Nowhere, IL

Page 1

2011-10-24T03:27:00.001-05:00

I was thirteen when my mother ran off with the piano player...

If I ever write a book, that will be the first sentence. H/T to Vicki Butler for loaning me her life.

One Flew East, One Flew West ...

2011-08-09T18:15:00.003-05:00

The last of the chicks has left the cuckoo's nest.

Baby Katie (we're going to have to stop calling her that) and her man friend moved to Wichita, where they rented an adorable house to live in while he goes to graduate school, so we spent one of our patented Kwach 'n Ev Whirlwind Weekends^TM pulling a U-Haul trailer for 1072 miles round trip while living on love, laughter, Chex Mix, coconut macaroons, penny slots and four hours of sleep a night in the decadent luxury of Harrah's - Kansas City.

We pulled out of Carbondale at 7pm on Saturday and back into our driveway this morning at 5:15am. I caught an hour and 15 minutes of beauty sleep and then got up and drove 236 miles to work and back (it's a satellite office day). Ev got to sleep a whole four hours again so she could drive three hours back and forth to Carbondale to return the U-Haul and get home in time to get ready for work tonight.

At many points during these trips we high five each other and remark on our Road Warrior awesomeness. At other points - like in the wee small hours of the morning - we mumble along with a Dixie Chicks CD and stare blankly through the windshield with our eyes bouncing around like pinballs. But it looks really cute on us.

But even tired and twisted up like pretzels after all those hours in the truck, we're happy we made this trip. We're going to miss Katie and Charlie a lot, but it helps to know that they're going to be in such a great place and we're glad we could help them embark on this new adventure together.

Fuck It

2011-07-10T12:17:00.003-05:00

Late last week I stayed up all night, lost in writing a lengthy, heavily fact-checked, completely forgettable (and quite possibly undreadable) post about a current event over which I was feeling melancholy, but which meant diddly-squat to anyone but me. The post wasn't funny or entertaining, it wasn't thought-provoking or heartwarming, it wasn't particularly educational ... and, because I failed to check my e-mail during that time, it ended up costing me more trouble than the considerable amount of pleasure writing it had afforded me. So it was a negative sum post, and it deserved to die.

I couldn't shoot it or strangle it, so I deleted the motherfucker. I don't want it sitting here reminding me how much backlash can be brought on by wasting eight hours lost in my thoughts and dreams and memories.

This post took me no time at all, but now it occurs to me that since I can no longer prove the other one was ever here in the first place to account for all those hours, who knows how the Universe will kick my ass for this 15 minutes?

Hence the title of the post.

Happy Birthday, America

2011-07-04T10:46:00.004-05:00

Well, America, it's your birthday. You aren't a kid anymore, so it's time we told you who you are and where you came from. No, you aren't adopted or anything, but the story of your birth is a little bit confusing, and lately there have been some untrue stories told about it. You're old enough now to let go of some of those childhood fantasies and learn to love and accept yourself for who you really are.

Let's start with a few misconceptions about how you came to be:

Right off the bat you need to know that you are not a Christian nation, so let that one go. You are not a religious nation of any stripe, and you should be proud of that. It's what makes you uniquely you. You are a secular nation, founded by British subjects who no longer wanted to be ruled by a monarch across the ocean, nor by his religious arm - the Church of England. Some of the men who created you were Protestants and some were Atheists, but the majority of them were what's known as Deists. They believed that there was a Creator of some sort (thus the phrase, "endowed by their Creator" instead of "endowed by God"), but they believed that this was proven by reason and observing the natural world, and they rejected organized religion of any type. They believed that, once created, the world ran like clockwork without intervention from the clock maker. They were an unconventional lot, Freemasons and Freethinkers, heavily influenced by the Enlightenment. They were the New-Agers of the 18th Century. Many of the men we now call the Founding Fathers wrote at great length about the fact that you were most definitely not a nation founded on religion, but a nation founded on reason and common law.

That "common law" part is very important. It means that your laws are not based on any religious doctrine, but on precedent. It means that, in general, your laws were not meant to be legislated, but developed over time ... by judges. Yes, that's right, that term "legislating from the bench" is actually how the Founders meant for your laws to develop. Common law is both a very old form of lawmaking, and yet it stays very current, because it's meant to be malleable and is based on the idea that laws should and do change as social needs and human understanding changes. The Founders made provision for creating laws at the Federal level through the legislature, but those were meant to be the big unifying laws that effected how the government operated. They maintained the idea that most laws, and especially civil laws, should and must change over time, and that judges are primarily the ones who should make those changes.

Contrary to current popular belief, you were not born because Americans wanted to keep their guns. You were born because the phrase "taxation without representation" is meant to be taken literally. As a British colony, early settlers on these shores paid colonial taxes that were levied locally, and they paid 1 shilling per year directly to Great Britain. They felt they were paying an adequate amount. Additional taxes levied by Great Britain (the Stamp Act and the tea tax for example) were enacted by Parliament without any representation by the colonists, which led to rioting in the streets of Boston and the dumping of a boatload of tea into Boston Harbor. King George III placed Massachusetts under military rule, all hell broke loose, and a year later you were born. It took seven years of bloody war before Britain finally accepted your long-form birth certificate and believed you were America.

You had a very long gestation before you emerged on July 4, 1776. You developed over a period of fifteen years, created by representatives from the thirteen colonies who met three times at conventions they called the Continental Congress. Not all of the members wanted independence from Great Britain at the First Continental Congress, but by the time the Second Continental Congress met in 1775 we were at war with Great Britain (see Item 2, above). The first document drafted by the delegates in 1775 was an attempt at reconciliation with King George III entitled "The Declaration of Rights and Grievances." King George was not pleased and he stepped up his efforts to quell the colonists insurrection by military force.

On July 4, 1776, the representatives to the Second Continental Congress took a very bold step. They officially established the Continental Army, appointed George Washington as its Commander In Chief and drew up two documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. I'll bet you thought I was going to say the Constitution. Well, that's sort of a dirty little secret about your birth -- you started out life as a Confederacy.

As a Confederacy, you were a collection of states, all with their own legislatures and finances, supposedly under the umbrella of the Confederation Congress to which each state sent representatives. When the Revolutionary War ended, you owed a lot of money -- $40 million -- to a lot of people. You owed the French and the Dutch governments $8 million, and $32 million in domestic debt incurred in fighting the war. The problem was, the Confederation Congress had no money. It could borrow money and print money, but the money it printed was worthless so the debts could not be paid. Without power to compel the states to help pay the debt the states not only stopped sending money voluntarily, they stopped sending representatives to the Congress. What a mess.

Okay, I'm not being totally honest with you. All of those things I just told you were sort of about you, but sort of not. This is the other thing you need to know. You were not an only child. You had an older sibling (the Confederacy) who was born on July 4, 1776, but that sibling died and that's when you were conceived as a Constitutional Republic. We called both of you the United States of America.

Here's what happened:

By 1787 the unpaid army was falling apart, foreign countries were refusing to do business with the United States. Individual states were setting up their own foreign trade agreements, creating their own armies and starting wars ... and the poor old Confederation Congress was barely able to get enough representatives together to form a quorum. The Confederacy was only eleven years old and it looked as if it wasn't going to survive.

In a last-ditch effort to save its life, the Confederation Congress talked twelve of the thirteen states into meeting one more time to try to revise the Articles of Confederation and hold the Union of states together. After much debate it was clear that the Confederacy had severe, life-threatening birth defects and the decision was made to pull the plug. The Articles of Confederation died in Annapolis, Maryland in June of 1787. The death was hushed up and you were created in secret by the Constitutional Convention. It took a lot of debating to create this new form of government cobbled together with ideas of governance from the Magna Carta, the Roman Empire and in large part from the Iroquois nation. In fact, we borrowed the phrase "We, the people, to form a union, to establish peace, equity, and order..." from the Iroquois Constitution (a fact we finally officially recognized in October of 1988 when the U.S. Congress passed Concurrent Resolution 331) It also took a lot of salesmanship to get the states to ratify this crazy new idea, but they got it done and you were officially born on September 13, 1788 -- twelve years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Like all living things, you've grown and changed since your birth. You got ten amendments called the Bill of Rights in 1791, twenty-seven more since then, and there are several on deck even now. You're only 223 years old and you aren't done growing yet.

We celebrate your birthday on July 4th because that's when we stopped being British and started being American, even though it took a dozen more years to figure out what that meant and how to accomplish it.

There's one last thing I want to tell you about your birthday. It isn't a military holiday. I know we shoot off fireworks and that a lot of people use this day to talk about supporting our troops and thanking our troops for our freedom, but the fact is, we have other holidays to honor them, and we don't really honor them for securing our freedom. The only soldiers who ever fought for America's freedom fought in the American Revolution. Since then our soldiers have fought for a lot of other reasons, but never again to purchase our freedom. So yes, we are certainly grateful for the Continental Army, but today is really about an elite group of well educated Freethinkers and politicians who met in Philadelphia and wrote the Declaration of Independence. They didn't exactly prove that the pen is mightier than the sword, but they did prove that sometimes it takes both, and we wouldn't be the United States of America without them:

John Adams - Educated at Harvard, lawyer, political theorist and c0-drafter of the Declaration of Indpendence.

Benjamin Franklin -Self-educated after the age of ten, voracious reader, author, printer, scientist, inventor, civic activist, foreign diplomat and creator of one of the first volunteer firefighting companies in America.

Alexander Hamilton - Educated at King's College (now Columbia University), lawyer, banker, founder of the U.S. Mint, co-author of the Federalist Papers.

John Jay - Educated at King's College, lawyer, diplomat, co-author of the Federalist Papers, first Chief Justice of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson - Educated at the College of William and Mary, lawyer, farmer, collector of books, fluent in seven languages, principle author of the Declaration of Independence.

James Madison - Educated at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), Hebrew scholar, tobacco farmer, c0-author of the Federalist Papers, author of the United States Bill of Rights and considered to be the Father of the Constitution.

George Washington - Home schooled, surveyor, land-holder, aristocrat, distinguished military leader, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, first President of the United States. Considered to be the Father of the Country.

You have two dads!

Kwach and Ev Get Hitched

2011-06-12T19:49:00.002-05:00

Congratulations to Kwach and Ev! Our Civil Union takes place Wednesday, June 15th. After 7+ years of sinful cohabitation, we're making honest women of each other. Mazel Tov. :-)

2010-03-20T15:51:00.002-05:00

I pre-apologize for the fact that this post has a high likelihood of looking like crap when I post it, because Blogger can't seem to deal with quoting, changing fonts or font sizes, and I can't seem to stop trying to use those features. That said, here are a just a couple of news items culled from the blogosphere today regarding the frenzy accompanying the end of the HCR debate on the eve of it's passage, and The Crazy that has become the trademark of the "conservative family values" crowd:

Things seem to be getting pretty heated in the Capitol with crowds of anti-Reform/Tea Party activists going through the halls shouting slogans and epithets at Democratic members of Congress. As our Brian Beutler reports, a few moments ago in Longworth office building, a group swarmed a very calm looking Henry Waxman, as he got on the elevator, with shouts of "Kill the bill!" "You liar! You crook!" Not long before, Rep. Barney Frank got an uglier version of the treatment. Just after Frank rounded a corner to leave the building, an older protestor yelled "Barney, you faggot." The surrounding crowd of protestors then erupted in laughter. At one point, Capitol police officer threatened to throw a group of protesters out of the building but that only seemed to inflame them more; and apparently none were ejected.

And this:

Tea Party activists have gathered on Capitol Hill today for a “Code Red” rally against health care reform. Speakers at the event included Republican Reps. Steve King (IA), Michele Bachmann (MN), and Mike Pence (IN). The gathering was organized by Tea Party Profiteer organizations like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. ThinkProgress attended today’s rally and spotted a sign threatening violence if health care passes. The sign reads: “Warning: If Brown can’t stop it, a Browning can,” referring to Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) and a Browning firearm.

************************************************************************************************

A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-M.D.) had been spit on by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis (D-G.A.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a 'ni--er.' And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a "faggot," as protestors shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams. Frank, approached in the halls after the president's speech, shrugged off the incident.

I could post a dozen or so more, but you get the picture.

These are not the family values of any decent human being.

These are the people screaming that they're having their rights and their country taken from them, and you know what? If that's the country they've been living in, and that's how they believe the First and Second Amendments were intended to be exercised, then they are absolutely, 100%, totally fucking correct. That country is systematically being taken from them, by the power of the democratic political process and the rule of law, and rightly so.

Hat tip to Joe.My.God, Echidne of the Snakes, Sam Stein at Huffington Post and anyone else I read today who inspired me to this level of anger and disgust.

A dictionary in every Congressperson's desk would go a long way ...

2010-02-25T22:54:00.003-06:00

This is, perhaps, the best segment I've ever seen on Rachel Maddow's show, and because I believe it needs to be seen and spread far and wide, I'm linking you to it here and hoping you'll pass it on:

American Healthcare is a for-profit business, not health care.

This is the message Democrats should have been pressing since day one of this administration, not the namby-pamby begging for bipartisanship or the waffling while awaiting the latest polling results. And it's fucking criminal that the one man willing to stand up and speak the truth was shut out of the healthcare "summit."

Yes, it's true that a large percentage of the American people are not in favor of the current healthcare reform bill(s) being put forth in Congress, but not for the reasons the Republicans claim. We are not in favor because the crumbs the current bill(s) are likely to throw at us are piddling and pathetic. We are not in favor, not because it goes too far, but because it doesn't go far enough by a long shot. We are not in favor because it's not in our best interest to continue to be screwed by for-profit insurers.

It's a sad fucking state of affairs when I'm better off being uninsured than being insured. I should kiss someone at Blue Cross/Blue Shield for denying me coverage. Who knew what a blessing that would turn out to be? I'm ahead of the game by a lot. It cost me exactly the same amount to be uninsured this year as it did last year, and no greedy corporate bastard got paid a million dollars, took home a big bonus or went on a spa vacation on my dime.

And about that socialism crap? We are a society.

This is a definition of society - a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests.

This is the definition of Socialism - a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

Every phrase that contains the root "social" is not Socialism. Social programs protect the members of a society who need protection. This is one reason we don't put our old people on ice floes and no longer throw our mentally ill into prisons and hell-holes. A civilized society doesn't live by the "kill or be killed" law of the wild. It is not "socialism" to live as a goddamned civilized society.

Just Stop It!

2010-02-20T13:30:00.003-06:00

Two things are stuck in my craw today ... lucky you!

First:

In the wake of Andrew Stack's suicide bombing of the IRS building in Austin, TX, I want to address those of you who hate the IRS with a passion. According to the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration,

"In the past four years, there appears to have been a "steady, upward trend" in the number of threats against IRS employees."

Just stop it.

I was speaking to one of those employees in that same Austin office just hours before Mr. Stack tried to murder him, and he was a very nice man. In fact, I've dealt with employees of the IRS on a few occasions when they could have been exactly the assholes they're purported to be, and have never had an IRS employee be anything but helpful, cordial and soft-spoken, even when I owed them money. Especially then, actually.

Let's remember what our taxes pay for. In addition to funding things we might disagree with, like wars and corporate bail-outs, our tax dollars also provide roads, bridges, public schools, social services, breathable air, untainted food, drinkable water, scientific and medical research and a whole lot of other things that make our lives better. If we weren't forced to pay for those things, would you voluntarily sit down and write checks to the Social Security Administration or the Food and Drug Administration or the Department of Transportation? Yeah, me neither.

