I think credit and credit cards are an evil evil thing.

Woke up around 6:30 this morning due to a vivid dream of a family member. One that I used to be really close with, like brother and sister, but haven’t actually seen in years. So instead of going back to sleep, I stayed up and wrote down my thoughts, and started the first portion to what looks to be a rather long story. I plan to use it on my MUD. I’ll post it when it’s finished.

Sati and I decided not to go to the Grove today. There was just no desire to go and deal with all of that crap. But now I’m hearing that they may be having an emergency closed witan meeting today anyway. So I might have to go pick up Sati and drive down. Wonderful.

Sometimes I just want to give up on the music thing. I can’t seem to accomplish anything. I’m feeling very defeated right now. I can’t put my thoughts down on paper in a way that I feel speaks to me. I don’t have time to sit down and fine tune my guitar.

I just don’t know if I can do this.

This article on yahoo is about a new billboard they’ve displayed in New York about the cost of the current war on Iraq. Meant to display just as the Republicans were to gather in New York for their annual meeting.

Apparently the cost of the War on Iraq is as follows:

$177 million a day
$7.4 million an hour
$122,820 per minute

Quite interesting if you ask me. Makes me wonder why some people are still so adamant about voting for Bush. Please explain to me….why?

For all of our Olympian fans, I thought this article was neat. It describes the Olympics of Ancient Greece.

The Olympic Games were held every four years from 776 B.C. to A.D. 394, making them the longest-running recurring event in antiquity. What was the secret of the games’ longevity?

It was the sheer spectacle of it. Sports [were] one part of a grand, all-consuming extravaganza. It was first and foremost a religious event, held on the most sacred spot in the ancient world. It had this incredible aura of tradition and sanctity.

Today’s Olympics is a vast, secular event, but it doesn’t have the religious element of the ancient Olympics, where sacrifices and rituals would take up as much time as the sports. And there were all these peripheral things that came with the festival: the artistic happenings, new writers, new painters, new sculptors. There were fire-eaters, palm readers, and prostitutes.

This was the total pagan entertainment package.

Today the Olympics are celebrated for their noble ideals of competition, friendship and culture. Do we find those ideals in the ancient games?

We have a very sentimental attitude toward the ancient games. But this romanticized image with gentlemanly behavior and chivalry was largely devised by Victorian scholars in the 19th century.

Perhaps the most inspiring ancient ideal was the moratorium on war during the games, a sacred truce that allowed travelers to safely get to the games. But the ancient Greeks were not as idealistic as to try to stop all wars. They just didn’t want anything that interfered with the operation of the games. If you wanted to have a war in Sicily, the truce wouldn’t stop you at all.

There were times when the truce fell apart. In 364 B.C. the regular organizers lost control of the games, because they had become involved in politics. To get revenge, they attacked the games’ new organizers in the middle of a wrestling match. They had this pitched battle going on inside the sanctuary, with archers up on the temples.

The fans took it in stride. They stopped watching the wrestling match and instead watched the battle, applauding as if these were opposing teams at a sports match.

What is the origin of the games?

This has been lost in the mist of time. The ancient Greeks had many mythological reasons for why they were held, but no one knows for sure.

The games were dedicated to [the god] Zeus. There were athletic games all over Greece, but because of the sanctity of Zeus, the Olympics quickly became revered. The first games had just a single foot race, which was won by the cook Koroibos.

How did the athletes prepare themselves for the Games?

They had to appear at the [nearby] city of Elis a month before the games. This was the first Olympic village. There, they had to submit to a grueling training regime designed to weed out those who weren’t up to Olympic standards.

While there was no shame in dropping out before the games, athletes who dropped out during the actual games were humiliated. There is a story of one huge wrestler showing up for training. As soon as he took his clothes off, all the other athletes dropped out because they all knew they couldn’t beat this guy.

Were the athletes on any special diets?

Some of the dietary fads in antiquity were probably no more logical than what we see today. The traditional diets were very simple: olives, bread, feta cheese, and a reasonable amount of meat. But one wrestler went on an all-fig diet. Doctors would tell athletes they shouldn’t eat pork that had been raised on certain berries.

There were a lot of performance-enhancing potions floating around. Lizard’s flesh, eaten a certain way, for example, became magic.

Why did the athletes compete in the nude?

The truth is that no one knows. According to one story, it began when a runner lost his loincloth and tripped on it. Everyone took off his loincloth after that. But ancient historians have traced it back to initiation rites—young men walking around naked and sort of entering manhood.

