Fuck It

I haven't blogged because, frankly, I'm just too damn tired. Not tired as in "fatigued" or in need of a good night's sleep. Not even the kind of tired that can be relieved by the well-deserved vacation we're taking next week. I'm existentially exhausted. It's the kind of tired that even the antics of baby poultry and a great visit with out-of-town guests who bring a big fluffy puppy to play with Pickle for a week can't relieve.

Tired probably isn't the right word for it. I'm demoralized, discouraged, disheartened and downcast. I'm shot down, cast-down, bummed out and blue. My spirits are low, man. I'm forlorn.

I don't see the point in blogging about it, because a) it's not what you folks want to read, and b) there are other bloggers out there doing a much better journalistic and fact-based job of it, but really, I don't see the point in blogging about anything else, either, because the reality is that I'm not feeling funny and that's a fact.

Life in Nowhere continues as it always does, with the usual round of poultry stories, truck stories, landlord stories, work-related stories and upcoming vacation news, but in the five months since Inauguration Day it's been overshadowed by a creeping, cancerous angst.

Whatever else we are here in Nowhere, we're a middle-class gay couple who can't get married. We're in the same middle class that's drowning and disappearing in these economic times, but our little gay slice of the middle class is doubly invisible to the Obama administration we helped elect. Now it appears, according to the DoJ, that keeping People Like Us away from our civil rights and federal marriage recognition and benefits is good for the economy ... although it's not that great for our personal economy. So we hear a lot about ourselves on the news and read about ourselves in our RSS feeds and find ourselves being debated by politicians and pastors and pundits ... and it feels a bit like being a helpless bug pinned to a piece of crap encrusted cardboard. I keep telling Ev that I don't recognize this country anymore. I don't recognize the hate-filled rhetoric being broadcast on TV news shows. And I sure as hell don't recognize the man I held out so much hope for and for whom I wept tears of joy on election night.

Ev says this is the same country I've always lived in, but I was living in the other half of it ... the white heterosexual middle-class half ... for the first 40 years of my life. Now I'm living in the half that actually feels the stick the other half has always been poking someone with.

I had held out a hope during the presidential race last year that We the People could do something positive to turn this country around before it imploded. I thought we were electing someone who meant what he said about equality and civil rights and healthcare reform and transparency in Washington and fierce advocacy, but what really happened is that I got seriously schooled in the realities of politics. Everyone makes campaign promises they have no intention of keeping to get elected. Everyone curries favor and takes campaign contributions from the folks who can least afford to make them and then throws someone under the bus. Everyone lies. Next go-round I'm finding out who the fucking Anarchist Party candidate is and sending them every dime I've got. At least I'll know where they really stand.

I don't know what the country feels like right now to everyone else, but inside my head it feels like we're taking so many hits from both our gay and our middle-class sides and being so completely sold out to corporate bailouts, political pandering, religious extremism and outright bullshit that the only possible outcome is for this nation to collapse under the weight of it's own greed and ugliness, and I'm not so sure that's a bad thing anymore. Sometimes the only way to fix something is to completely dismantle it and start the fuck over.

And would someone please tell me why we spent bazillions of dollars and wasted tens of thousands of lives to go halfway around the world and fight some nebulous religious terrorist regime when we've got our own Christian Taliban right here in the good old USA?

Anyone who'd like to give me the "America, Love it or Leave it" speech is welcome to hand me a one way ticket to Canada along with it. I'll be on the next goddamn bus.

Barring that, we'll be going to Asheville, Charlotte and the Outer Banks next week to play on the beach for our birthdays. Harrah's will be giving us free accommodations, because queer money spends just like straight money and, although they aren't very generous with the jackpots, at least they have no qualms about treating us like a couple and letting us bunk together in their lovely hotels. The rest of America should buy a hint.