Next, let's remember that IRS employees are employees. They don't make the tax laws, they just do their jobs, and they do them with a lot more compassion and better customer service skills than your average tech desk help person or doctor's office appointment clerk. If you want to fly a plane into a building full of the people who are really responsible for the unfair and egregious tax laws in this country, fly it into the US Capitol. Try to hit the Republican side of the aisle.

Next subject: Down Syndrome

I understand that supporters of Sarah Palin are now posting all over the Intertubez that Andrea Friedman, the professional actor who lent her voice to the "Family Guy" episode presently giving Caribou Barbie fits, could not possibly have a) written the e-mail in which she defended her performance, or b) even understood what her father got her to do, because she has Down Syndrome herself. If you clicked that "Andrea Friedman" link (and if you didn't, please do) it's clear that Ms. Friedman has accomplished more in her life than I have, certainly, and (I'm guessing) more than most anyone who will ever read this blog. People with Down Syndrome are not incapable of expressing themselves in e-mail or making decisions about their lives. They are not props and they are not pets and they are not here for you to exploit.

Just stop it.

I'm Sofa King tired of hearing Sarah Palin talk about her poor, pitiful, handicapped child and what a wonderful mother she is for having him (however she got him, which is a question still unanswered). I'm tired of her illogical off-again on-again band-wagon jumping over words like "retarded," and I'm tired of her petulant whining and her pedantic lecturing when she hasn't done the very first thing that parents of children who successfully deal with the challenges of Down Syndrome do ... parent them. That's their special need ... attentive, encouraging and hands-on parenting.

I'm tired of watching her use all of her children, and especially Trig, for political gain -- and tired of hearing her supporters anoint her with sainthood and buy into the notion that she is any kind of expert on the subject of special needs children, since she has never demonstrated any desire or willingness to find anyone special besides herself or to put anyones needs ahead of her own. She's as full of crap as a Thanksgiving goose and you're stoopid if you're falling for her schtick.

I'd like to dedicate the rest of this post to a woman named Missy. She's a personal hero to me -- a successful young woman and a very talented artist who has had her work published on calendars and greeting cards, and, like Andrea Friedman, she happens to have Down Syndrome.

I met Missy when she was a patient in our office about 15 years ago. She was a young teenager at the time and came to us to undergo a Dacryocystorhinostomy to correct an anatomical abnormality with her tear ducts. At that time it was a painful surgery with a lengthy recovery that I've seen bring strong adults to their knees, but Missy was already a veteran of several surgeries to correct her facial abnormalities and improve her quality of life, and she was determined to be tough about it and not complain. Even though she was often scared, she sat stoically in an exam chair gripping my hand tightly, and tolerated whatever we had to do, including the removal of her sutures and the tubing in her nose and tear ducts. No matter how much we'd put her through on her visits she always went around the office and hugged each of us hello and good-bye, and she always had a story to tell us about some wonderful thing that had happened to her lately. Her greatest thrill was becoming Cher's pen-pal and receiving hand-written notes and letters, autographed photos and backstage passes to one of her shows. She was special in many ways, but most of all she was special because of her wonderful attitude about life and the joy she brought to the lives of others.

Missy had attended mainstream public schools since Kindergarten and was about to graduate from Junior High when she came into my life. She didn't get there by herself, though. Her mother had given up her own career to be a full-time parent and advocate for Missy when she was born, and by the time Missy was a teenager her mother was also working long hours volunteering for the MARC Center (that's the Mesa Association for Retarded Citizens).

So, Sarah, until you are even half (oh hell, a quarter) of the mother that the Missys and the Andrea Friedmans and the Chris Burkes of this world have been blessed with, just shut your selfish mouth and stop it.

I Get It

2010-02-18T18:41:00.006-06:00

The guy who flew into the IRS building in Austin, Texas? I get that. And really, it's two birds with one stone: the IRS and Texas.

But mostly it sounds like he was a fairly normal guy who collapsed under the relentless onslaught of financial pressure. As crazy mass murderers go, he makes a lot better sense than Dr. Amy Bishop.

Here's an excerpt from Joe Stack's manifesto:

In my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

Honestly...except for the arson and terrorism part, he makes a valid point. The system is rigged against people like us. Joe Stack isn't a martyr, but he sure seems like a fairly normal person pushed beyond his limits. It's too bad he chose this way to make his voice heard.

Our Families Count »

2010-02-18T11:54:00.002-06:00

It's census time. Let's make sure we all fill out the form and be as clear as possible about our relationships. The Feds say we'll have an actual GLBT box on the 2020 census, but in the meantime, we're "unmarried partners."

Our Families Count »

Scooterbitches in the 'Ro

2010-02-18T11:15:00.004-06:00

It's been 20 degrees out for weeks. Snowy, overcast, and gloomy. The daytime part of the day lasts about 15 minutes. So what is the best solution for the winter blues? A scooter!

And really, nothing says cool like riding a scooter around town in an alpaca hat with earflaps.

A scooter is a lifeboat to cling to when you're drowning in a sea of endless winter. Scooters promise sunshine, picnics, and tank tops.

And if summer doesn't get here pretty soon, I'm heading for Central America on my scooter. At 35 mph. With my scooterbitch riding shotgun.

Central America, start watching for me. I'm coming from The 'Ro and I ought to be there in about three weeks, weather permitting.

Butter

2010-02-12T11:19:00.007-06:00

I heard this on The Splendid Table on NPR last week. I'm not really much of a poetry person, but when Elizabeth Alexander was reading her poem Butter aloud, it was so evocative that it has stayed in my head for days.

Since I've made reference to it in various conversations probably 10 times in the last week, I thought I'd post it here for anyone to admire. Don't sue me, Ms. Alexander. I steal because I love.

Butter by Elizabeth Alexander

My mother loves butter more than I do,
more than anyone. She pulls chunks off
the stick and eats it plain, explaining
cream spun around into butter! Growing up
we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon
and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,
butter melting in small pools in the hearts
of Yorkshire puddings, butter better
than gravy staining white rice yellow,
butter glazing corn in slipping squares,
butter the lava in white volcanoes
of hominy grits, butter softening
in a white bowl to be creamed with white
sugar, butter disappearing into
whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,
butter melted and curdy to pour
over pancakes, butter licked off the plate
with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture
the good old days I am grinning greasy
with my brother, having watched the tiger
chase his tail and turn to butter. We are
Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite
historical revision, despite
our parent’s efforts, glowing from the inside
out, one hundred megawatts of butter.

Eight Forty-Eight - Could Punk Rock Save Cairo, Illinois?

2010-02-11T10:36:00.001-06:00

Eight Forty-Eight - Could Punk Rock Save Cairo, Illinois?

2010-02-06T13:16:00.003-06:00

We were just this morning revisiting the moral outrage we confront annually -- owing to the fact that we can't combine our salaries and file a joint tax return instead of each having to file our returns as "single" (especially since none of the shiny new "middle class tax breaks" will effect either of us, what with having grown children and no elder care to worry about) -- and discussing what we'll do about the new tax debt we will be adding to our ongoing tax debt come April 15th, and we came to the conclusion that, depsite the IRS' generous offer to accept our checks in the amount of the total owed, we have no choice but to tell them to keep on taking those auto-debits out of our twin (unmarried) checking accounts into our dotage. So it was with some consternation that I read the following statement by GOP Chairman, Michael Steele in the Boston Herald:

Steele panned President Barack Obama’s long-stated plan to let income tax rates return to higher levels for families making more than $250,000 a year.

"Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money," Steele said.

Trust me, you arrogant disconnected prick, after taxes, student loan repayments, household expenses, exorbitant gas prices, car repairs to keep the clunkers running, the occasional grocery item and the annual additional tax screwage on April 15th, neither is the average American income, which falls way the hell short of $250,000. What country are YOU living in??

The city of Colorado Springs is about to resemble something out of Mad Max film, the mayor of Los Angeles just ordered that 1,000 random city employees be sent to join the 15.3 million other Americans standing in the unemployment line and Michael Steele doesn't think being paid a million bucks to be an obtuse asshole is a lot of money. Wev. Take back the country, teabaggers. It's already fucked up beyond redemption.

Outside. A Love Story

2010-02-04T11:42:00.002-06:00

Outside, I can see you though my window.

You're taunting me with your sunshine, setting me up for the next disappointment with your secret plan for rain or snow, or rain mixed with snow, or sleet mixed with freezing rain and snow.

I watch you, Outside. Furtively, like a stalker. Someday I will possess you, and I will make you love me as I love you. I will make you yearn for my lawn mower, for my sack of bulbs and my spade.

Soon, my beloved Outside...soon. Punxsutawney Phil says six more weeks until we can be together, and then I will hold you tightly to my bosom until you are lost to me again in November.

Kindle? iPad? Wev.

2010-02-02T12:08:00.002-06:00

I've had an Amazon Kindle on my "someday" list for the last couple of years. It seems like it would be convenient and very cool, and as a person who always has two or three books going at once, it would be nice to not have to decide which one to grab on the way out the door. With a Kindle I'd be able to grab all three and then some.

Conversely, I have had no interest in an iPad. I have a visceral dislike of all things Apple...too cool, trendy, statementy, showy-offy. I like my technology to be cumbersome, stodgy and lagging-edge...it reflects my personality better.

So imagine my dismay to read that Amazon is feuding with publishers and removing their titles from the list of Kindle selections while Apple is actively courting publishers and attempting to establish a solid foothold in the e-reader business.

Apple is hoping to topple the Kindle from the top spot and establish themselves as an equally viable e-reader option. But you know how it is with technology...they'll never be able to coexist. As a matter of convenience one format eventually becomes the standard and their rivals all fade away. And during this process potential customers like me will sit on our hands (and wallets) and watch the battle to see which format will eventually dominate. Because there's nothing more frustrating than spending $350 for cool new technology that is immediately obsolete.

This is like the Betamax vs. VCR battle, or the thing with the Blu-Ray and whoever. Or Godzilla and Mothra. It's an epic battle for the soul of the consumer (or in the case of Godzilla, the planet). But lately I've been reading about Amazon's ruthless marketing strategy, which incidentally screws the authors and publishers while trying to suck up new customers, and Apple's absurdly overhyped MaxiPad, which is apparently a larger version of an iPhone but with no telephony. I'm stuck once again in the same place I find myself with regard to the major political parties: I'm a little jaded about both my options. I feel like Apple and Amazon and their cadre of advertisers are hoping to manipulate and/or swindle me by waving shiny twirling objects in front of my eyes. Instead, I'm inclined to walk away from the whole mess and let them work it out without me.

I guess I'll stick with paper-and-ink books for a couple more years. By then they ought to have it sorted out.

Vehicular Musings

2010-01-29T12:31:00.001-06:00

I drive a 1993 Chevy S-10 pickup. I'm a pickup kinda person anyway....I frequently have large and unexpected things to tote around, and very few humans. Plus, I have a pickup person personality. You know...you can sort of tell what kind of person a person is by what kind of car they buy, unless they're so poor they buy any $500 vehicle that runs. That tells you something too, but more about their checkbook than their psyche.

Camry people are sensible and secretly a little self-indulgent, but embarrassed by it. SUV people? It depends. Dodge Caravan? Lots of kids, no money. Lexus SUV? One kid, $1000 stroller, lots of money. Honda Passport? 2 kids, one at Montessori preschool, the other plays T-ball. Badly.

Cameros/Corvettes/two-seaters of any kind? Assholes. Although the exception is possibly the Honda Del Sol, owned by middle-aged people who "never got anything fun, dammit, and now I want something fun for the first time in my whole life!"

Lori drives a Sebring convertible that used to be showy-offy, but now looks a little bedraggled, like a 50 year old stripper clinging to her job at the dive bar across the street from the explosives factory. It's become an ongoing source of frustration for her. It's main computer has gone rogue and has taken over the car ("I can't do that, Dave."), the peeling chrome plating on the wheels tends to let the air out of the times at inopportune moments, and recently it has begun to spontaneously jettison it's bodily fluids. Sometimes. And then not for a few months. And then again for a while.

It's next on our list of things to get rid of, right after the two-gallon water heater.

My truck is a lot like me, I think. It used to look a lot better when it was younger, but it still gets up and goes to work every damn day but it bitches about it the entire time. It's one of those vehicles nobody ever borrows because of the list of tricks required to make it go, and then keep it going, which currently looks like this:

1. The starter is dead. Like, since last July. So I park it on an incline and when I want to start it, I let it roll, put it in second gear, and pop the clutch. I'm so good at this I can start it on a two degree pitch. My criteria for deciding where to go is whether it has I hill I can park on. Wal-Mart? Hill...okay to shut it off.. Kroger? No hill, so unless I'm just running in for one thing and can leave it running...no.

2. The power steering leaks fluid like crazy, so sometimes it works,and sometimes it works but it moans like the aforementioned 50 year old stripper rolling out of bed in the morning after a double-shift of pole dancing, and sometimes it's an excellent arm-and-pec workout.

3. There's a large-ish rust hole in the corner of the floorboard that gets a little nippy on those 20 degree nights, because:

4. The heater works, but the blower doesn't. Which is fine at 60 miles per hour, as it makes it's own air movement with the vortexing from the hole.

But it always starts and it always goes, I've never hit a deer with it nor put it in a ditch, and it cost me $1500 three years ago and it's still running 100,000 miles later. Sure, it's showing some age and rough living, but hey...I own a mirror. Time hasn't exactly been my best friend either. And if it needs a little extra lube? Well...when you get to be a certain age...

Danger is my Middle Name

2010-01-28T11:59:00.001-06:00

Who just ran out of gas in the gas station parking lot??

Thank the Prime Mover for manual transmission. At least when a person runs out of gas 20 feet from the pump that person can coast in. Not that I know a person dumb enough to do that. But I've read about it. In books. Books about stupid people. Of which I'm not one.

I'm just sayin'.

Before the Seed There Comes the Thought of Bloom.

2010-01-27T13:50:00.001-06:00

It's the last week of January. It's been cold and rainy for maybe two months. The dogs need exercise, I need exercise. Even eating Heath Bars and drinking beer are beginning to lose their allure.

But then...?

Treasury of Gardening arrived from Paperbackswap.com. It's a bible-sized hardcover tome with suggestions and instructions for planting and landscaping, and orgasm-producing photos of lawns and gardens and flowers and shrubs and annuals and perennials.

So now I'm getting my Springtime yard fantasy in order. Only two more months until Spring officially arrives.

Coming Out, Part 3. The Family

2010-01-26T01:33:00.008-06:00

I have an odd fractured family and we hardly ever talk to each other. Not, I think, because of any animosity, but mostly due to ennui and out-of-sight, out-of -mindedness. The exception to that for much of my life has been my mother. She's sort of a willful, bitchy know-it-all, as mothers (including me, I'm sure) tend to be. She's also got some mental health issues that cause her to drop into my lap periodically with no notice and stay for a few years and require at least some casual supervision.

For a long time she lived 100 feet away in a trailer we'd put on our property. After a few years we moved a couple of miles down the road and she stayed in the trailer, but she would come over every day and watch the kids after school until I got home. Then I'd cook supper for all of us and she'd go home again. It was a nice arrangement...it saved me a fortune in childcare and we had just enough interaction to be enjoyable but not so much that we'd have to kill each other.

My mother had taken up religion in a BIG way in middle-age. She was Jesusing a couple of evenings a week because she couldn't get enough Jesus on Sunday* alone, and she was also getting an extra Jesus fix on Christian television all week long. Sometimes when she was watching the kids I'd hear one or the other say, "Oh, Gammy! Do we have to watch the Jesus show? I hate the Jesus show!"

