breakfast menu

and we weren't even done talking about the last one.. .

GIVE ME VIOLENT MOVES!

barber: $3 on a $17 haircut to make it an even $20 (cash-only spot). i'll tip $5+ on a good haircut. servers: i don't eat at restaurants that much so when i do i try to tip ~25% contingent on service. half my friends are servers, i know they're not living large. pizza delivery guy: is probably getting a few bucks. i don't tip: baristas: since my coffee is black/drip 98% of the time. pour-over is trendy and extra and overrated, but does take some time and effort, so since i'm already gonna get hit for a $5 cup of coffee i'll tip a dollar to the barista who's probably gonna be out of work in 4 months when their pop-up closes anyway. cable installation guy: it's their job. they probably make about the same i do, and they work for the devil. take-out orders: anyone asking for a tip on takeout can massage my meat

gotta tampon mop ready for this'un actually a tampon really might be a good nib for a homemade.

welcome back pro. i hope a hospital's as bad as it gets for you, and it gets better from here. i couldn't afford a long-term inpatient rehab, so it just wasn't an option. if you can swing it, it seems like it could be interesting. especially if you've tried this a few times. might be more intense; something might stick that hasn't yet. i wondered about the whole "return to society" part, when you have to do a lot of it yourself (or with a support group). my logic was always that i'll need to learn to stay sober in the real world anyways, right? like rehab is lovely but i can't live there forever, you know? that made it easier to go to aa when i was brand new. i stay sober with 12step meetings and decent people around me and a life that has kind of come together even though i'm not the most active participant at times. i paint and take photos and read and write, a lot. it is a good substitute and often gives me things to talk to people about. painting keeps my self-destructive streak at bay too. my old priorities were drinking and sex and other pleasures, which was dumb and expensive, and also too reliant on others. with painting and writing and other creative outlets i'm still out/around other creative types but competing with myself more than anyone else. it's very gratifying to compete with yourself, you always have home court. or something. maybe some of that makes sense. i bike, too. and exercise makes you tired, which is usually not when i wanted a drink. i don't know what "runner's high" is but i feel free-er and more awake when i'm on a bike and afterward, too. anyway. i came to share here that i lost two people to suicide in the last week. one was a crewmate and one was a cousin. my crewmate's death hasn't even hit yet. he was one of the happier people i ever met, a goofball with a big smile who loved graffiti and cracking jokes. i guess there was something behind that smile but i never saw it. friends are saying it's depression, or something, i don't know. it's so unexpected that i guess i still don't really believe it. my cousin committed suicide on saturday, around dinnertime. he had bounced in and out of sobriety for 3-4 years, and was definitely an alcoholic. had burned most bridges in my family; drained his parents' savings and retirement accounts on years of rehabs. just really, really didn't want to stop drinking 'cause sobriety sucked even though drinking hurt worse sometimes. (i'm patching this together from years of relayed phone conversations, especially once i got sober and my mom could watch her nephew and her son fight the same thing.) saturday, he called his mom (my aunt) and told her he loved her and asked her to make sure his dog got taken care of. my reactions have been all over the place, there's a lot to sort through. one thing scaring the shit out of me is that each person has different things in common with me. i get depressed sometimes, i'm an alcoholic, i hate life sometimes, i'm capable of just as much damage as these two, so why am i still alive? is it my program? is it my connections? what did i do to survive where these two didn't? these deaths are an unwelcome reminder of my own story, which almost ended similarly. i woke up in the hospital after my last night drinking with a .43 BAC. i was ruled legally dead. i'll never forget the looks on my parents' faces when i woke up in the ER. i saw those faces again on saturday when we got the phone call about my cousin. the speechless & paralyzing clench of something that's utterly out of your control. this disease (alcoholism and related -isms) kills, and it scars the people around us as we go down. my attention to sobriety/a program keeps me alive and away from something i want but that'll take my life without remorse. sobriety is worth it and i've never been more convinced of the need for it in my life. if you (pro or anyone) want help, i hope you find what you need. rest in peace to D and J.

nope! i mean going places you shouldn't, sometimes by breaking things, to find cool places to paint. totally different. thanks for book recs symbols

DC is suddenly full of chik fil a's now. it's love. wendy's spicy nuggets, though >>>

think i pulled the last one off me for 2015. this year's count: 4

this is the hardest time of the year for many of us. stay up/stay focused.

got receding gums and that shit is skresssfuuuulllllllllllllllll

drinking coffee. i should be packing but i want to put colorschemes together.

most of the graffiti i like sucks when it's compressed down to instagram size. pieces got huge and our photos of them have never been smaller. the world is funny. i am out and about in the real world way more now. when i take photos i put them on flickr. some faves: https://www.flickr.com/photos/12639586@N08/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/beautifulcrimes/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/soulroach/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/129272849@N07

here to confirm that gibbs is great.

serious threats to the united states are homegrown - either lone wolf terrorists (mcveigh, et al) or terror sympathizers who are radicalized online. they act similarly - the challenges in preventing isis attacks are the same as preventing school shootings. it's not illegal (yet?) to say you hate the united states, the president should die, etc. it's not illegal to say "i love isis" (though it's illegal to send them money). it's not illegal to do a lot of things that stop just short of terrorist activity. we also live in a nation that has made it easy to acquire guns in a lot of places, for better or for worse. the 10,000+ gun deaths we experience every year are a side effect of this. for millions of americans, this is a norm. we accept it. and look, the majority of guns reside with men and women (ok, mostly men) who don't use them for harm - a majority of americans who own guns own A LOT, not just one or two, and never kill anyone. i collect things too, i get it. i don't shoot often but i can see why it'd be fun to have a variety of guns to shoot. unfortunately, there are a lot of people who would use this openness to hurt people. and terrorists could easily do this, especially in some states where you can buy guns out of a trunk in a parking lot. if a group like isis employed a white male straw buyer, they could buy guns for months (years?) in a number of states. we haven't figured out how to stop these people. i don't know if we will. even if you're on a fucking terror watch list, you can still buy a weapon (and that's where a background check is required for an arms sale - some states don't even require that). i think the united states has years of bleeding left before we do anything about gun control. we didn't do anything after sandy hook, even though most proposed gun control laws wouldn't have stopped that shooter (who took his mother's guns to an elementary school and gunned down dozens of children). if you're a homegrown terrorist and not even hurting people, i can't imagine federal law enforcement paying all that much attention to you. or the average american. i have a way better chance of someone shooting me to death when i'm out spot-hunting, or in a terror attack on the train to work, than being hurt by you destroying bulldozers at a construction site.

