1995-2000 (my birthday).

Today is a day; a day I arrived at once a while ago (my mom was there, ask her if it happened the way I don't remember).

Here are some words, most of them real, reminiscing an important six-year stretch of my life and the going-ons, 1995-2000, as these events were on my radar.

Love like a good human. Learn to build a robot. Breathe in, Peace out.
- Joseph

95 THE BENDS, STRETCH DAILY!

Celebrity attorney-ed OJ trial.
Cameras whir; system defile.
Biggest news my brain could recall
since '86 Challenger tragic skyfall.
Wondering what made one deed News and other deeds not.
Through news feed I skimmed; stories hot and ones of human rot.
USA Today swiped off vacated coffee table.
Filled with narratives wicked as Cain did Abel.
Oklahoma City bombing downtown; homegrown rage,
Rwanda and Packwood and Balkans and Million Man March of all age.
Latter an October event to which I unfortunately did not went.
But a sign of hope and love and possibility of making a dent.
The Chemical Brothers, Radiohead, and J. Buckley scored
and Pitt, Leonardo, J. Depp young and abhorred.
By chest-thumping dudes anyway.

96 IF YOU TOLERATE THIS OUR CHILDREN WILL BE NEXT, OR MAYBE NOT.

Mad cow a Denny Crane-ish fear;
Atlanta Olympics, Unabomber in cuffs, no more Chechnya riot gear
Clinton vs. Dole,
Russian FBI mole,
An education's the goal,
Bank account a big hole,
Baby sister born, Fugee love to my soul
Freeway a misnomer when collecting a toll
Classmates smoke a bowl.
Wheaties or oatmeal in my bowl, s'il vous plait
The Preachers of Manic Streets
screaming politics loud; antonym of sheeps' bleats,
fleets of foots I once was, now I swiftly read Keats.

97 OK, SLEEP THE CLOCK AROUND.

An unethical Newt in the House,
Monstrously quiet like a monstrously loud mouse.
A Tiger roars, Clinton a second term soars, Russian prez Boris signs cease-fire for us with force.
Or rather, Chechnya, duh,
Duh duh duh dum, Di dies
Sound of millions of cries;
Spy satellites in the sky for cash and commerce,
Remembering not so much the verse:
love your enemy
with hugs and non-venomy anemone-
like transparency and glasnost
no longer a thing from sea to coast.
Okay, computers now the evolution
of long-coming revolution.
Radio dead,
Head, ahead is the future with un-fired lead, steroidless bread, Grandaddy’s Humanoid Jed.

98 XO, DESERTERS.

Euro coins made,
Four million slayed
in Second Congo War;
a war scale we swore would happen no more.
Clones banned,
Lewinsky’s name canned
Oval Office on sinking wet sand.
Rushdie’s fatwah removed,
but may want to stay off Iranian land.
Iraq nuke inspector get the boot,
Kate get Leonardo Titanic steamy in birthday suit
Nagano Winter gold,
Windows 98 sold
bad blood Kosovo
Big Blue beats Garry, new low.
Chilean Pinochet caught too,
extradited, charged, crimes never paid, judicial process a zoo.
Matthew Shepard’s life stolen, sad but true,
humanity’s soul, makes my heart blue.
Mercury, rev, rev, vroom,
sweep the sadness off the universe with a
giant justice broom,
and a bottomless wastebucket for the bigots and vermin to meet their doom.

99 PLAY, SURRENDER, MAN-MULE.

Gretzky says quits
Menacing Phantom with lightsabers Jar Jar and other odd bits
Musharraf coup d’état,
Mandela au revoir,
Boris says ta-ta.
Vlad the Impaler, Vlad the new leader
Putin in power, not what I call a super good-deeder.
Family Guy starts, SpongeBob begins,
College students plus Napster make more deadly sins.
AOL, dial-up jam-up,
Bill out of a jam, no Dow logjam;
hits ten K, bam! Merci, Ma’am,
I’m still no millionaire,
or thousandaire, just
lover of fresh air, messy hair, Icelandic maidens so fair.
WTO protesters Seattle,
WTF global financiers soulless prattle,
Enron megawatt Nevada re-rerouting sociopathic addle.
Balkans trying for peace,
Columbine shooters easy access to piece,
Yugoslavian treaties hard to long-term lease
when wars pit brother against brother and niece against niece;
not nice.
I am Moby, Melville’s descendant might boast,
a vegan techno-electro-punko geek who the Chemical Brothers might roast,
but a fine album of digital analog smashup, to that a thousand commercials did toast.

00 CHARTSENGRAFS.

Y2K deal, computer coding,
too many numbers loading?
Type of hype we like to gripe
Jobs pitches $30 OSX beta,
Yugoslav Milošević told bye-bye, see ya lata, hata.
Politics hot,
Al and George W. friends?
Sort of, but…not.
First female Prez of Finland
Hillary to Senate, plans with no end;
India at a thousand million,
AOL Time Warner cozy up for a hundred sixty-two billion.
Sydney Olympics in summer,
Elián González custody raid bummer,
Playstation 2 release,
Nintendo plays too with GameCube piece
Bombing of USS Cole,
collective hurt of country’s soul
G.W. selected
Later elected,
court trauma with Gore
Story often a bore
Fifty percent country sore
No liars, no more
International Space Station
first crew; dedicated to investigation
Universal elation,
or earthly happiness of most every nation.
Sophtware won’t save us,
numbers minus and plus
don’t trump;
digital technologies
hubristically rise and inevitably slump;
the abstractions of a good conversation top
the binary dimensions of a
one, zero, or two.
We are the real hero.
Until the robots.
Happy future, universe. I’m still around.