I'm not sure what she thought was happening when Carol moved in, but we were observing a strict "don't ask, don't tell" policy. I was nervous about how she would react in light of her religious zeal, but at the same time, Carol was obviously living with me and we weren't trying to hide the relationship. My solution was just to set another place at the table and not mention it. It worked great for a couple of months.

Carol and I planned a long weekend in Panama City, Florida during the semester break after we'd been living together for a few months, and my mom agreed to watch the kids. I stocked the fridge for her, and we had cable tv, which gave her access to even more Jesus channels and she was a happy little Holy Roller.

We went to Florida and had a great mini-holiday. We got home early Sunday evening and I hugged the kids and asked my mom how it went. "Fine.," she said tersely, then picked up her stuff and quickly hurried out the door.

"What's up with her?", I asked the kids. They told me they didn't know, she'd been that way all day. It seemed weird, but I thought maybe she had something of her own going on and I just sort of blew it off.

Later that evening when we were getting ready for bed, I realized that she had gone through a wooden box on my nightstand and read a pile of fairly steamy love letters from Carol, and she had left them sitting out on the bed. I said, "Uh-oh. Now she'll be in therapy for the rest of her life! That'll teach her to stay out of my stuff."

Since I was between semesters, mom didn't come watch the kids for the next few days and I didn't see her. But I had agreed to take her to the oral surgeon at the end of the week for a procedure that would leave her doped up enough that she wouldn't be able to drive herself home afterwards.

I picked her up first thing in the morning, and she was quiet in the car. We got to the dentist's and she went in for her procedure while I waited outside in the waiting room with a book. Finally a hygenist brought my boneless mother back to the waiting room and explained that she'd required some extra anesthetic, so she was pretty loopy. I took her and her post-op instructions and prescriptions out to the car and poured her into the passenger seat, where she promptly fell asleep. She was sleeping so soundly that I thought I was safe stopping at the drugstore to fill her prescriptions.

When I got back in the car, she surprised me by being awake...sort of. She rolled her head sideways towards me and spoke in a slurred mumble, "You know...iss alrigh' wi' me if you're a....ho...ho...ho-mo-sek-shul." Then her head rolled back and she was sleep again.

Huh. Well.

I took her back to my house and put her to bed in Katie's bed, and she slept all day. When she woke up, she was popping pain pills and drinking her tea lukewarm, but she was pretty much back to normal. She stayed and drank tea at the kitchen table while we ate supper, and afterwards, when the kids went to watch tv, she said, "You know, this is the best relationship you've ever had. I'm glad you found each other."

This is exactly the reason I never shot her for all the other misery she caused me later.

We never have really talked much about Teh Gay...I can't see much of a reason to. I yam what I yam, in the words of the philosopher Popeye. I realized while writing this that I rarely made the announcement of gayness, except to my friends who didn't live close by. Otherwise it never even occurs to me that I might need to seek approval or permission or whatever else people seek. And it's not like it's a secret to the people I meet now. Look at me. I'm such a dyke. Duh.

It also occurred to me now that it might have been bad manners to not make a formal announcement. This is the first time I've had that thought, so it might require another minute or two of thinking.

*She changed churches soon after that. I asked her why, since she loved her church. She told me that when her church elders heard I was gay, they told her she would have to shun me. She quit her church on the spot.

A Musical Interlude

2010-01-24T20:25:00.001-06:00

One of the great things about living with Ev is that, every so often when I get in my car to go somewhere after she's been driving it, something wonderful and unexpected comes out of my stereo. Sometimes it's something I've never heard, sometimes it's a new rendition of something I have, and often it's something I've forgotten I loved. Tonight was sort of a jackpot.

I got in my car to run errands and I couldn't find my usual NPR station. After flipping up and down the dial a couple of times and finding only the Jesus stations, I punched the input button and a CD that's been in there for a little while started playing. We've had it on while we did other things, but I hadn't paid a whole lot of attention to it, and cut 11 wasn't really doing a lot for me, so I hit the "next" button and heard ... really heard ... an old standard sung by Rosanne Cash, and then remembered Ev telling me the story of her latest album, "The List" ...

"When I was 18, I was on the road with my dad. One day, we were sitting in the tour bus, talking about songs, and he mentioned a song, and I said, "I don’t know that one." He mentioned another one, and I said, "I don’t know that one, either." Then he started to get alarmed, so he spent the rest of the day making a list on a legal pad, and at the top he put "100 Essential Country Songs." And he handed it to me and he said, "This is your education."

‘It just didn’t interest me," she says. "I learned all the songs, but then I set on my own course as a songwriter, and set about separating myself from my parents, as you do when you’re young."

The year was 1973 and it took her a little over three decades, and brain surgery that put an end to her songwriting for over a year, to get back to those "essential country songs."

I guess I've always known this song, but never fully appreciated it before. I love the way the chorus slowly climbs less than an octave in whole steps up and half steps back, like a country waltz, combined with a unique rhyme scheme in the lyrics that just rocks my socks off. Have a listen. You'll be happy.

Coming Out, Part 2. The Rest of the World

2010-01-24T19:47:00.003-06:00

When last we left our heroine:

Okay...not so much. No being tied to the railroad tracks or carried away by Snidely Whiplash's sister, Snooty Whiplash. Not that Snooty would have talked to me anyway. I'm not very cool.

So...coming out to the rest of the world.

Remember I'd been living for years in a small town in Nowhere, IL. My lesbian options were slim. After The Best Ex-Husband Ever and I got divorced, I spent some time alone. I didn't have a clue where actual lesbians were to be found in Nowhere, but it was clear there were none in Alto Pass. Luckily two things fell into my path: the Internet and the Forest Service.

The Internet gave me access to message boards full of lesbians who were smart and kind and supportive. I found a community of woman to talk about life with who could understand what I was going through and talk about it without being judgmental (Compare that to the AOL boards of the last few years. Shocking, eh?)

I fell into my Forest Service job accidentally. I had a friend who worked for the Forest Service and after my divorce I was working at a crappy student apartment complex in Carbondale, showing apartments, answering the phones, and hauling away the detritus of students who skipped out on their rent. I hated the job, but it paid every week.

My friend Kelly worked for the Forest Service Ranger District in Jonesboro, IL and she thought she could get me on for the summer because of my Biology degree. Nevermind it was a microbiology degree, like so many jobs, the degree was just to get you through the door. I got hired as a summer tech and found the coolest thing ever: the Forest Service is lousy with lesbians! You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a lesbian in a sporty green uniform. It was like a smorgasbord of healthy, tanned, outdoorsy dykes with pickup trucks, chainsaws, steel toed boots and hardhats. Dykes who liked power tools and backhoes and firefighting and all the finer things in life. It was dyke heaven, dyke mecca. It was dyketastic!

That is, of course, where I found my first girlfriend. She wasn't really much of a girlfriend anyway, she was more like a lesbian spirit guide. She introduced me to lesbians culture and more importantly, to lesbian sex. And what a brilliant idea that was!. If someone could bottle it and sell by the half ounce, they'd be rich in a week.

She was older than me and farther up the F.S. chain of command, but I was a lot hotter back then, so it sort of evened itself out on the power scale. She got five extra points for income and five more for experience, but I got ten for hotness.

I met my first live-in girlfriend when I went back to school for a graduate degree after I figured out that no one could raise three kids on $8 an hour. I courted her with my Internet access, my keen grasp of calc-based Physics and my excellent Forest Service tan, and in short order she moved in with me. At this point, two girlfriends and three years down the road, I was still not out. That is, until the day that my neighbor Molly came to the door. Katie answered it. and said, "My mommy can't come to the door right now. She's taking a nap with Carol." I looked over at Carol and said, "Well...we're out."

It's a small town. By the time I put my pants on, there wasn't anyone over 10 years old within a five mile radius that didn't know I was a lesbian.

And now for something completely different ...

2010-01-23T17:52:00.002-06:00

We take a break from teh Gay to bring you yet another political rant, because ranting about what's happening in the country is about all the blogging I'm fit for these days. Nothing seems very funny anymore.

I just stumbled across yet another comment on yet another political blog whining that everyone is trying to blame Bush for the mess we're in. The whiner noted that the current administration has spent umpty trillion dollars "all on its own" which can't, of course, be laid at the feet of Bush.

Except that it can, and unless you're a complete idiot you already know that.

Here's an analogy, because I love analogies and they work fairly well when some people have to be hit over the head to grasp a simple concept.

Let's say there's a house on the market. That house is 200 years old. It's had a lot of owners and residents in that 200 years. Some of them have been good caretakers (as evidenced by the fact that it's still standing) and others have been less good. Let's assume the owners before last left the house in really good shape when they turned it over to the last jokers, who completely sucked. The recently evicted folks lived in it for nearly a decade (in which a lot can go wrong with a 200-year-old house if you aren't careful) and they let it go completely to hell. Now the roof leaks, the pipes leak, there's water damage everywhere you look, termites and carpenter ants have made a good start on destroying the foundation ... in short, these assholes generally let it go to rack and ruin before they went into foreclosure, and then they tore out the appliances on their way out. Along comes a new family who can see that the house has a lot of problems, but it has "good bones" and it's worth saving, so they go ahead and buy it. They not only have to pay off the old debt the last owners left behind, but they're going to have to put new money into bringing it back to livable conditions. (A side benefit of this, by the way, is that it pleases the neighbors to no longer have to look out their windows and curse the sonofabitch who last lived there.) But livable isn't really enough, and doing actual restoration takes a fuckload more money. So, whose fault is it that the house has become a money pit? I submit that it's the fault of the previous owners, not the ones who took it on as a rehab project.

To add insult to injury, let's suppose that the previous owners (and their friends who helped trash it) continue to hang around the neighborhood complaining about the eyesore and the length of time it's taking to restore it and trying to convince the neighborhood folks that the damage to the house didn't happen on their watch and is really the fault of the new people. You'd have to be a real moron to buy that story, wouldn't you? Especially if you'd been living there watching it happen? Well, there are a lot of morons in this country.

Coming Out, Part 1

2010-01-23T02:50:00.010-06:00

I was up until the wee hours of the morning talking with an old friend last night, comparing coming out stories. She, like me, was an "LLL", or late-in-life lesbian.

Coming out, obviously, is a huge deal fraught with emotional baggage and fear of rejection for everyone who does it. For grown-up women with marriages and children and grown-up lives tightly intertwined with other lives, it's tricky and complicated and messy. It's hard on your family, and it's hard on your self-esteem.

Every gay person I've ever known has the coming out moment indelibly stamped in their mind. It's right up there with "where were you when the Twin Towers fell"?
No one ever forgets telling the person they most worry will disappove. For a lot of people, that means telling yourself.

There are three levels of coming out:
1) When you recognize your own gayness.
2) When you come out to your family.
3) When you come out to the rest of the world.

I had my gay epiphany later in life. I think I never knew any out lesbians growing up, and I chalked up my huge childhood crushes on women to just one more sign of weirdness. I think I would have married my fifth grade teacher if I could have. But then, she was extraordinarily hot. I'll bet 90% of the class would have married her, all except for maybe that girl with the white sweater with the pearl buttons. What was up with her? Why didn't she sweat??

By the time I was in my 20's I had sort of decided that I was an emotional cripple and couldn't feel love like other people talked about being in love. By then I was married to a wonderful guy who my friends now call The Best Ex-Husband Ever, and Lori and I refer to as "our ex-husband."

I spent my early adulthood never being alone with my head...I had kids and college and a job and friends and a million other things to keep me busy. Looking back, of course, it makes sense to have avoiding too much introspection. It was scary and dangerous for me inside the deep depths of my psyche. But one weekend the ex-husband took the kids camping with his brother and I was alone. All weekend.

And what do other people do with a quiet weekend alone? Read? Nap? Take long walks? I spent mine having an existential crisis. It took me about 6 hours alone in a house with no distractions to realize that I was a lesbian, and the next 42 to figure out what to do with that information.

My answer was...nothing. This was so much not a part of my plan. I liked my life, I liked the husband, I had 3 small kids and I wasn't ready or able to make any big life changing leaps. So I spent as much time exploring it as I could, then put The Gay back in the closet. I remember feeling shaky when they got back, and wondering if I looked as crazy as I felt.

But I could do it. I'd spent 25 or so years pursuing a life of self-deception...I'd had a bad weekend of internal honesty, but I wasn't going to let that interfere with my life. And aside from the emotional cripple part , I was an excellent mother. A lousy wife perhaps, I did as good job as I could have under the circumstances. Eventually our marriage fell apart because really...living in the world with a marriage and three kids is hard enough, but a marriage, three kids, and a HUGE life-altering existential secret? Too much. Even for The Best Ex-Husband Ever.

Next: Part 2. Coming out to the rest of the world.

Pup Help?

2010-01-22T11:25:00.004-06:00

We've been feeding our dogs Diamond brand dog food for the last couple of months. It's supposed to be a high quality, decently priced food, but they have had ungodly bad gas since they've been on it. I mean, the kind that make you jump up from your chair and run around the house to see who crapped on the floor. Cooper is middle-aged and has lousy digestion so I could chalk it up to her bad plumbing, but even Pickle has had digestive woe on this food and she's only a year old.

So...can anyone recommend another decently priced high quality dog food with a hypoallergic version for goofy-looking sensitive doggies?

I'm From the Government. I'm Here to Help.

2010-01-22T00:57:00.004-06:00

Why exactly do the Democrats have to wait until Scott Brown arrives in Washington to get back to the pressing business of doing nothing? Can't the earnest pursuit of no meaningful legislation continue while Brown loads his backpack, futon and mini-fridge into the back of his pickup and heads down I-95 to his first week at Senator sleepaway camp?

The Senate should be able to spend this week doing nothing with a 59-40 Democratic majority and then when Senator-elect Brown arrives next week they can seamlessly transition to doing nothing with a 59-41 majority. That seems like it would be more efficient use of government resources and in this weak economy, efficiency is the key.

Church/State...whatever.

2010-01-21T10:55:00.010-06:00

So the Mormon church has been exposed financing the Prop 8 anti-gay marriage campaign and trying to cover up it's involvement. And Cindy McCain hearts the gay. It's been all gay all day in the news today and I want to join in the fun while I drink my coffee.

One of the most interesting things about the Prop 8 trial is all the machinations that went into passing it in the first place. Even if I were to buy the Prop 8 premise that marriage inequality is the right policy because the majority of Americans are in favor of it, it's clear that the will of the people has been driven by a sophisticated advertising campaign. And while I appreciate the efforts of fair-minded people like Cindy and Meghan McCain, their paltry efforts can't compete in the spin battle with behemoths like the Mormon and Catholic Churches.

That's offensive on two levels. First, the churches are asking their members to turn their backs on their gay sons and daughters and friends and coworkers and keep us in a separate plane, living among, but not quite equal to, our friends and relatives. That's caused more than a little cognitive dissonance for straight people who clearly see the injustice for what it is.

Secondly those churches continue to enjoy their tax-exempt status in spite of the their involvement in political activity. They are clearly and demonstrably engaged in the financing of candidates, referendums, and "grassroots" organizations, as well as passing out "voter guides" on specific campaigns and speaking from the pulpit on political issues. Their 510(c)(3) status requires churches to abstain from political activity in exchange for preventing government involvement in their church affairs.

Of course if they want to be political they are more than welcome to give up their tax exemption and dive into the fray with the rest of us. But as long as they are receiving taxpayer support for their spiritual mission, they have to stay out of our secular political scrum.

So WTF Feds? Now that you have actual tangible evidence of illegal Mormon and Catholic political activity in the United States, isn't it time to get busy revoking their tax exempt status? Could it be any clearer? Do we need to wait for yard signs showing Brigham Young and the Pope arm in arm, saying "God Hates Gays, Vote Yes on Prop 8"?