i can't fucking wait for these two. gibbs might be out already. extradite nothing's leaked from this yet, but it's rumored to drop on thanksgiving next week.

this is what you expect it to be, probably abrupt tone change she's unreal stupid good

ginger fuck! i'm reading resumes and making them better.

actual graffiti writers are criminals, largely broke and often flaky and unreliable. you want to appear to Be Down with us, not actually be down with us. trust me, it sucks. like, the condo and rental market is really hot right now, you could pool some investors and buy a property, that might not be a bad option, and you could even tell your wife or kids that. maybe one of them could bring you in for career day. that'd be hype. unless you want to organize a kickstarter-like service for regular people to come together and bail me out of prison when i'm arrested participating in what's left of the culture that you're trying to milk. that would be really fucking down.

fuck this religion, though: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/11/16/church-flying-spaghetti-monster-massachusetts-religion/75862946/ massholes.

an important distinction, one that's more of a scale than a dichotomy, even though i know americans love things in plain black-and-white. there is a bigger resentment towards the west that would likely be there with or without hard-line religion - in cultural differences, alone. (as i see it our own intervention in the middle east is about more than spreading Freedom™ in payloads of thousands of pounds at once - we fail to intervene so definitively in other parts of the world where similar, abject suffering occurs, and where armed intervention would be just as sticky - see darfur, for example.) also a good post. isis benefits from prolonged conflict and suffering, especially when it comes from the west. it has little-nothing to negotiate with other than oil - and the united states has been very busy learning to drill that oil itself, so much so that we are now pushing to reopen exports (!). opec is not a fan of that, and that's why gasoline is $2.11 in my neck of the woods. but i digress. war on the rocks is a really good read for foreign policy-related things. they wrote this last year on countering isis with asymmetric warfare. i know we have current or former servicemembers on here; i'd love your take(s) on this. isis gains reassurement (of the "purity" of their mission) every time one of their own dies in combat, so that really shouldn't be considered the ultimate goal. (i know, i know, anathema. wait.) we don't know how to fight islamic extremism because we keep trying to do it with weapons but that really doesn't do much to disrupt a network with a gossamer-thin physical footprint. i don't know if the united states will ever learn - who else loved that we have another bush calling for another war in the middle east? - but if we're to prevent more of these attacks, it's time to try. these are motivated organizations that know better than to cluster in one destructible place. they recruit and rehearse online. but key to their organizations - what inspires terror around the globe, what keeps people in line in controlled territory - is the (real or perceived) ideological purity of the organization. sharia, etc. once the fighters start to doubt their leadership, or start to perceive isis as the group of armed humans it is - not the group of divinely inspired demigods they leave their home countries to train with - things will change. that saps their motivation more than a drone strike will. and there's no chance the target we hit ends up being, you know, a wedding party. war on the rocks put it better than i did there. this isn't the kind of fight that we win with a big standing army, or faster planes, or heavier bombs, or an f35. it's akin to a cold war, a victory we starve out of isis and their subjects. (some would also say help them rebel - i would not, we just did that and it was an abject failure that led to isis getting more weapons and equipment.) every time we re-stage an armed conflict with these people, we create a potentially bigger problem than we solve; we thread barbed wire down our throat, setting ourselves up for a painful removal that might leave lasting damage. it seems to stun some people, but we can't fight this war with grunts or sheer numbers, we fight it with intelligence. infiltration. confusion. fewer, much smarter people. even in an ideal, fictional scenario - in which we completely dispose of extremist rule via conventional warfare - we leave a power vacuum when we leave. THIS HAPPENS EVERY FUCKING TIME. either there was no local leadership in the first place, or they were killed (with isis, it's the latter). we can't force democracy on people who don't want it, but i think we can encourage it through our own wealth and benevolence. people want to get fed and have access to clean water. we can reward governments who play along with us, so long as we don't A) waste all the money or B) negate goodwill by maiming and killing (and then trying to mop up the mess with condolence payments). i don't think we (the united states, mostly) are smart or forward-thinking enough to pull any of this off. combined with how good war is for certain manufacturers who have hefty lobbying budgets, i see us repeating history under a republican president who sweeps into office on a tide of fear. but at least we'll have cool laser drones to re-gift to american police departments in 5 years. i don't see the united states wanting to yield enough control over the global anti-terrorism fight to make this happen.

good to see you, man. word. great pianist

heeeeeeeeeey guys. where's @massgraff ? richmond rap. y'oughta listen to this, would i ever steer you wrong? no

a guy at my meeting tonight has 15 days, and he shared. at 10 days in, he was between hitting a meeting and going to the bar with a friend for a belated birthday celebration (newly sober dude's birthday). decided on a meeting - wasn't really feeling going out that night, birthday or not. his friend wrapped his car around a tree driving home from the bar that night. the funeral was just the other day.

AIN'T SHIT CHANGED ----- enta da stage full album stream

GOOOOOOD i had forgotten about this