(7am) Nice workout. (I have gained ten pounds since starting work. (Boo!))
(5pm) Work was ok, but things have slowed down already and the day went slowly. (I read Council meeting minutes again today.)-(My boss has trouble delegating work. (He seems to prefer working 16-hour days to giving some of it to me.))-(Sooner or later he is going to snap.)
I had a nice chat with Jesse. (It sounds like she is similar to me and avoids commitment to a man.)-(She has chosen fucking everyone though. (She can jump me anytime. (Such a lech!)))
During my chat with Ross at Corky’s the other nite he kept saying it's time for him to make some big changes. (I think he is sort of hoping Carly's dad will go back to supporting her, so he can move on.)
Maybe D O avoids me because of the cigs?
(8pm) Jesse says she now thinks a lot of her depressions are to turn people off and keep them away. (I can relate!) (She is a Pisces. (I read somewhere that is one of the best signs for Libra. (The same article said Aquarians are the worst choice, but most of my lovers in the past and Erica are Aquarians.)))
(9pm) The Council has been talking about Flippers lately. (They are applying for a zoning change so they can switch from a beer license to a liquor license, but little of the discussion is about that. Most of the discussion had to do with shutting it down, which doesn't have anything to do with the issue at hand.) (They represent 25% of the gambling revenue in Missoula and the City gets 15% of that, so I doubt the Council will shut them down and lose that much money.) (At one point there was a big fuss because the owner was connected to organized crime.)-(Now the concern is the gambling and the crime it generates.) (One of the new owners made a mistake by saying they wanted to change their target audience from blue collar to white collar. (Most of the Council members are Democrats and they reacted emotionally to that.))-(One of them also made the mistake of responding to the Council’s attacks by attacking them. (That is a time and place to be diplomatic.) (Again, you have to let the emotional storm pass before you respond.)) (Another interesting comment was that they claimed 50% of their clientele were women. (?) (That would give them the best odds in town.) (When I used to stop in there it was three to ten guys for every woman.) (I wonder if it has changed or if he was just bs'ing?))
One of the long-term projects the City is involved in is cleaning up the riverfront and making it into a yuppie showplace. (Flippers doesn't fit into the image they are trying to create. (Flippers is going to encounter more pressure to move in the future. (Same with Luke’s and some of the other downtown bars.))) (One of the Council’s goals is to clean up litter and other eyesores.) (If the Council gets their way, downtown won't be a fun place to drink anymore, for anyone but the wealthy. (Interesting since most of the Council are Democrats.)) (Like most urban renewal programs, they have torn town low income housing and tried to push the poor out of the area.) (Like much that government does, I am torn. The parks, trails, new facades and other revitalization projects are nice, but the primary beneficiaries are the rich. (The rich see the value of their real estate holdings going up and they get fancy new places to hang out. (Then they start pushing for laws that will sweep the homeless out of the way, so they don't have to look at them.))-(Urban renewal projects of the past few decades are a major contributing factor to the current homeless problems we face now. (They have eliminated a lot of cheap housing!)) (The rationalization for a lot of Democrats is that people shouldn't be living in slums, and, ideologically, I can agree. The reality though is that, without slums, a lot of people are going to be homeless. (I know I would have been homeless a lot longer, if it hadn't been for cheap slum apartments!)))