We know how fundamental nudity was to Greek culture. It really appealed to the exhibitionism and the vanity of the Greeks. Only barbarians were afraid to show their bodies. The nude athletes would parade like peacocks up and down the stadium. Poets would write in a shaky hand these wonderful odes to the bodies of the young men, their skin the color of fired clay.

But other cultures, like the Persians and the Egyptians, looked at these Greek men oiling one another down and writhing in the mud, and found it very strange. They believed it promoted sexual degeneracy.

Was homosexuality accepted?

The Greeks would not have understood the word. Sexual acts between two grown men would have been considered entirely shocking. But pederasty was inherent to the Greek gymnasium culture, and you had all these men mentoring pre-pubescent boys. It was socially accepted and considered part of a boy’s education, but it wasn’t discussed openly.

Of course, women did not compete in the Olympics.

That’s right. Married [women] weren’t even allowed into the stands, though young women and virgins were allowed in. Fathers brought their daughters to the games hoping they would get married to one of the champions.

Prostitution was rampant. Women were brought in from all over the Mediterranean. It’s been said that a prostitute could make as much as money in five days during the Olympics as she would in the rest of the year.

But there was a special sporting event for women.

Yes, it was kind of a second string of the festival. The [women’s] games were held at Olympia and dedicated to Zeus’s consort Hera. The young women ran in short tunics with their right breast exposed as an homage to the Amazon warrior women, a race of female super warriors that was believed to have cauterized their right breast so as not to impede their javelin throwing.

In Sparta there were women wrestling. There’s a great story of a Roman senator traveling from afar to see these Spartan women, who were legendarily beautiful and muscular. He got so excited that he jumped in the ring. We don’t have any records of whether he won or lost, but we have to assume that he enjoyed himself.

How popular were the male athletes?

They were as close as you could get to being a demigod in the mortal world. You would gain incredible prestige and wealth from an Olympic victory. You never had to work again.

Officially, the winner was given an olive wreath. But your home city would give you piles of money, honors like front seats at the theater, lifetime pensions, vats of olive oil, maybe even priesthood. Your name would be passed down from generation to generation. You became part of the very fabric of history.

Why did this sports mania take place in Greece and not elsewhere?

For two reasons, I think. First, Greece has this gorgeous environment. It was a land of the great outdoors, with beautiful Mediterranean weather. You could go swimming or hiking in the mountains. You have to have decent weather if you’re going to be running around naked all day.

That converges with this incredible competitiveness that the Greeks have. For whatever reason, the Greeks would just compete about everything. There are hilarious stories of travelers meeting in inns and having eating races. It was inevitable that they would have these formal sporting events.

But sports were just one part of what you’ve called the Woodstock of antiquity. What was it like for the spectators?

To be a spectator at the Olympic Games was an incredibly uncomfortable experience. It makes modern sports fans seem like a pretty flaky bunch. First of all, if you came from Athens, you had to walk 210 miles [340 kilometers] to get to the site.

Olympia is in the middle of nowhere. It’s a beautiful place, very idyllic. But it’s basically a collection of three temples and a running track, with one inn reserved for the wealthy.

The organizers had it pretty easy in ancient times. They only had to chase a few sheep and cattle off the running track and temples. Everyone just turned up and had to look after himself. If you’re rich, you put up a tent and you had servants. But the rank-and-file spectators plunked down anywhere.

In the high summer it was incredibly hot. The two rivers that converge at Olympia dried up. Nobody could wash. There was no drinking water, and people collapsed from heat stroke.

There was no sanitation, so the odors were quite pungent. Once you got into the stadium, there were no seats, only grassy banks. The word stadium comes from the Greek stadion, which means “a place to stand.” But it was an incredible atmosphere with an amazing sense of tradition. People were standing on the very hill where Zeus wrestled his father [according to legend].

How many people showed up?

There were an estimated 40,000 spectators, and probably as many hangers-on, like vendors, writers, artists, prostitutes, and their shepherds.

What about some of the most famous names of the time?

Plato was a great wrestling fan. He showed up at the games incognito and stayed in makeshift barracks. He used to invite people to come and see him in Athens after the games. They would go there and realize he was the most famous man in Greece. Sophocles was a great handball fan.

Almost all Greek intellectuals were sports fans, and the games [were] also a great literary event. Herodotus debuted his famous history at the Olympics.

Did the games make any money?

The local farmers and producers certainly made a lot of money, but not the organizers. They didn’t charge for entrance. They were aristocrats who weren’t in it for the money but for the prestige of organizing the most important events in ancient Greece.

There must have been a lot of boozing.