Gaahhh!

2010-01-20T11:09:00.005-06:00

With another 12 hours worth of perspective behind me, the Democratic meltdown in Massachusetts looks like the Democrat failure in health care reform all over again: a massive failure of willingness on the part of elected Democrats to stand by progressive values.

The Dems had a chance to come roaring out of the gate in 2009 and make serious headway on Progressive issues. They should have scaled back the wars, enacted some regulatory oversight on the banking and insurance industry. repealed DADT and DOMA, and created meaningful health care reform legislation. That's what they promised to do, and that's exactly what we elected them to do. We gave them a Democratic president, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, the largest House majority in 20 years, and a mandate for change. We were very clear and cohesive for the first time in decades. We said "Get in there and take back our moral standing in the world and repair the damage done by the Bush Administration."

And instead, they wasted the entire year and all that momentum shuckin' and jivin' to the Republican tune, begging and whining for bipartisanship until their fillibuster-proof majority was gone.

All that compromise has accomplished exactly nothing except that they managed to give away Ted Kennedy's seat to a Republican who vows to oppose health care reform. Ted Kennedy, who spent the last 40 years promoting meaningful health care reform. That Ted Kennedy.

So today while the Dems are all wringing their hands about the Massachusetts Senate seat and blaming each other, and the media is crowing about the voter's rejection of liberal values, I'm wondering why the Dems never did figure out what we wanted from them. Could we have made it any clearer?

Health care reform is essentially gone from the health care bill. It's lost any chance to control the insurance companies with competition from a public option, but does give them millions more customers by mandating coverage. We're still studying DADT, in spite of the zillions of reports and top military officials urging Obama to dump it. We're spending more money on the unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Oh...and Obama has declared his opposition to marriage rights for gay couples and his Justice Department is still filing legal briefs in support of marriage inequality in the courts.

So...Massachusetts.

Dems, voters are still looking for change. You've pissed away your mandate, but now at least you've got someone to blame for your complete absence of political will. Remember this moment. This is the day you lost both the White House and the Congress again for the next decade. Welcome back to the wilderness. It should look very familiar.

Fukitol

2010-01-19T23:57:00.007-06:00

Prop 8 supporters, Scott Brown voters, mealy-mouthed Democratic health care weenies, and Republican fucktards of every stripe:

You can have it. I give up. Just don't come crying to me later because you thought it would be more fun. When they said they were taking back the country, they didn't actually mean for you Teabaggers, white-trash Republicans, Dittoheads, and protectors of sanctity. They actually meant that you would be protecting it from us, and they would be cashing the checks.

We'll still be here, unmarried and uninsured, when you're done with our country. Just please take out the trash when you leave.

Pride Goeth. But Funnel Cake Stayeth Forever.

2010-01-19T11:42:00.007-06:00

How often do I ever post twice in the same day? Never-ish? But I wanted to write this down before I forgot. I read a post about Gay Pride in one of my favorite blogs, Be Gay About It.

I don't dispute anyone else's experience, but here's mine.

I know that among some of our gay friends this will put me squarely in the company of Hitler and Pontious Pilate. I also understand that I may sound like the love child of an unholy union between Roseanne Roseanadana and Andy Rooney.

I don't get gay pride.

Gay pride is right up there with blue-eyed pride, short pride, and funny hair pride. Pride, IMO, should be reserved for things a person actually does. I'm proud of my college education because I achieved it under the influence of three children and one brain injury. I'm proud of my wonderful kids, because I believe I had a hand in their wonderfulness.

I'm not particularly proud of my gayness. I'm not unproud either. It's merely a fact of my being. I didn't do anything to cause it and so I can't take credit for it. I like it, but I'm not any more likely to hang a Gay Pride banner off my house than I am a Right-Handed Presbyopic Pride banner.

I like a nice parade and a street party, and I love any event that causes funnel cakes to happen, so I can appreciate a Gay Pride festival. And gay people are generally fun, in a neurotic, politically correct, every-moment-is-a-potential-diversity-teaching-moment kind of a way. But a nice VultureFest or Pancake Day is just as meaningful as a Gay Pride day...unless a person is hunting her next girlfriend. In that case she's much more likely to find her at Gay Pride Day than at Pancake Day.

In Which I Find a Reader in an Odd Place

2010-01-19T11:12:00.006-06:00

Hi, DMV Lady. Thanks for your help today.

Now that I know you're here, it's going to be your responsibility to let me know if we get any of the Cairo details wrong. Oh, and in case it'll get me any perks with the State, I just want to say: I Heart Illinois.

(Hey, it worked for George Ryan. A girl can dream, can't she?)

When Sesame Street Becomes A Communist Plot

2010-01-15T22:02:00.003-06:00

The Prop 8 folks made a compelling case for discrimination this week, and provided further proof that Barney hates America:

In cross-examination, Protect Marriage lawyer David Thompson labeled Lamb a "committed liberal," citing his membership in such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women, and his financial contributions to the Public Broadcasting System.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/15/MNLG1BJ18V.DTL&type=gaylesbian#ixzz0ckE1SsPW

In Which We Keep a Child, but Lose a Cat

2010-01-15T10:39:00.005-06:00

It's been a challenging couple of weeks around here. First we had the magical exploding girlfriend with the blood pressure of 210/110 and then Katie tried to put her head through her windshield.

Thankfully, both of these potential disasters have turned out okay...Lori got on blood pressure meds and has brought her b.p. down to a sedate 125/70 and Katie's Rubinas Head of Steel turned the windshield to mush and not the other way around.

So here's the story:

Katie's been having her own trying week. She was in Tucson visiting friends over the winter break and one of them was in a fatal car accident. She stayed over for the funeral, then arrived here on Wednesday to pick up her cat and a spare...we're generous that way.

We left her here Wednesday afternoon while we went to Lori's doctor appointment. She finished eating, gathered her stuff and her cats, and headed north for her apartment in Carbondale.

We were sitting in the waiting room at the rural health clinic when I got a call from Katie, telling me she'd been in an accident and she was being taken by ambulance to Union County hospital. I asked her if she was okay and she said there was blood on her face and her head hurt.

She was pretty upset and I could hear the EMTs in the background, so I told her I'd meet her at the hospital. She said, "Mom...I've got the cats." Crap. I told her I'd still meet her at the hospital, then head back and pick up the cats from the truck.

The clinic is next door to the hospital, at the bottom of a steep hill. So I left Lori and ran up the hill. I went to the E.R. and was filling out the paperwork for Katie when a teenage girl came into the waiting room and said, "Uh, we were just at an accident by Pizza Hut and we have these cats...?"

I raised my hand. "That would be me. She's my daughter." The girl and her mother had been in the intersection when Katie had her accident and had jumped out of their car to help. Katie's driver side door had come to rest up against the truck she'd hit and the passenger door was caved in and couldn't open. The mother made soothing mother noises at Katie, then ripped the passenger door off it's hinges like a big-haired Jaws of Life. She said, "oh...you have cats. Don't worry, honey...we'll take care of them."

And they did. They brought the cats to me. I transferred Apa to my car just fine, but underestimated Porch's hysteria and let her claw her way out of my arms. We hunted around for her for a while, but she was gone. I still feel crappy about that.

I ran back up the hill to meet Katie's ambulance. They'd just arrived, and the receptionist said, "She's being triaged. Take a seat and they'll call you in a few minutes." I was thinking, Oh, lady...you don't want to make me go all Mommy on you. You'd better open the damn door, but just then they called me in. I hurried into Katie's room. She was conscious, but shaky. I petted her head and held her arm and looked her over for signs of overt damage.

She actually looked better than I expected. Her face and the front of her head were caked with dried blood and she was strapped to a backboard, but there were no bones sticking out anywhere and she still had both eyes, one nose, and a mouthful of teeth. The rest of her was wrapped in blankets, but the nurse assured me that they were all there too. She told me she'd hit her head on the windshield and broken a bottom tooth, but no other damage was apparent.

We talked while the nurse cleaned up her head wound, and finally we were both calm enough to joke a little and blow off some of the fear. She told me what had happened. She'd been driving northbound and was going through an intersection with a green light and a truck pulling a horse trailer that was travelling southbound had turned left in front of her. She was worried about whether any horses had been injured. The EMT told her that there was a cow in the trailer, not horse, and the cow was unhurt and not even particularly concerned.

By this time Lori was there. We hung around for a couple of hours while she was cleaned and x-ray and shot full of drugs, and then finally we were able to take her home. She'll be spending a couple of days with us to rest and heal and have someone change her bandages and make jokes with. We're extremely grateful and relieved that she's going to be okay. I credit her rock-like Rubinas head.

Yesterday I spoke with the other driver's insurance agent and she said he'd been ticketed and they weren't going to dispute the claim. There would be an adjuster at the wrecking yard on Friday to assess the damage and they'd cut Katie a check within a week. We went to clean out the truck yesterday afternoon and marvelled at the damage. The front end was shoved a foot back, and the windshield was shattered and bowed out at the point where her forehead had made contact with it. Yikes. It could have been so, so much worse.

A Tribute of Sorts

2010-01-10T23:50:00.006-06:00

I have this really, really long commute which, I know, is nothing next to you urban commuters. But for us out here in Nowhere, driving an hour to your job is a really, really long way. I like it though; it gives me time to gear up for and wind down from my job.

I enjoy the time: I listen to NPR or to my faux iPod, and sometimes I just listen to the quiet and let my mind wander. And today on my way home I was thinking about this:

Long ago in a land about 50 miles up the road, I discovered the Internets. It was an expensive discovery...$2.99/hour for AOL dial-up, plus long distance charges to Carbondale to connect. But my crappy overpriced AOL connection brought a whole community of lesbians into my life, which was something I would never have experienced in Alto Pass, IL, pop. 350, of whom at least 250 were over 80 years old.

My snazzy AOL dial-up connection was instrumental in the wooing of my first live-in girlfriend. We were grad students together at SIU and she would come over to do research on my computer...oh, and make out. Eventually we were able to dispense with the $2.99/hr-plus-long-distance-charges-to-Carbondale dating, move in together, and get on with the making out in earnest. That saved me a fortune.

Anyway, when I first realized that the Internet was lousy with lesbians it was an epiphany. Coming out had been hard for me, a single mommy in a small town with no other gay people that I knew of. Lesbian chat rooms and lesbian message boards made me swoon with the realization that I was a part of a larger community. I made a lot of online friends and a few real live friends. I met some people, I slept with a few of them (but not all, in spite of what you've heard), and I enjoyed being part of this group of smart, funny, supportive women.

That was back in the 1990s, when PCs weren't yet in every home and before every idiot with a cell phone could send pictures of their genitalia whizzing around the earth at a gazillion megafucks an hour. Back then, computers were mostly still in the hands of people who could spell with real words.

By the beginning of the 21st century, however, computers were in every home, and the chat rooms and message boards began to fill up with, well...morons. People devoted to proving Godwin's Law:

(From Wikipedia)

Godwin's Law "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

Chat rooms and message boards were still places where nice people and interesting conversations could be found, but they were increasingly home to trolls and nutbags.

Enter Webbie.

In the beginning, before I even knew Lori, Webbie was Lori's own personal Internet stalker. I was vaguely aware of her and her story...she had apparently had some sort of medical mishap that had caused her some brain damage and left her physically crippled and a little crazy, with very poor impulse control. Because the denizens of the AOL message boards were an incestuous community, everyone knew someone who knew someone in real life. Thus, I got the lowdown on Webbie. She was a Texan named was Lisa Tr**sd*ll, who had once been an attractive, athletic young woman before some sort of brain injury had left her partially paralyzed and more than a little crazy. I'd seen her crazy in action; she had a pattern of attaching herself to the smartest people on every message board and hounding them with nastiness and paranoid accusations until they threw up their hands, left AOL, and created private message boards elsewhere. That was bad for AOL, but good for the rest of us. Those refugees created communities filled with wonderful, disparate groups whose only common trait was that they'd been stalked by Webbie. Over time the origins of the groups faded, and they just became groups of friends.

I was not very involved in online groups at that point. During that period of my life I was raising small children, moving around the country with my military girlfriend, and going to school for my Med Tech degree. I was still reading the message boards, but not very frequently. After my breakup with the military girlfriend I had a chance meeting with Lori which ultimately blossomed into what we affectionately call The Love That Won't Shut Up.

In addition to discovering the woman who was to become my life partner and best friend, I also acquired her stalker. Now the deranged Texan proved her ability to multitask by stalking us both. She trolled, she flamed, she stealthed, and she made us the center of her universe. For. Years. Wither we goest, so goeth Webbie. Everywhere. Message boards, chat rooms, blogs...you name it and she was there with us, with bells on.

Finally, even we, the tireless Kwevs, gave up. After 12 years on AOL message boards, we threw in the towel, deleted AOL from our computers and rode off into the sunset to our other (private) communities. I thought our Webbie years were finally behind us.

Until now. She's ba-a-a-c-k.

So all that history was just to bring me to this one point:

Why? What in the world could we possibly have that draws her to us after all these years?
Youth and beauty? Not so much anymore.
Wealth? Not hardly.
Lively banter? Maybe...that's pretty much what we do best. And it's free, so that's a plus. But really...I don't delude myself by thinking a clever turn of phrase can't be found elsewhere. Perhaps even in Texas.

So today on my way home, I was thinking about the phenomenon that is Webbie and her incredible stamina. She has toted around her festering dungheap of irrational nonspecific hatred for more than a decade. The object of her obsession has changed more than a dozen times in the last 12 years, but the intensity of her wrathful focus has never wavered. And oddly, perversely, I have to sort of admire that. Say what you will about Webbie, she's not a quitter.

So, Webbie...this is my tribute to you. You may be crazy, but I've grown accustomed to your particular techniques in exercising it, and like a cross between a rottweiler and a chihuahua, your slobbering full-throated growls and incessent shrill yapping have become the background music to our history together. You are our Kodak commercial: you're the Times of Our Lives.

And oddly, I feel a pang of nostalgia. I've missed you.

P.S. We're on Facebook. Friend me, okay?

Winter in Cairo

2010-01-09T20:19:00.007-06:00

I wish I'd had the camera with me this morning.

At least once a week we take a ten mile drive across the bridge over the Ohio River to buy gas and kerosene in the pretty little town of Wickliffe, Kentucky. Wickliffe overlooks the Mississippi River about two miles south of its confluence with the Ohio. Cairo sits right at that confluence, which gives us a bird's eye view of the very cool phenomenon that occurs when the waters of the two rivers meet.

Generally what you see is a distinct line where the brown water of the Mississippi runs smack-dab into the blue-green water of the Ohio before they combine and head for New Orleans. That dark green patch of town hugging the shoreline of the Ohio is Cairo. Pretty view, huh?

It's so pretty, in fact, that whatever else we happen to be talking about, it's become part of our driving-to-Kentucky ritual for one or the other of us to spontaneously declare our love for this place every single time we get to about the middle of the bridge, at the spot where the view is maximized. Either it's the water or the barges or the foliage (or the goofballs who somehow managed to drive their camo-clad trucks out into the river before it rose and left them stranded on a little island), but every trip in every season has had something about it that's made us stop in mid-conversation to congratulate each other on having the excellent sense and good fortune to be living here.

Of all the seasons, winter in Southern Illinois is not generally the prettiest. We're too far south to get big drifty winter wonderlands of snow, so we mostly get dead trees (which have their own sort of stark beauty), but we did get some snow this week and the sub-zero temperatures have kept most of it on the ground. So imagine this scene covered in snow, and imagine the Mississippi River looking like a big white frozen slushie being poured into the clear blue Ohio River. Now imagine intrepid little pilot boats mightily pushing their strings of barges up river through the ice. That was our view this morning.

