, Alabama's teamwork was impeccable (one penalty the whole game – amazing!!!) The defensive play calls were spot-on, and the offensive strategy, though not exactly exciting, was efficient and, for the most part, effective. Well, maybe not so much effective as adequate.  It was a field-goal seminar until late in the fourth quarter, when 'Bama's Trent Richardson ripped a touchdown run out of LSU's lackluster defense's heart to put the final nail in the Louisiana team's coffin.

Congratulation Alabama's Crimson Tide. You earned that title fair and square!

Procrastination is plaguing me these days. I'm facing my last semester on an associate's degree track and I cannot get my brain to engage with the work. I usually love to explore and learn new things, but this past month has been a drag in that department. I'm distracted and feeling somewhat depressed (I recognize the symptoms), though not so much as to cause alarm. But it's bugging me that I'm unable to find the energy or the drive to tackle the studies that I should be focused on, especially since this semester is my last shot at whatever GPA improvement I'd hoped to obtain at the beginning of the semester.
I'm struggling to stay in the here and now, but I"m drifting into the future and the past and it's draining my "juice" to the point of exhaustion!
And when I simply let go, I don't find the center that I'm used to finding blazing directly in front of my in-between eyes.
Foggy, that's the feeling and the perception. Foggy. And I don't like it right now. Any other time, I might enjoy foggy. But it's definitely out of place in this time and space.

Such a shame that we've allowed dipwads like Alan Greenspan to ruin the American economy. And the GOP, shamelessly, is still pushing the notion that deregulation of the stock market and banking interests in this country should be unfettered and unregulated, despite the horrible state of our economy today – a direct result of deregulation and greed on a gargantuan scale. And that greed was fueled by Greenspan and his ilk, the economists who saw an opportunity to make a few billion dollars for themselves, while implementing deregulation to the point of absurdity, allowing crooks, swindlers and outright con men to benefit from the public's gullibility and stupidity in following the crowing Republicans who reveled in their power to push the government over a cliff, along with "we the people."

Macs RULE!

Well, hello Christmas!
We've arrived on the doorstep of the Yuletide season 2010 and time spins ever faster each year.
I hope that you're with someone you love and who loves you. Or at least with a community of people of who care about you. Christmastime can be so depressing if you have to spend it alone. I know. I spent a lonely Christmas/New Year season in an empty house (no furniture – no friends) in Oakland, Calif., one year and it was the pits! So much nicer to have love in my life and someone to share it with!
No doubt!
So best wishes to everyone. And sincere hopes for joy in the coming new year.

Life sometimes can be a huge disappointment. The drab, colorless drudgery of day-to-day living, punching a clock to establish that you're in the race toward the conventional dream of retirement.
Death sometimes can be a boring, uneventful slog through the sameness of nothingness. People making wills and buying grave plots, or signing contracts for burning the corpse to ash, "I'll take that $5,000 urn, the one with the walrus tusk handles and the ruby on top.
Routine and routine and routine, learning to accomplish a thing, only to find that it's not the thing you wanted to learn. Disappointment, disappointment, disappointment.
The hope for a world in which people truly learn to love one another, without requisites or class structures to separate them. That dream of a world where no one goes hungry, or lacks medical care, or struggles to find a safe, comfortable place to lay their heads at night. That dream, it turns out, is not what the human psyche desires.
No, it's flames and chaos and enormous forces ripping worlds apart that sets the human psyche salivating.
What kind of person takes a machete and cuts off the head of another person? What goes on in the mind of a killer whose soul is blacker than pitch? And what kind of world tolerates the constant lies, greed and indifference that seems to be the bulwark of our political systems? Time trickles through a hole in the glass and piles up an indecipherable mass of lost, unattainable grains and we, spectators all, allow our lives to simply wither, dry and blow away. Good-bye youth. Good-bye amazement. Good-bye passion, lust, joy, curiosity, and wonder.
Turbulent, yes. I knew turbulence early on. And savagery, yes, that too!
But nothing prepared me for apathy. The soul-sucking uselessness that apathy delivers to the heart. It's pitiable, to say the least. And I refuse to allow it into my life. I simply refuse to die without a smile in my mind's eye.

I've been told that my mother fell and injured her head earlier today and that she's bleeding into her brain, so she's in the intensive care unit at the hospital. My dear, sweet old mom (she's 92 – that's another thing I learned today, I thought she was 84) is 2,000 miles away and I've no means with which to get to her side.  I'm struggling with a feeling of helplessness now. It sucks!
I'm praying to the invisible man in the sky to "please intervene on her behalf and save her life." I'm praying to the ancient CREATOR to fuel her tanks, repair her arteries and veins and keep her among the living. I'm selfishly asking the OMNIPOTENT ONE to send a kindness her way and relieve any pain or fear she may be experiencing, and lift her up from the yawning throat of death. To save her from THE END.
What else can I do? I wonder.
One of my sisters, the closest to Mom all her life, is by her side, so at least I know she's not alone in that sterile hospital room.
This day comes to all of us one way or another. We get the news, if we're lucky, that a loved one is on the brink of death or suffering from a life-threatening injury and, depending on our psychological and/or spiritual reserves, we manage the rush of emotions and thoughts that begin to roar in our heads.
"Mom, hang in there, OK? Please hang in there and LIVE. Because, no matter how frightening the process of disintegration must be, I think you must be able to understand that you're valued and loved and wanted in this world and that you CAN decide to stay." That's what I'd say were I able to whisper in her ear right now.
It's been a topsy-turvy week! My love's nephew and his wife birthed a six-pound baby girl Saturday, and she's beautiful! Crises have been swirling around our household for several weeks now, so the super-charged event of birth had lifted us all above the sucking vortex of depression and fear that seemed to linger just outside the front door.
One thing after another, and now, this. Gack!
Life and death, the two guaranteed experiences presented us all soon as we suck in that first breath of oxygen. What's on the other side, though, of dying? Oy vey!