Yes, you find the first sports bars in ancient Greece. Normally the Greeks didn’t get terribly drunk. But this was like five days of living it up. People didn’t sleep much at all. Students would organize these symposia that turned into drunken orgies.

Despite this debauchery, the Games had a spiritually profound meaning.

The sanctuary of Zeus was the most sacred place in the ancient world. The gods paid as much attention to the sports results as mortals. Athletes offered sacrifices nonstop to the gods, and the gods were even meant to have competed in the Olympics at an early stage.

They didn’t have some of the things that we associate with the games today, like the torch relay.

The torch thing was really devised for the 1936 Nazi games. Hitler was fascinated with the ancient Greek world. He had all these theories that Spartans were this Aryan super race. Carl Diem, a sidekick of his, came up with this idea of carrying the torch from Olympia to Berlin.

But the torch and the opening ceremony transcended those rather sordid origins, and it became this wonderful tradition.

What about the Olympic flame?

Every sanctuary had its eternal flame. As a symbol, fire has been an important part of ancient Greek culture.

What was the opening ceremony like?

It was just as spectacular as it is today, the athletes filing into the temple, where they had to give their oath before a terrifying statue of Zeus wielding these thunderbolts. They had to swear over this bloody slice of boar’s flesh that they would obey the rules of the game and use no unfair means to gain victory.

The judges were concerned that athletes would use performance-enhancing potions. But even more popular was placing curses on your opponents. There are stories of athletes veering off course [or] not being able to make it out of the starting blocks.

Was anyone else moved when the crowd for the male gymnastics boo’ed the score they gave Alexei Nimov? What’s with the judges lately? Are they this pompous on purpose?

Had a lengthy and emotionally stressed Witan (Board) meeting at the Grove this weekend. A lot of feelings hurt, a lot of people possibly leaving, a lot of shit us younger generation have to fix. Not looking forward to the next couple of weeks, I expect many drastic changes.

One of our neighbors went to the ocean this weekend. Along the way on the bay bridge that goes over the chesapeake, she says she saw a baby chick. Not only did she turn around to retrieve the baby chicken, but she took it to the ocean with her, brought it back home, and gave it to us to raise, naming it “Miracle.” So now we have a miracle peep. I’ll have to figure out how to get pictures of it.

I’ve decided to try and save up to buy a 2005 Ford Hybrid. Probably buy it used from someone who wants to sell, but it’s something I’d really like to have. Maybe do some wild paint, jack it up a little, it’ll be nice. It’s amazing how environmentally friendly Ford is trying to be. I’m quite impressed.

Work is going well, I really enjoy it, though it can get hectic at times. I have no plans of looking for anything better anytime soon. This is a job I strongly feel I could make a career out of.

I had to leave early today due to a severe dizzy spell. But I was asked if I wanted to anyway because I stayed late for the boss yesterday. Right now it’s hard to focus on much of anything. I think that’s all I can handle for this entry.

The next guy that says to me “You deserve better,” I think I might actually beat his ass.

I don’t have time, desire, or patience to deal with this kind of crap.

So one of our neighbors decided to host a Neighborhood “Block Party” today. A lot of us have lived here for years, or just moved in, and besides my father, hardly get a chance to talk to one another. There were quite a few people, and lots of which I’ve met for the first time.

It started out slow, but everyone got a chance to sit and talk and enjoy some very yummy food. I made devilled eggs, since my father is known as the “Egg man” to our neighbors.

The weather was whimsical, a very blue sky with a lot of thunder in the distance. You could see a very precise line of thunder clouds that seemed to surrounded us, but never really bothered to rain on us. The moon was a light crescent orange at nightfall, and the temperature was perfect.

I brought my guitar, of course, played for 2 hours straight (my fingers are killing me) because everyone kept asking me to play more. I definitely made some wonderful impressions with people, some of which I believe have some musical contacts.

I was really proud of myself. I started out nervous, but once I got used to it, there was nothing stopping me. I remember how I used to be so nervous playing around people. I was down in Biloxi, Mississippi once, and played for a bunch of navalmen on the Keesler Airforce Base down there, but it was extremely hard to do. Now it’s so easy, and I think I’m really starting to get somewhere with my music. I just need the right contacts, and some decent samples.

I should really look into playing some local places on a regular basis. I think once I get some finances straightened out and get through this summer, I’ll look into it.

Tomorrow night I get my sister for the weekend. Saturday we’re having a family cookout with 2 bushels of steamed crabs (which is all coming out of my pocket, eesh), and Sunday I’m at the Grove the entire day. So needless to say I’m going to be really busy.