I think I'll try to get down to Fort Defiance tomorrow (that point of land poking out into the exact spot where the rivers meet in the photo) and climb the tower to get a picture.

Still Life with Melon - II

2009-12-28T20:41:00.003-06:00

Someone needs to water the cat.

Happy Dies Natalis Solis Invictus

2009-12-21T21:35:00.006-06:00

I'm pleased to report that, just as it has since the dawn of time, the sun has remained unconquered (despite efforts by NOM, SarahPAC, Fox News and the GOP) and will once again begin rising earlier and staying up later. Yay!

However you celebrate this "birthday of the unconquered sun" -- be it with Druidic fir trees, Mithraic gift-giving and caroling, Saturnalia feasting, or invoking the elvish spirit of De Goede Sint Sinterklass like the chilly Germanic pagans of old -- we can all be grateful for that good old 23° 26' axial tilt that has been the cause of mid-winter celebrations of all sorts by human beings through the ages.

Happy Ramadan, Cool Yule, Blessed Bodhi Day, Diwali Mubarak, Happy Chanukah, Blessed Solstice, Merry Christmas ... and all the others I've missed.

Make the Yuletide Gay.

Spam-a-lot

2009-12-20T14:14:00.002-06:00

For the time being, until some better solution presents itself (like Blogger putting some controls on this crap, for instance) comment moderation has been turned on. It's just too hard to track down all the phishing and spam comments and remove them after they've posted. It sucks to have to do this, but we don't need Cialis, and I'm pretty sure the rest of you don't, either. If you do, you're reading the wrong blog. : )

Mysteries of Nature

2009-12-17T00:22:00.002-06:00

How does a ten pound cat gack up a twenty five pound hairball? Not that it ever happens at my house....

Still Life With Melon

2009-12-14T11:58:00.001-06:00

I'm going to have to repot this. It has seriously outgrown the pot it's in.

Crimestoppers!

2009-12-12T17:54:00.004-06:00

The other day we stopped at our local gas station, the Cut-Mart, so Lori could buy a pack of cigarettes before we went to her Christmas party in Evansville. The Cut-Mart is a constant source of jokes in our house; it's on the bad side of town and is the site of frequent knife fights. If we need to stop for gas after the sun goes down? We don't.

But on Saturday afternoon the Cut-Mart is a perfectly viable gas station with an excellent little deli that makes some of the best fried chicken on the planet. While Lori went in to buy her cigarettes, I sat in the car and scoped out the parking lot for potential entertainment. A Cairo parking lot is generally more interesting than anything on prime time tv.

There was a car idling in the parking lot next to me, with a driver who also appeared to be waiting for someone. After a minute or two, another car pulled up next to him and a happy smiling guy jumped out of his car and into the passenger seat of the waiting car. Maybe a minute passed, and then he got out of that car, got back in his own, and drove off.

Okay...I was born in 1963, which made me a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As was the custom among moderately bad teenagers at the time, I imbibed in all the usual illicit drugs. So you'd think I'd be a little faster on the uptake. But Lori got back in the car and I told her what she'd missed and asked her if maybe that had been a drug deal. She rolled her eyes at my cluelessness and said, "Yeah. That was a drug deal."

My only defense was that in the 1970s we had better manners and would invite our dealer in for a Coke and brownies. Don't judge me....it was the suburbs.

So now that I know what I'm looking for, I've graduated from being one of those horrible middle-aged women who yell, "Hey you kids! Get out of my flowers!" to being that horrible middle-aged women peeping through her windows looking for possible criminal activity in the park.

I'd like to be all Elmore Leonard, but I worry I might be more Gladys Kravitz. Can a housecoat possibly not be in my future?

Cairo Hearts Teh Gay

2009-12-11T15:26:00.007-06:00

I'm sure this is horridly un-PC and it embarrasses me a little, but you know me...I'm sort of socially challenged anyway, so consider the source.

For most of my life I've lived in communities that were majority Caucasian. This is probably the first time I've lived anywhere where the population was evenly split between white folks and black folks. When we moved here my coworkers acted like I was insane, like we had just moved to the bad side of Baghdad, but actually, it's been very nice. People, both black and white, have gone out of their way to make us feel welcome, even in the face of the obvious Gay.

When we moved here in August the first thing we did was apply to buy the municipally-owned field next to our house, The city was happy to oblige; anything that gets property back onto the tax roles is well received in Cairo. I had to make several visits to City Hall to drop off bids and deposit money, and then Lori and I went down there to sign the deed on the property.

The woman working the counter at City Hall is probably in her late 60s and very Southern. We're right across the river from Kentucky and a lot of the locals have that air of antebellum Southern manners and sensibilities. When I went in to drop off the final payment on the property she told me she had written the deed as a joint property with right of survivorship, like she would with a married couple.

She clearly understands the nature of our relationship and isn't worked up about it. And really, that's been the predominant attitude here. The gay isn't scary or dangerous or whatever else homophobes think to justify their -isms. Our neighbors understand that we're a couple and behave accordingly. In conversation, they ask after Lori, invite us to join local civic and social groups, compliment our yard and our pets, and try to catch a glimpse in our windows. Like people anywhere do with their neighbors.

Like I said, this is my first time living in a black community. There are a lot of churches here, and a lot of churchgoers. I think I had a sense that we might encounter some hostility with regard to our openly lesbian relationship. I've read repeatedly that blacks in general support a lot of liberal causes but draw the line at Teh Gay, since many religious people think it's a fast track to hell and feel the need to either distance themselves from it or pontificate at it. But either the local churches teach tolerance and diversity, or the local citizenry have too much on their own plates to worry about ours.

So the moral of the story is that I like it here. I feel welcome, and any oddness is not due to the gay, it's due to the cultural disparity between southern blacks and northern whites, which is much more interesting as far as I'm concerned.

So I'm likely to post a lot of stories about the community, but I hope they're taken in the spirit intended. It's a friendly community filled with kind people and I love it here. I've liked almost every person I've encountered here (Except the melon guy. What's up with him?), but they certainly have ways about them that leave me scratching my head at times and as always, I'll chronicle them here.

God Loves Me. Ask Anyone.

2009-12-10T19:58:00.006-06:00

I'm going to preface this by saying I'm one tiny inconvenience from a full-blown meltdown. I think it's a combination of PMS, lack of exercise, and my cheap knock-off faux Lamictal. But regardless (or irregardless, as we say here in the Lower Midwest), I'm feeling a little ragged.

So this morning I woke up to a couple of minor inconveniences that put me into a deep blue funk. It was cold in the bathroom, there was no half-and-half for the coffee, and the second I turned my back on Cooper she gulped down half a notepad. We had a wrestling match for the other half and for a second I think she thought about biting me, until I growled viciously and clamped the hand that wasn't in her mouth firmly over both nostrils.

I finally yanked the bedraggled soggy ex-notepad from her mouth, went into the ice cold bathroom with my unhalf-and-halfed black coffee, and showered for the approximately two minutes that our recalcitrant water heater was willing to oblige.

I growled once more at Cooper on my way out, just because, then grabbed my book and keys and headed to work. Early. So I could attend a Corporate mandated meeting designed to make us more fucking happy at our fucking jobs. When I turned around after locking the door, I realized there was someone sitting on my front stairs.

I see this guy all the time. He's an older black man, walks with a cane, and spends a significant portion of every day sitting on the marble steps of the Post Office across the street. Today he was sitting on my steps with his cane, staring off into space. As I was locking the door, he turned around and said, "Good morning, Young Lady. I was dear, dear friends with Miss Kristie (the previous owner of our house, and a story unto herself), and I am very sorry that she has moved away."

I said good morning back and walked around him to the bottom of the stairs, hoping he wasn't going to be crazy, since I was already cutting it close for getting to the meeting about the fucking happiness at work. He introduced himself, and I said, "I'm Evelyn. Nice to meet you."

And he said, "I know. I've already heard about you."

Uh-oh.

Then he said, "You know...a person's sexuality is not important. It's what's in their heart. That's what's important."

Ummm...BIG uh-oh? Are we going to discuss sexuality?

He said, "I'm 74 years old and I'm a pastor. I don't smoke or drink, I never robbed nor raped nobody, and I try to help out any way I can. God don't care who you love, he just cares if you have a good heart."

And really...I'm an atheist, and this even warmed my heart. I was settling in for a feel-good "We are the World" conversation.

And then he asked me for $3.00. Or stamps.

My heart was so warmed that I gave him the whole book of stamps. If I'd had $3.00, I would have given him that too.

He should go into sales.

A PSA for Bibliophiles

2009-12-10T10:41:00.006-06:00

If you're a person who likes books, check out Paperbackswap.com. It's a site where people exchange books by listing their books that they're willing to give away for free, and get credits to use to get other people's books. The whole transaction takes place for the price of book rate postage. When you join they start you out with two free book credits, so you can order a couple right off the bat.

I discovered them a few months back and have gotten rid of a huge pile of books I'll never read again nor inflict on my loved ones, and I've acquired a huge pile I'm really excited about. Fiction, nonfiction, paperback and hardcover...they're all free. It's a godsend to fiscally-challenged book nerds.

If you do happen to join, please use my e-mail address, UALabGeek@gmail.com, in the "referred by" section and I'll get a couple of free credits too. (You'll get your reward in heaven, or I'll invite you over for pie. Your choice. But the pie is pretty damn good, and your chances of getting into heaven might be a little iffy. )

One interesting caveat, though. The gay and lesbian section is also the heading under which anti-gay and lesbian books are found. I was browsing through the available books and between volumes of lesbian humor, lesbian mysteries and lesbian erotica I found stories about how much God hates lesbians. Oh, the irony.

A Dead Horse Beaten

2009-12-10T00:15:00.004-06:00

The cop story:

I've been sort of blogjammed since the cop incident. We moved, and then I got busy doing new house things, and then...Officer Gibson.

In the immediate aftermath of my encounter with Officer Gibson, I did indeed travel all over Southern Illinois...over and over, in fact... to try to find some governing body who would punish him. I spoke to the state police, the state's attorney, and a variety of interested and/or knowledgeable people in law and law enforcement.

I did finally find the right person and she outlined a strategy to get my new friend Officer Gibson out of his patrol car and maybe into an unemployment line. Beyond that, though...not so much. He and the municipality he worked for could be sued for violating my civil rights, but not penalized in a criminal court. There's a lot of leeway afforded to police officers in the manner in which they arrest and detain people.

And in the short term, part of the resolution strategy outlined by the state's attorney was that I was to avoid telling this story to too many people. I interpreted that to mean probably not telling the entire Internets, so as of August 25th, I was pretty much dead in the water as a blogger. I couldn't tell the only story I needed to tell, so I couldn't really tell any story at all. I was stuck behind this boulder of a story and couldn't figure out a way to get around it.

But this morning seemed like as good a time as any to exorcise this demon and get back on track. I had been to court, told my story, and left it in the hands of a higher legal authority...and presumably they're dealing with it now. Whether they are or not, I don't feel any obligation to keep my mouth shut any longer, so here it is.

But on my way home tonight I was thinking about this in the context of the little moments that change the direction of your life. Maybe not change your actual life, but open a window to a view a person might not ever see, or even know they ought to see.

Ten years ago I got hit in the temple with an errantly thrown softball, and it instantly and radically changed my life forever. Five months ago I was handcuffed and bullied on the side of a dark highway. I didn't commit a crime, nor did I do any of the things that I would have typically expect to cause such a result. What I did was have the bad luck to be in the car that a crazy cop pulled over to shake down for cash, and the bad fortune to be both local and bothersome. It was the same amount of randomness as the softball and just as impersonal.

So. Power. You never notice it until you lose it.

In my real life, I'm a force to be reckoned with. I'm fairly smart and verbally nimble. I'm not fearless, but I'm brave enough to stand up for myself. I'm college-educated and middle class, and I expect to be treated with respect.

So when some big bruiser with a gun and a pair of handcuffs takes that away from me in an instant, it's a shock. There's a "maybe you're confused about who I am" moment, followed by a suspicion that this is happening because of who I am, and not in spite of it. Maybe if I wasn't a person who looks an asshole cop in the eye and says, "wtf??", he would have strutted around, metaphorically pissed on my bumper and drove off.

And then what? Well...I wouldn't have bruised wrists, a ticket for crossing the white line, and a burning feeling of almost-shame at having been so easily stripped of my power by some redneck moron who doesn't know one tenth of the things I know...and doesn't need to, since he has that gun-and-handcuff thing going for him.

So I'm still a middle-aged, middle class white woman with a couple of college degrees, and I don't for a moment imagine that I can understand what it must be like to be a person who expects to be randomly and gratuitously harassed for the crime of being, what...alive, maybe? But I certainly do have a better sense of the hopeless anger and frustration that comes with realizing that personal power only exists if everyone remembers to follow the same rule book. It doesn't matter how special I think I am if the guy with the handcuffs doesn't think so too.

But the silver lining of this experience is that it gives me another way to interpret and understand the world. When life is going according to the plan, whatever the plan happens to be, it feels linear, like a drive on a road. Follow it, and it will take you where you mean to go.

But when something like this happens, it makes it clear that life isn't a road, it's a field...every direction has some sort of value, and it will take you somewhere, even if it's not a place you thought you wanted to see. And those unintended detours add new color and nuance to our internal picture of the world.

I would always prefer things to work the way I want. But I can (grudgingly) see the value of, as my mother used to say, upsetting the apple cart. When we restack the apples they have an entirely different look, and a whole bunch of different apples are available for inspection.

In Which a White Laboratory Professional Gets Treated Like a Black Person, and Doesn't Care For It. Not One Bit.

2009-12-09T10:59:00.013-06:00

I hate to juxtapose two unrelated topics when it's been so freakin' long since I posted on even one topic, but I have two things on my mind, and well...it's my blog. I can juxtapose my heart out and no one can stop me. Ha.

Thing one:

Last August I got pulled over on I-57 on my way home from work.

It was midnight-ish. I was driving 62 in a 65, wearing my seat belt, with all lights on the truck in good operating order...I knew I was in good shape. I saw the lights behind me and pulled onto the shoulder. The cop got out of his car, approached my window, and asked for my license, registration and insurance card. I wasn't sweating it because as an evening shifter who frequently comes home from work at about the time the bars close, I've been pulled over a few times on random drunk checks and I assumed this was that.

After a few minutes he brought all my paperwork back and said, "Have you been drinking tonight, Ma'am?" I told him no, I was on my way home from work at the hospital.

He stood there at my window for a while. He shined his flashlight into my truck. He stood there some more. Finally, I said, "What?"
And he replied, "You veered over the white line."
"Which white line?"
"That one", he said, pointing at the shoulder.
"No I didn't," says I, indignantly. "There's a rumble strip over there. If I had crossed the line, I would have rumbled. But I didn't. So I didn't cross the line."

At this point, my routine traffic stop got weird. The cop said, "Don't fucking lie to me! Get out of the vehicle!" I still thought he might think I was drinking, so I got out and prepared myself for a field sobriety test. What I wasn't prepared for was to be spun around, pushed against the side of the truck, and cuffed behind my back.

The cop continued yelling. "Don't fucking lie to me! Do you know what that is? That's obstruction of justice! You just bought yourself a ticket to jail for lying to a police officer!" Then walked me back to his car and pushed me into the back seat.

