Just got home from the convergence center for direct action and the media center, which they have appropriately named Transcendence. the whole building. It is quite a brilliant thing that is going on there. too tired to type in what I learned and saw tonight. Big protests and demonstrations tomorrow. all day long. it has the potential to be quite an interesting day.

I walked away from the so-called transcendence media center feeling alive and inspired like I had not in many years. talking to one of the main guys from the orgs and we kind of marveled at the coming together of their hardcore grassroots activism and my more capitalist revolutionary ideas. It could be a good team. A good combination. And it has been so far.

They gave me $200 for the phone lines. That is all they had. after all their other expenses. it will probably cost me about five or six hundred dollars in total, not counting electric and cleanup etc.. I know that, but I don't say anything. They have no idea that I am about to go bankrupt. But I don't mind donating. What they have given to me is so much more profound and meaningful than money. the dots connected tonight. I mean besides the basics which is just that two weeks I could barely walk into that building because of such negative energy because of Cleo and everything. and now the energy in the building is shifting. The building is filled with beautiful shiny happy smart hippie activists. Eating their health food and making their banners and writing spin for the press and media and on their laptops all hooked up wirelessly communicating with media all over the world all night and day. It is a brilliant thing. beautiful.

But even more than that, cause that's my own selfish little thing I get out of having their energy in their shift a major aspect of my life. and that's nice. but deeper than that. tonight I realized that we are there now. we are knee deep in the revolution. This isn't grassroots anymore. This isn't the sixties when the people were just going to be shut down and shut up. this is just me saying this, but I think that the major turning point was in 2000 when at the same time that we were all starting to realize that Bush and the oil companies stole the white house by rigging Florida and through other nefarious acts of deceit, we also saw the WTO protests in Seattle. We saw what we could do, the people. and a lot of us for the first time in our generation saw that there were all these other people out there from our generation who not only knew all this stuff that we didn't but they were brave and smart enough to do something about it. for a bigger cause.

For me that's when things changed. I noticed a measurable shift in my studies and thoughts from matters more personal and more social, less of the heart and spirit and more political. And for the last three years I have just been soaking socio-political thought as much as I possibly can and still stay a productive singer songwriter musician. For me I believe that is where my real strengths are. But the movement for real change has captured me now. and I think it has captured a lot of people. that Seattle event, that violent spectacle was the catalyst I think for a lot of people. we talked about it tonight. for a lot of people just seeing it made them all of a sudden take notice to the word WTO. How many people didn't even know what that meant before those Seattle protests. And then what percentage went and looked it up and checked out what all the fuss was about. It was major awareness raising. And then from there thousands of organizations popped up all the world. It was like overnight. Somehow it became cool and acceptable to be honest about wanting to make the world a better place and not just try to act like you don't care or be all cynical because you think there's nothing you can do about it anyway.

Feeling very happy right now. I think the more honest you get, the more honest of a space you get into, the more happiness you feel bubbling up inside you. 

Today the power and the insanity of the new technological age that we live in really hit home. On an MSN IM meeting with our art director who is currently residing in Chile. He was emailing me posters for an upcoming show and dictating the printing specifics to me through instant message. I had Kinko's on my cell phone and he's on speaker phone sitting on my desk and I'm in this other MSN IM with this girl in Holland and she's asking me to sing her a song over instant message. So I'm typing these lyrics of a song to this girl in Holland and I'm repeating to this guy on the speaker phone from Kinko’s everything that that the art director is typing to me from Chile about the posters. All of sudden I'm like what the hell? Now this really is the technological revolution they promised all those years ago. Oh yea!

Watch TV for even five minutes now (I'm not recommending this except as a very brief socio-political experiment only) and you will soon see that things have slowly shifted in American media since this strange group called the Republicans landed on American soil. Tonight we saw one of those anti-drug commercials that showed a couple consoling their young teenage daughter who just found out she was pregnant. The culprit? You guessed it. Pot. O.k. so we were rolling on the ground laughing. Because you know, just last week they showed us how pot is also responsible for terrorism as well. But seriously, a few minutes later Barbara Walters comes on TV and introduces her next skit. A team of “undercover” ABC reporters, not cops, framed this air force academy cadet who was hosting these group sex orgies with his cadet buddies and posting them to the Internet. They weren't breaking any laws. But they just totally set this guy up two months before he was due to graduate and made him look like a criminal. Why? Who the hell knows why. This is journalism today. All of a sudden sex is a crime. What else are these guys supposed to be doing in their spare time in their early twenties? This country is getting twisted. It feels just like it did in the eighties. 

Sex is a crime. Homosexuality is an abomination. Pot, not alcohol, is responsible for everything wrong in our society. And invading other countries and taking over the world is good. These people are twisted. Hang on. Its going to be an ugly decade.