Did I mention I've never been arrested in my life? I've never been handcuffed, never even been in the back of a police car except the time my girlfriend forgot to pick my up at the Cape Fear Crocs game and a Fayetteville cop invited me and the kids to sit in his car to get out of the rain until she showed up.

So I was shocked into silence by the whole thing. I said, "You're kidding!" when he put the cuffs on, but that was it. So there I was, sitting silently in the back of the police car while he continued to yell at me, thinking what the hell? Can this actually be happening?

"Do you want to go to jail? Because that's where you're going. Lying to a police officer is a serious crime! And you won't see a judge before tomorrow, so no one is going to come down and get you out!

In between threats, Cop was studying a small computer on the dashboard next to him.

He asked me, "Do you still live at this address?"
I told him no, we'd moved to Cairo twelve days earlier and I hadn't yet changed my license.

"Don't fucking lie to me! There are no white people in Cairo! What's your real address?"

I gave him the address in Cairo and said, "Look. You can follow me home if you want, and watch me stick the key in the door."

He went back to his computer.

"Are you related to these people?" he finally said as he swivelled the screen around so I could see it in the back seat. "They're my kids." I said.

He ran his finger down the screen and rattled of a list of their various (traffic) crimes. Then he said, "What are you doing about this?"
"Not a damn thing. They're adults. They can take care of their own stuff."
"You're not a very good mother, are you?" he said.

Okay...NOW I was pissed. Handcuffs, insults, screaming accusations...ok. But denigrate my parenting? Oh hell no. Don't even go there. The next time he offered to take me to jail I said, "Fine. Have at it. If people go to jail for crossing the white line, then get on it. I'm ready."

He didn't reply, and continued studying his computer screen for a few more minutes. Finally, he took out his ticket book and wrote me a ticket for improper lane usage, and wrote "Lying to a police officer" in the comments section.

He got out of the car, opened the back door, pulled me out, removed the cuffs, and told me I could go. He was a big guy, so I had to look up to see his face. I said, "What's your name?"
"Officer Gibson, ma'am."
"Officer Gibson, are you a state trooper?"
"No ma'am. I'm an Ullin city police officer."
(What was with the "ma'am" all the sudden? Five minutes ago I was a pathological line-crossing liar. Now I'm "ma'am"?)

I looked up at him and said, "Officer Gibson, I'll be back in the morning to see your boss. Bastard." I was glad my voice wasn't shaking.

I walked back to the truck on quivery rubber legs and thought I'll be goddamned if I'll stumble in front of this bastard. Then I got in the truck, buckled up, turned on my turn signal, pulled out onto the highway, and cried like a girl all the way home.

Six months later, I still think about it every night when I come home from work.

(I was wrong...I won't tell the other story today. I have to take a shower and go to work now, but I'll get back to it later.)

There. Now it's official. I'm senile.

2009-11-19T18:45:00.003-06:00

Tonight on the drive home I scared myself. A lot.

I've been driving this 60 mile commute since mid-August and I know I-57 between Cairo and Marion like the back of my hand. I can drive it in the rain, in the fog, before dawn, after dark and, up until tonight, even when I'm deadly tired. Tonight I got lost coming home. Really lost, like "where the hell am I and where is home?!?" lost. If it weren't for the nifty direction finder in my car I might still be out there somewhere getting ready to cry.

I'm still not sure how it happened. It's dark and I was tired, but I know my exit. The highway curves to the left and the exit veers to the right. It takes a long curve to the right, then a curve to the left and comes to a stop. Then you turn left onto Route 3 and you're there. But tonight when the highway curved left and I veered right, taking the same long curves right and left, and came to a stop just like every other night, the left turn put me on little highway I've never seen and there was nothing familiar anywhere. I finally turned into an old pot-hole ridden gas station I've never seen before in my life and turned around. I found my way back to the highway, not sure which way to go, and took a guess. The next sign I saw said I still had seven miles to go to Cairo. At that point I was so confused I wondered if I'd somehow managed to drive across the bridge into Missouri without realizing it. There was still nothing that looked familiar. There were lots of lights I don't remember ever seeing and railroad overpasses that seemed completely unfamiliar and out of place. My directional computer thingie said that I was, indeed, still headed south, and the signs kept saying I was headed for Cairo, but nothing looked right to me until my exit came (again?) and it was exactly the exit I always take. But it was also exactly the exit I just took, except this time it went where it was supposed to.

I still don't know what happened, but whatever it was I didn't like it.

Hellooooo?

2009-11-11T20:29:00.003-06:00

So, where the hell have we been, anyway? Obviously not blogging. We've been reading, baking cookies, walking the dogs, hanging out on Facebook, working, commuting, settling into the new house and generally not being very interesting. Certainly not blog interesting. I feel guilty about it, if that counts, so I thought I'd make a token attempt to post something in November, what with it being NaBloWhatever.

On the upside, we're loving our house and our town. We're as settled in and unpacked as we can be until we erect the wall-o'-bookshelves; and aside from painting Ev's work-out room there aren't any other inside projects that need done right now, so we're in the idea gathering stage until some need reveals itself. Ev's big project has been clearing and cleaning up the lots we bought adjoining the house and wow, there was a lot of extra yard under that mess! We've been sneaking the dismantled chicken coop and other sundry trash from the yard to various dumpsters around town under cover of darkness, where we usually meet up with people who are taking things back out of them to sell for scrap. It's sort of like a social event ... but not. Burning shit in the yard was much more efficient!

Ev's also been collecting hundred-year-old bricks for the upcoming patio project. The really cool ones are heavy as hell and stamped with the year and manufacturer, so those are the ones she watches for when a house or building comes down (which they do with saddening frequency. We just lost three more historic downtown buildings last week). She and Pickle find the good rubble piles on their long walks (the last one was about six miles worth along the top of the levee clear to the Mississippi river) and then we go back (again under cover of darkness) to load bricks in the truck. I'm not sure anyone cares, but the clandestine nature of the scavenging makes it more fun. What can I say? We're easily entertained.

On the downside, Ev's been working way too much overtime way too often, Cooper's ear needed surgery for another hematoma, the Sebring has gone rapidly from being my dream car to a problem child to a goddamn mechanical albatross around my neck that spends as much time in the shop as on the road, and we finally had to put our sweet old Sage to sleep at the end of the summer. All in all, life balances out, but I wish it didn't feel the need to swing from one extreme to another in the process.

And I'm really really disappointed in President Obama.

Death is lonely, Hunter

2009-11-10T20:17:00.003-06:00

Today in Rhode Island, a bill that would allow same-sex couples to make burial decisions about each other passed the state Senate unanimously and the Assembly overwhelmingly, only to be vetoed by Gov. Don Carcieri on the grounds that it is a "disturbing erosion" of the "principles surrounding traditional marriage."

In an almost flawlessly executed catch-22 with a double twisting dismount, Carcieri stated that "he was also uncertain 'how it would be ascertained in many circumstances whether [a couple] had been in a relationship for year' since there is 'no official or recognized form'' of domestic partnership agreement in Rhode Island."

Ooooh, you're good, Gov. You've caught us. Our days of making fun-filled funeral arrangements in Rhode Island, and paying for the burial or cremation of any old body we want to, just for the hell of it, are over.

You can read about the veto here:

Joe.My.God

Newsblog

As the comments pointed out, there will probably be an override of the veto, but there's no overriding the hatred that led to it ... couched, as it was, in good intentions about family and tradition.

One of the many places that Carcieri's argument falls apart is that, in many cases, we're all we've got. For some of us, there is no family who wants anything to do with us, dead or alive. Others of us have families waiting in the wings for just such an occasion so they can punish our partners. Some of us have families from whom the only protection we and our partners have is each other. We don't want our screwed up families making the decisions our life partners should be making. Oh, silly me, that's the point, isn't it? To stand between us and those basic rights we want.

I've been wracking my brain, but I can't think of any group of people in the United States who were prevented by law from burying their dead. If we are to have no rights in life, can we not, at the very least, be afforded some small measure of dignity when we're dead?

2009-10-04T08:54:00.002-05:00

There's an excellent post at Jesus' General this morning, so in case he isn't already on your "must read" feeds, you ought to go and have a look at it. It's exactly what we've been saying here at our house with increasing frequency.

"I don't think they would get very far, but that doesn't necessarily deter extremists, does it? The hatred of and opposition to Bill Clinton was nearly as strong as what's being directed at Barack Obama, but it was under Clinton that we saw the growth of a violent militia movement. It was the militias --- extremist, racist and theocratic --- that gave birth to Timothy McVeigh and the worst terror attack in the United States before Al Qaeda's 9/11 strike."

Just last night I was saying to Ev that, considering the messages coming out of the right these days, they might just as well be broadcasting from bin Laden's cave. With elected government officials suggesting secession and coups, calling the duly-elected president of the United States an enemy of humanity, subverting foreign policy without censure by (if you'll pardon the recently overused phrase) going roque in Honduras and media personalities encouraging citizens to root for America to fail and celebrate when it does, how much more aid and comfort does the enemy need? Blankets and money drops? If not actual treason, this kind of rhetoric certainly falls under the definition of sedition.

The first amendment guarantees any crackpot the right to free speech, no matter how lunatic that speech may be, but as Ruth Calvo points out at Firedog Lake:

"While our usually deluded wingers are comfortable working against the public interest, outright sedition is a new tactic. While Perry and Pawlenty espouse the virtues of secession, actual interference with U.S. foreign policy is treason of a more active variety."

Whether or not the "Chinese curse" was ever actually uttered in China, it's sentiment is certainly applicable. I have lived in interesting times and I don't care for it. I remember 9/11. I also remember 11/22, 4/4, 6/5, 5/4 and 11/27. Once I start ticking off the dates of all the interesting times I've lived through --- from the Kennedys to Kent State, from MLK to Harvey Milk, from anti-war protests to Al Qaeda, it's hard to know where to stop.

I'm not old enough to have lived through McCarthyism, but I hear those were interesting times, as well. So, too, were the years between 1861 and 1865. Those are years about which some of our illustrious leaders and pundits might like to take a refresher course.

There must have been some pretty heated rhetoric following the Republican victory in the election of 1860. Heated enough to cause the secession of eleven states and bring about the deadliest war in American history --- one that would cost the lives of 620,000 American soldiers and untold numbers of civilian men, women and children.

I believe there truly are enemies of humanity in our midst, but they are not sitting in the White House. They are sitting in the United States Capitol, collecting a paycheck from American citizens while they thwart and obstruct the current administration's efforts to undo the damage done by the previous administration and decades of unrepentant, unrestrained, unfettered, deregulated corporate greed and financial mismanagement. They are being sponsored by corporations and exorbitantly compensated by a megalomaniacal Australian billionaire to broadcast 24 hours a day from the studios of Fox News.

They are preaching from pulpits, twittering terrorist threats and organizing armed overthrows of the government in basements in Oklahoma.

I've given up trying to figure out the why of it. Maybe it's fear, maybe it's racism, maybe it's religious fanaticism, maybe it's holding onto political power, maybe it's plain old-fashioned greed ... maybe it's simply human nature to hate and fear and be self-absorbed and self-interested to the exclusion of what's good for the planet or humanity as a whole. It no longer matters. Just like it doesn't matter what caused your brain cancer once you have it. What matters is how to get rid of it.

What I, as a tax paying citizen of the United States, would like to know is this: why is this being allowed to continue unchecked? You can't legislate rational thinking, but you can certainly uphold laws that protect the president and the government from assassination threats, treason and sedition. I would like to know why people are being allowed to carry firearms to a presidential speech in 2009, when four short years ago you couldn't attend one without first signing a loyalty oath.I would like to know why outright acts of sedition and hate speech are being ignored, and why threats against the president are not being prosecuted by any of our various and sundry law enforcement agencies.

Stupidity and swaggering bullshit is one thing, but this has crossed the line and become something else altogether.

People

2009-08-18T08:17:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I spent an hour squabbling with the phone company over our bad connection. Finally, when my voice apparently faded away completely and the woman from Verizon was saying, "Hello? Hello? Can you call me back from a different phone?" I gave up.

We live kitty-corner from the City Hall, so I walked over there to see if maybe they had a pay phone. The City Manager greeted me and said, "Hey! How are our newest residents doing! Are you all moved in?"

I laughed a little at that idea and told him I wish, but no...we're still threading our way between the boxes.

I explained my phone woe and asked if they had a pay phone at the City Hall. He said no, and asked me if pay phones still even exist...they're pretty much antiques now. The clerk offered me the use of her cell phone and I made a couple of calls, then I asked them about the local phone service.

"AT&T is the land-line provider and Verizon is the only cell service that gets a signal here.", said City Manager.

"Really? No one else has service here? Are they planning to?"

"No", he said, "You gotta have people for that. We ain't got any people."

At first I thought he meant you have to have important people who will lobby with state government and utility companies for better infrastructure and services, but after a minute it dawned on me that he really meant what he had said literally. We have no people. Cairo is a town that went from a population of thirty thousand in the 1960s to twenty five hundred today. That's a loss of more than 90% of it's population in 40 years.

We have no people. In my head, "people" is turning into a word that should be capitalized. The Holy Grail of dying small towns in the Midwest. People.

The last thing he said to me when I was leaving was, "If you know any people looking to move to a nice little town, you tell 'em to come here. We need people."

Well, People?

What Was I Thinking?

2009-08-17T17:07:00.004-05:00

I got up this morning and thought I might work out. Then I carried 32 boxes of books out of the shed. Now I think I might lay down instead. How the mighty have fallen.

Always Thinkin'

2009-08-17T01:17:00.004-05:00

Today we drove to Columbia, MO to deliver 7 of the ducks to their new caregiver, Fritz. I avoid the word "owner" because if you've spent any time with ducks, you know better about who owns whom.

We had a tasty housewarming breakfast/lunch with Fritz and Ann (With an "e"? I forgot to ask.), a fun but too brief conversation about politics, and then we drove home as empty nesters (heh). On the way home we were discussing our second favorite topic: how much we hate conservative talk radio nutbags and what interesting things they manage to cobble together into a conspiracy theory, such as:

Vince Foster, dead friend of Democratic President. Marilyn Monroe, dead lover of a Democratic President. BOTH DEAD. Coincidence? Could they have been killed for what they knew? Or could they actually be the SAME PERSON??

Consider this: they were both known to hobnob with people in their respective president's inner circle, yet they have never been photographed together. Why? And what of Lorena Hickok? Is it any coincidence that she's dead too?

Clearly, the Democrats have systematically worked to eliminate anyone who could expose their Communistic intentions, sometimes waiting until their victims were in their nineties to strike. We demand a Senatorial panel be convened to look into this, and articles of impeachment be drawn up for John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt and of course the nefarious Clintons, all of whom have shown signs of Socialistic homosexual tendencies. Deceased defendants should not be shown leniency, as they would certainly be murdering your grandmother via their Death Panels if given the opportunity.

A nice paranoid conspiracy theory is essential to deflecting attention from actual issues, and instead drawing Democrats into a baffling morass of absurdity. Don't have any way to counter single-payer health care? Let's talk about the President's birth certificate.

For some reason, Democrats fall for this over and over again: whenever they're in danger of actually confronting the issues that got them elected in the first place, a well-placed Vince Foster, Monica Lewinski, Kenyan birth certificate and/or death panel can bring a policy debate to it's knees.

How can a party that's smart enough to force the Democrats onto the defensive over and over be dumb enough to propose Sarah Palin as the fresh new face of American politics? Because they think were not smart enough to pay attention to the life and death issues we'll be confronted with for the rest of our lives.

Screw the birth certificate. I don't care if he was born on the moon, if Obama can get us health care AND civil rights in his first term. If we get bogged down again and let this oportunity pass, I'll volunteer to be on the Death Panel the ends up killing Sarah Palin's grandmother myself. Its the least I can do for my country.

The Adventure Begins

2009-08-11T07:57:00.002-05:00

Well, this is it.

Today will be our last official day living in the place that's been our home since we moved to Southern Illinois three and a half years ago. I won't miss renting, and I won't miss our landlord, but I'll miss all the prettiness in our big yard and I'll miss the ducks. I won't miss Ev having to work so hard to keep the mower and weedwhacker and chainsaw running to keep it pretty, but I'll miss the bonfires; and, for at least this winter until we figure out how to convert the fireplace from a coal-burner, I'll miss the fireplace. I won't miss the nasty goddamn above-ground pool/mosquito brooder the landlord has stubbornly refused to remove, or his crappy trailer parked behind our house, or his junked truck parked in the yard, or the rutted gravel driveway he refuses to repair. In short, I won't miss paying to live in a place where we're at someone else's mercy.

I'm excited about our new house and looking forward to what comes next for us, but the whole ritual of taking apart a house, and handling and packing every item in it, is always bittersweet for me. I have several things that belonged to my parents and grandparents, so I think about them while I'm packing those things ... and then I handle all that Ev and I brought with us from other times and other relationships, and all that we've acquired together, and I think about our personal histories and our history together.

I get into a whole "circle of yife" space, which sort of inevitably leads to spending a portion of the packing time thinking about mortality, and what sums up a life, and what all this stuff I'm packing carefully against breakage is really worth in the grand sceme of things. Eventually, it will be a huge burden on our kids, to whom most of it will be yard sale fodder. I wonder what they'll hang onto? I hung onto Grandmother's crockery and a coffee cup from a Santa Fe Railroad dining car, a wooden medical kit with some syringes Grandaddy used to vaccinate his cattle, Mamaw's sugar bowl and Mother's sewing machine. My dad's ashes have been living on our bookshelf for five years now, trying to make their way back to South Padre Island. A combined 438 years of life and acquiring stuff, summed up in a box of photos and a dozen or so physical items. It gives one pause.

I woke up this morning thinking about the little blue dress my mom made for me when I was a flower girl at my cousin's wedding at the age of five. It was a beautiful little dress and my mom packed it away carefully in layers of tissue paper and saved it for nearly fifty years. She also saved many of our childhood toys ... special dolls and such ... intending for my sister and I to have them someday. When Mom got too ill to live on her own, my sister and I divided up the tasks. I took Mom to Arizona to stay with me until my sister could sell her house and bring the few remaining items to set her up in an assisted living apartment. She brought me some things from mom's house, but not the little blue dress or the baby dolls. I asked her about them and she said she threw them away. So, I woke up this morning wishing I'd been there to grab them off the discard pile and thinking that this is one of the reasons I care about all the stuff around here ... who knows what little dumb thing we haul around with us might be just the thing one of the kids treasures someday? I don't want them to wake up and wonder what ever happened to it, whatever it is.

But the overweaning thought that comes to me a hundred times a day during this process is how grateful I am for all the processes that came before it -- all the other moves, the weddings and divorces, the births and deaths, the falling in love and then crying over breakups, the things gone missing, the things kept, the people who influenced me and are no longer here, the people who are still here ... all of what brought me to this relationship, at this time in my life, on the verge of this move with Ev and the next chapter of our life together -- because this is perfect.

Diversity Training

2009-08-06T10:43:00.003-05:00

We had an hour's worth of mandatory diversity training at my work yesterday, which was just enough time to say, "Although everyone in this room is white, you may encounter some non-white people at some time in your career. If that happens, be nice to them."

It was an exercise in PC agony. At one point the instructor asked if anyone could think of a stereotype applied to people of another culture, and the room was silent. How to repeat a racial slur without admitting you actually know a racial slur? A dilemma for sure. One woman finally started mumbling about wives who answer questions for their husbands and then trailed off, unwilling to say which wives and husbands.

So because I'm Evie and I Know Things, I finally piped up.

"Jews are cheap and Mexicans are lazy."
The guy behind me said, "Mexicans aren't lazy!"
"I know that. That's why it's a stereotype, not an actual fact!"

(He must know a Mexican. *sigh*)

Considering that my workplace is a hotbed of racial jokes, ethnic stereotypes, queer bashing and sexism, I'm going to go out on a limb and say an hour of diversity training won't be enough for a lot of folks. But it did fulfill our government-mandated quota for another year. And isn't that what really matters?

T-Minus 1 Week

2009-08-05T11:58:00.003-05:00

It's the last week before moving day!

Not much to blog about unless you like stories about packing up books and kitchen utensils, sorting through old papers and broken stuff and trying to decide what to keep and what to throw away.

The only bloggable story we've had this week was a sad one. We had a houseful of family and friends on Family Sunday, and one of the guests brought his labrador retriever (Archimedes or Agamemnon or Antichrist, or whatever his name was) to play with our dogs. It was all fun and games and big dog rasslin' and yard romping until Rob came around the side of the house dangling a big lifeless bird by the legs. It was our Spanish Black turkey ... cut down in the prime of its life. This put something of a damper on Family Sunday. And, as unpleasant as it was for us, it was probably even more unpleasant for the guest whose dog did the deed. Great way to make a first impression on people you've never me ... drop by and kill their pets.

So what do you do with a murdered turkey you've raised from poult-hood, held and petted and cuddled while it napped? You do the only thing you can do. You have the ex-husband take the two twenty-something young men out back and teach them how to ... well ... you know ... turn it into food.

They were quite a bit more excited about the prospect than we were prepared for, and took to the task with what I can only call relish ... and a dull-ish axe. The inedible parts were relegated to the burn pile where we performed a ceremonial cremation later in the evening. The edible part was placed lovingly in a very small roaster, seasoned lightly and baked for an hour, and (after a few beers) the guys produced their trophies ... Jenny-O's ex-feet with tendons still attached, useful for grasping, photographing and making YouTube videos.

I admit to taking part in that last bit. Sometimes, in the immortal words of Monty Python, you have to look on the bright side of death.

Jenny-O's buddy was bereft and spent the next day and a half wandering around the yard searching and calling for her, then started hanging around the pond with the ducks trying to swim. Turkeys don't swim. I kept carrying it back home to keep it from drowning itself, and then we took it into town yesterday and gave it to one of Ev's co-workers who has a farm. She has other turkeys (not for eating), horses, chickens, ducks, pet raccoons and peacocks. When I went to get Butterball from the pond for the last time he was hanging out with the neighbor's young son, fishing from the bank. It was a regular Tom Sawyer moment.

So ... moving to town has begun. The turkeys are gone, seven of the ducks will be going to Fritz's farm in Iowa, four will be staying here with the neighbors and we're going to try taking six to town with us if we can. If not, Katie has a friend whose mother will take them.

This has been an interesting introduction to Southern Illinois for my city-bred son. The first night he was here he was introduced to the age-old sport of frog giggin'. Two days later he was butchering poultry. The next day he went for a walk in the woods and came face to face with a five foot long black racer. Welcome to rural life, kiddo.

Ho-Moaners

2009-07-31T07:21:00.002-05:00

In case you're the last person on earth who a) cares and b) hasn't already heard this in person, via e-mail, or read it on Facebook or one of the message boards we post on:

We signed the contract and transferred the down payment yesterday, met the Mayor and got our official handshake and welcome to town, and there you go ... we bought the house!

We get the keys on August 12th and then we've got five days to get our stuff moved, our ducks and turkeys redistributed to their various new homes, the empty lots cleared of grass and weeds to make room for Ev's shed and have a refrigerator delivered and installed.

Except for the self-inflicted anxiety and fretting and waiting for something to go wrong, this has been a practically painless transaction. Woooooo-hooooo!

In Which Ev and Kwach Go to Town

2009-07-25T08:42:00.006-05:00

We've been keeping a secret.

It's not that we didn't want to share it with the world, it's that we didn't want to jinx it by publishing it and then having to rub salt in the wound by retracting it, as has happened in the past.

Those of you who've been reading us for awhile may remember that we've been looking for a house to buy in Cairo, Illinois for a long time, and that we came very close a year or so ago. When that didn't pan out we dithered about building on our land vs continuing to look for houses in Cairo vs buying a house we didn't really want as a temporary step on the road to one we really did want, just to get out from under our not-entirely-honest-as-the-day-is-long landlord. (We dither almost as well as we process, which is really saying something.)

Ev spends a goodly amount of her online time perusing Craigslist and realty sites, keeping her eyes peeled for the perfect house, and once in awhile she shows one of them to me if she thinks it's a good possibility. A couple of weeks ago she showed me one she's been watching on Craigslist for a long time. It gets listed repeatedly, but apparently without any takers. I took one look at it and said, "oh HELL, yes!" After a few e-mail exchanges with the seller and a trip down to Cairo to look at the house, we're there! The seller has the earnest money, we're signing the contract next week, and we're getting the keys on August 12th.

Folks, patience and perseverence have paid off and we found our house! It needs exactly nothing in terms of rehab, and its only miniscule fault was that it sits on only two town lots. But the six (yes, I said six) adjoining 25' x 100+' lots are all available and we're in the process of buying the first two from the city.

The best part of this transaction is that it's been conducted between the seller and ourselves in a very friendly and non-adversarial way. She had us write the contract, she's paying the costs for filing it, and she's selling us the house on a zero interest contract for deed, so it will be completely ours and paid for in three years. Why is she doing this? Because she's going to California to study for the ministry and she doesn't believe in usury and she does believe that we're a gift from God. (We could have told her that!) It sounds flakey when we try to explain it, but you'd have to meet her to understand it. She's got that big open friendly honest people vibe, and this has all happened so effortlessly that you just know in your gut that it's right.

So, about the house ...

It was built in 1897, it's got all the original woodwork and chandeliers, the plumbing and electricity have been upgraded, it has a working furnace and dual upstairs and downstairs central air, a full concrete-floored walk-out basement, three full baths (one with a clawfoot tub), three big living spaces downstairs that are joined by enormous oak pocket doors, a fireplace, original wood floors ... and an ENORMOUS eat-in country kitchen and walk-in pantry. Did I mention it doesn't need any work and it's move-in ready???? Hallelujah!

I fretted about finding new homes for the ducks, but that's working out better than I imagined. Our friend, Fritz, is taking some of them to his small farm in Iowa, where they'll live on his pond and share the land with his chickens and pheasants. His daughter plans to name one of them Ferdinand. The turkeys are going to one of Ev's co-workers who already has turkeys. Our neighbor (who has turned out to be a secret Duck Whisperer, and has even begun to tame the skittish new ducks who sit at his feet and eat corn out of his hands) has asked for the duck dome and four babies, and the other six babies will be moving to town with us to become ornamental yard ducks. The seller checked, and there's no ordinance against ducks in town, so she's leaving us her chicken coop, and there's already a small fenced yard to contain them. Six ducks is a good number for town. There, I think that's as many times as you can include the word "ducks" in a single paragraph without incurring some kind of literary fine.

Happily, we won't even need to change the name of the blog, because Cairo is still pretty much Nowhere, Illinois, which is exactly why it's our kind of town! The history and demographics of Cairo are endlessly fascinating. It's 60% black, 40% white and 0.2% lesbian. Now it will be 0.35% lesbian. You gotta start somewhere!

TLE and Me

2009-07-24T11:01:00.003-05:00

I took yesterday off work as a mental health day, and I think it worked. I spent the day sitting around reading, cruising Facebook, and generally slacking off. Today is also my day off, but I'll have to actually spend it productively.

I changed seizure med about 6 weeks ago, since my insurance provider will no longer cover Lamictal. I've been taking a generic version, Lamotrigene, which works like Lamictal but not as well. And because I'm a temporal lobe seizure person and not a generalized seizure person, "not as well" for me doesn't cause me to roll around on the floor and pee on myself, it causes me to think and behave oddly. Just to recap, temporal lobe epilepsy, or TLE, looks like this on me:

(from Wikipedia)
Symptoms

The symptoms felt by the patient with TLE and the signs observable by others during seizures depend upon the specific areas of the temporal lobes and neighboring brain areas affected by the seizure. The Classification of Epileptic Seizures published in 1981 by the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) recognizes three types of seizures which persons with TLE may experience.
Simple Partial Seizures (SPS) involve small areas of the temporal lobe and do not affect consciousness. These are seizures which primarily cause sensations. These sensations may be mnestic such as déjà vu (a feeling of familiarity), jamais vu (a feeling of unfamiliarity), a specific single or set of memories, or amnesia. The sensations may be auditory such as a sound or tune, or gustatory such as a taste, or olfactory such as a smell that is not truly present. Sensations can also be visual or involve feelings on the skin or in the internal organs. The latter feelings may seem to move over the body. Dysphoric or euphoric feelings, fear, anger, and other sensations can also occur during SPS. Often, it is hard for persons with SPS of TLE to describe the feeling. SPS are often called "auras," and are sometimes thought to be preludes to more severe seizures.

So my ability to function is for the most part left unimpaired, except that I can feel the hallucinations lurking around the corner (or more precisely, behind my right shoulder) and under stress I feel emotionally more volatile than I normally do. The idea of beating my head to pulp on the pavement starts to seem like it might be a good thing to do.

Since I've been on this ride before, I know how it works: I try harder to avoid stress by hiding out from my life, which works well for a while, until it begins to cause more stress than it cures. In the end I turn into a fearful, self-destructive hermit...and that's attractive, doncha think?

So my mental health day was to get a little more level and beat back the demons. I think it has mostly worked. Now it's time to plug back in and re-engage with my life.

Huh

2009-07-20T03:56:00.003-05:00

We went out in the world and visited old friends for the weekend. It was wonderful to see them again and talk about the old stuff and catch up on the new stuff, but it reminded me that it's been almost 30 years since we've lived in the same town.

How does that happen?? How does 30 years pass when you're not paying attention? It makes me worry a little about the next 30. I think maybe I should be taking notes.

Near Miss

2009-07-09T00:35:00.002-05:00

I almost had a sighting of my children today. I passed them pulling into the driveway as I was pulling out for work. Nice almost seeing you, kids!

So Robbie? If you're out there? I need a haircut. Bring the clippers with your laundry next time. I'll lay in a supply of beer.

Love, Mom

For Val

2009-07-08T11:36:00.003-05:00

I promised Val I would e-mail her a picture of the red truck, but I apparently don't have her e-mail address (which must mean that she has only given it to me 6 or 7 times, and not the actual 12 times required to make me stumble across it at exactly the right moment and put it in my address book). I know she reads here,even though she's too shiftless to actually comment. If you need something scrubbed with a Hype-Wipe, Val's your girl. If you need a pithy comment on your blog...not so much.

So Peeps...the red truck.

Pressure! Do I Need More Pressure?

2009-07-07T00:30:00.003-05:00

Our little Joshie is going off to the Army to make America safe for pharmaceuticals. Or something like that. I'm not exactly sure, but he assures me that no guns will be involved and that any combat he's likely to be in will more likely involve the throwing of pill bottles than the shooting of guns, so I'm thinking this most likely won't turn into a "Johnny Got His Gun" situation. However, I'll be brushing up on my Morse code, just in case.

I'm expected to be the Official Recorder of Absurdity in his absence. That task requires treading a fine line; one man's absurdity is another man's tragic unrequited love for a pregnant stripper. The important thing is to put my own biases aside and create an unvarnished record that will let Josh feel the same stomach-churning frustration the rest of us feel every time we slip on the lab coat and step into the swirling miasma of melodrama and angst that characterize our professional lives.

To that end, I ask those of you who happen to work with me to please refrain from ratting me out to the boss., and if you have any fun dirt to pass along to Josh, please forward it to me in a typed double-spaced 500 word essay, or on the back of a torn unreceived specimen list with a suspicious fluid smeared on the corner. It's the least we can do for our boy on the front lines.

Josh, you're the Cool Hand Luke of the laboratory. Please send pictures of yourself with hot chicks you picked up in the mess hall or the commissary, even if you have to pay them to stand next to you. In return, I promise to send you Photoshopped pictures of Boss in stiletto heels and a Hitler mustache holding an Employee Opinion Survey in one hand and a 10 mL pipetter in the other, and remind you why being shot at by terrorists is preferable to another day with your laboratory family.

Carpe the Carp, Josh! And remember our motto:

"I wonder if I can have some organ removed that will get me 12 weeks of FMLA? Do people actually use their spleen for anything?"

Blog Neglect

2009-07-03T09:35:00.009-05:00

It's not like there's nothing to blog about, because we've been busy and stuff ...

Vacation:

We had a great one! The first day, we drove through Kentucky and Tennessee on the way to Cherokee, NC and got a chance to stop in Whitwell, TN. "What's in Whitwell?" I hear you asking. Whitwell is the home of the Children's Holocaust Memorial, made famous in the documentary "Paper Clips," which you should see if you haven't. We'd been planning to get there and see it and it was right on the way to Chattanooga, so that was a bonus we hadn't counted on. We weren't able to go inside the tiny German rail transport car that houses the 11 million paper clips, but we did get pictures of it. Standing in front of it, it's still impossible to truly imagine hundreds of human beings inside it.

Less inspiring was the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville. Who knew it was now a shopping mall attraction attached to Opryland? Ye Gods, we hope to never pass through that wasteland again. Whoever the Gaylords are, they should be ashamed of themselves.

Chattanooga, however, is a beautiful city, and the gorgeous countryside and pristine whitewater rivers of eastern Tennessee scrubbed the nastiness of Nashville from our brains. Then it was a long, slow, winding drive up the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in a blinding rainstorm to get to our "free" room at Harrah's Cherokee, for which we gladly traded a hundred bucks of penny slot play. I tried to make use of all the amenities the room had to offer, but the jacuzzi tub shot me in the head and made a lake out of the bathroom, so I just stole WiFi from some other hotel that doesn't charge for it instead.

Day two we were on to Charleston and a great room at the historic Mills House Hotel downtown. We walked miles looking at the gorgeosity that is Charleston, walked the Battery, peeked in all the gardens, took lots of pictures and found a brew pub to sample the cuisine and the local beer. I picked up a copy of the New Testament in Gullah and we bought a coffee table book with before and after pictures of the places we'd just been looking at in Charleston, then returned to our hotel to sit in the courtyard and enjoy the fountain. The next morning we visited the Old Slave Market museum before heading for the beaches of North Carolina.

Day three and four were spent enjoying Wrightsville Beach and Wilmington, NC. We romped in the surf, visited the North Carolina Aquarium, took the car ferry across the Cape Fear River and toured the USS North Carolina, which is very huge and very hot and very impressive in an "oh. my. god. I can't believe they lived like this" kind of way.

We ate at another brew pub and I had the best dinner I can recall having in a long time ... shrimp and grits, Charleston style. Indescribably tasty and just spicy enough! Ev proclaimed the pale ale "excellent!" The beach was relaxing and wonderful and we got sore calf muscles from all the beach walking and shell collecting. Ev almost caught a crab (the kind you eat) and lost her favorite banjo pick out of her pocket ... so, some good and some not-so-good, but the sum total was that we've decided we have to retire to the beach. We'll be needing donations, so get those in the mail right away, won't you?

Day five we were back on the road to Cherokee for the return trip and our second free hotel night. This time we had a lot of fun spending hours taking back our original hundred dollars, thankyouverymuch, and didn't spend it at the god-awful racist tourist traps all over town.

Day six we went up and over the Smokies on the way home, and I experienced something close to religious ecstasy. It brought tears to my eyes. Maybe it's the prettiest place I've ever seen, but probably it's just the prettiest place I've seen recently. At any rate, it's damned pretty. Coming out of the mountains into Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge and Dollywood will snap you right out of it, though. We had considered Gatlinburg as a vacation destination at one time. We're very much over it.

Please feel free to enjoy the rest of our vacation snapshots here, if you're so inclined.

Home:

We arrived home and found that Katie had done a great job taking care of the compound and all the critters alive and well, except that Pickle had acquired a brown recluse bite on her little head which had swelled to magnificent proportions, requiring a trip to the vet for antibiotics and anti-inflammatories. Once her head finished draining she went back for her hysterectomy, from which she's recovering nicely. I don't think she'll require the ten weeks off work that Ev's co-worker required for the same surgery, which is a shame, because I would totally have taken FMLA to help her convalesce if necessary. I'm that kind of good dog mother! We also discovered that we have a new flat tuxedo porch kitten who had been living (just barely) in the woods. We're fattening her up and hoping to keep her an outside cat. We shall see when the weather turns cold. She loves us, loves the dogs and loves the poultry ... and tries mightily to come inside when we open the door. Not very feral for a feral cat.

The turkeys are still friendly and have learned how to fly the coop, so they spend a good part of their day wandering the yard eating bugs and weeds, but the ducks are insane and hate us now. A week with only minimal human interaction has made them feral. They run and hide in the dome if we even step out on the deck, and they go completely insane and trample each other when we attend to their feed, water and straw needs. Ungrateful little fluffy-headed bitchez!

In sad news, we lost another Rouen. We're down to the last two now, and I can't bear the idea of losing them all, so we've confined them to the pen with the other ducks. They aren't happy about it, but I'm hoping they'll bond with the others and get attached to the new flock. The upside is that they aren't hiding their eggs in Al's burn pile anymore, so we can eat them again. (Al has been intently watching and waiting for them to hatch, even after we explained that there's no male duck. He says, "I'm going to give them another week." Good luck with that ...)

Okay, that's all the news from Nowhere. Over and under.

Reconciliation - ur doin it wrong

2009-06-30T19:04:00.002-05:00

AP Newsbreak:

"This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story," Sanford said."A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day."

During an emotional interview at his Statehouse office with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Sanford said Chapur is his soul mate but he's trying to fall back in love with his wife.

Do you suppose Jenny Sanford can even pick her head up and crawl out of bed in the morning anymore? What an asshole.

Damn

2009-06-27T19:54:00.002-05:00

I just heard from a friend I met through the blog ... a fellow duck lover ... that one of his Cayuga ducks was killed this morning on his pond. It brought me right back to the day we lost our first Cayuga, and it struck me that, as jaded as the world seems sometimes, I'm proud to know other people who have the kind of heart that can be broken by a duck.

There's something about taking care of these funny, helpless creatures that runs the gamut from entertaining to exasperating to emotionally draining. As our original flock dwindled slowly from ten to six, and then suddenly from six to three ... and as we discovered that 15 ducklings is, in practical terms, at least three times as much work and worry as our original eight ... I sometimes question why we ever took on the care and feeding of ducks. They can be hard work, and you worry about them. Then you forget to worry and something goes terribly wrong. Every time we've lost a duck I've felt sad and angry, and guilty that I hadn't done things differently or taken better care of them somehow.

Ev always reminds me that the ducks are happy and that the smartest of them have survived over a year despite living in a place where there are all kinds of predators ... Darwin and all that ... and that they wouldn't be happy if we kept them safely penned up all the time. I know she's right, but it's still hard to see one less duck coming to the house for feed in the morning. My heart goes out to my friend, Fritz.

Mark Sanford is Sorry

2009-06-25T09:18:00.002-05:00

Mark Sanford, the recently misplace Governor of South Carolina, is sorry. He would like us all to know how sorry he is to have been caught violating his marriage vows. And how very sorry he is to have torpedoed his hope for a Presidential bid in 2012. Very, very sorry.

Once again, we're in the position of gleefully laughing about the schadenfreudosity of another "family values" politician who's built a career on tut-tutting the immorality of Teh Gays, getting nailed (heh) with his pants around his ankles.

Potential GOP presidential hopefuls are dropping like flies these days because of their pants problems: they can't seem to keep them on. Nevada Senator John Ensign is also sorry. So are Larry Craig, David Vitter, Newt Gingrich and a whole host of other former political hopefuls with pants problems.

And from the Dem side, Eliot Spitzer and Jim McGreevy are also sorry. Bill Clinton was very sorry (but not so sorry he didn't think DOMA was a good idea to protect the sanctity of hetero marriage from potential gay interlopers).

And once again, I'm brought to this point. Guys, whatever is going on or not going on in your primary relationship is your business as long as we can agree that the same is true for me. However, when you pontificate about the sanctity of your hetero marriage while condemning me for wanting the same right, I admit...I get an enormous amount of enjoyment from your marital pratfalls.

Whoops! Another member of the Morality Policy trips over his freshly lubed nightstick. And it's our obligation as Americans to pass judgment on your sexual habits, right? Or...did you just mean for that to be for the rest of us?

Because We're Lesbians...

2009-06-23T12:57:00.004-05:00

...we've acquired yet another cat. This one is a stray that was waiting for us in the yard when we got back from vacation yesterday. A vacation, by the way, that truly rocked out loud. A vacation which has left us fantasizing about quitting our jobs and living on the beach with our ducks.

So anyway, about the cat...

I'm pretty sure it's the offspring of the feral cat that had a litter of kittens under our landlord's abandoned truck last year. This one, as Bob is my witless, will stay an outdoor cat. Not like Mrs. Foot, who merely pretended to be an outdoor cat to lull us into complacency and then moved indoor with a vengeance, taking over our bed and the sofa, and intimidating the dogs into snivelling cowards.

This new cat has an appointment to get spayed next week (Hey guys! I'm going to the vet to get tutored!) to prevent the inevitable litter of kittens to follow, which would cause us to have twenty feral cats living on our porch and put us in the position of trying to give them away to our friends and neighbors, leave them anonymously in baskets on stranger's doorsteps, and maybe put a few in the drop boxes of the library and post office.

Oh...and Pickle got bit on her head by a spider last night and has a vet appointment too, since her head is all bloated and she looks pathetic and even weirder than normal...which is saying a lot for Pickle.

Good Honest Sweat

2009-06-14T18:22:00.002-05:00

More along the lines of the kind of thing you really come here to read, here's a little poultry update for you:

Despite my existential funk, the poultry must still be tended to, and I tended to them mightily today. The big duck girls are running around the house quacking for their food and they keep running over to check out the cool new yard I built for the babies this afternoon. All by myself!

I dropped Ev off at work and then went to Rural King for straw, feed and fencing. Pounded a dozen wooden fence posts into the ground and strung 50 feet of shiny new poultry fencing to it, installed a small pool for them, gave them clean straw bedding, filled their feeder and waterer and put them out in the fenced exercise yard to entice them out of the dome. They ain't havin' it. They're all lying just inside the door looking longingly out, but not a one of them is brave enough to step one webbed foot over the threshold and come out under the big wide open sky.

I dragged a few of them out by hand and put them in the pool, but they jumped out and ran screaming back to the rest of the flock huddled inside. The big girls, however, are looking like they'd like to use the pool, so I'll go out and invite them in. They've already met the babies once and no one seemed to mind eating together, so we'll give it a go. Maybe they can teach them to be ducks.

The turkeys are growing and happy in their own little coop and enclosed yard, but I attached the big yard to their pen so they can come out and enjoy it, too.

I wish I were poultry.

Fuck It

2009-06-14T08:35:00.003-05:00

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.

Duck,Duck, Poult

2009-06-07T10:52:00.006-05:00

We're three weeks old tomorrow! Time flies when you're eating 50 pounds of poultry kibble and growing like weeds. The ducklings moved out to the Duck Dome a couple of days ago and are still industriously making duck schmuck, but they're making it in a larger area with better drainage. They're much happier. Kwach and Ev are also much happier. It's a win-win. Here's a sort of low-tech time lapse to demonstrate the progress of the babies from arrival day to yesterday.

This is the ducklings on Day One next to a three gallon waterer in a dog crate, and on Day 18 next to a five gallon waterer in the duck dome.

Next up, the turkey poults. They don't grow nearly as fast as the ducklings, because they seem to be working more on leg length, wingspan and flying ability. They're getting very tall and leggy, their wings are huge, and they fly pretty damn well for three week old flightless birds!

Here are the turkeys on Day One in their plastic bin, and on Day 18 on their first trip outside to see what grass is all about.

Cute, huh?

He Likes Us! He Really Likes Us!

2009-06-02T12:22:00.003-05:00

See? President Obama does remember we exist! It's Pride Month, and to celebrate he'll be forming a commission to check into whether we need another commission to discuss whether we deserve to be treated like American citizens. The commission will be meeting every Feb 29th, barring any scheduling conflicts.

From The Advocate:

Presidential Proclamation for Pride
Click the byline to view more stories by this author.By Kerry Eleveld
THE WHITE HOUSEOffice of the Press SecretaryFor Immediate Release June 1, 2009
LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER PRIDE MONTH, 2009
- - - - - - -
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A PROCLAMATION
Forty years ago, patrons and supporters of the Stonewall Inn in New York City resisted police harassment that had become all too common for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Out of this resistance, the LGBT rights movement in America was born. During LGBT Pride Month, we commemorate the events of June 1969 and commit to achieving equal justice under law for LGBT Americans.
LGBT Americans have made, and continue to make, great and lasting contributions that continue to strengthen the fabric of American society. There are many well-respected LGBT leaders in all professional fields, including the arts and business communities. LGBT Americans also mobilized the Nation to respond to the domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic and have played a vital role in broadening this country's response to the HIV pandemic.

Due in no small part to the determination and dedication of the LGBT rights movement, more LGBT Americans are living their lives openly today than ever before. I am proud to be the first President to appoint openly LGBT candidates to Senate-confirmed positions in the first 100 days of an Administration. These individuals embody the best qualities we seek in public servants, and across my Administration -- in both the White House and the Federal agencies -- openly LGBT employees are doing their jobs with distinction and professionalism.

The LGBT rights movement has achieved great progress, but there is more work to be done. LGBT youth should feel safe to learn without the fear of harassment, and LGBT families and seniors should be allowed to live their lives with dignity and respect.

My Administration has partnered with the LGBT community to advance a wide range of initiatives. At the international level, I have joined efforts at the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality around the world. Here at home, I continue to support measures to bring the full spectrum of equal rights to LGBT Americans. These measures include enhancing hate crimes laws, supporting civil unions and Federal rights for LGBT couples, outlawing discrimination in the workplace, ensuring adoption rights, and ending the existing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in a way that strengthens our Armed Forces and our national security. We must also commit ourselves to fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic by both reducing the number of HIV infections and providing care and support services to people living with HIV/AIDS across the United States.

These issues affect not only the LGBT community, but also our entire Nation. As long as the promise of equality for all remains unfulfilled, all Americans are affected. If we can work together to advance the principles upon which our Nation was founded, every American will benefit. During LGBT Pride Month, I call upon the LGBT community, the Congress, and the American people to work together to promote equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. I call upon the people of the United States to turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this first day of June, in the year of our Lord two thousand nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-third.

BARACK OBAMA

There's No I in "Can't," But There's an I in "I Can't"

2009-06-02T10:23:00.010-05:00

A little more work-related ranting?

This weekend we had staffing problems. Night shift is always tough to keep staffed. It's a crappy shift with too much work and not enough love from management. The bosses only drop by once in a while to remind the night shifters that they're losers and fuck-ups who aren't smart enough to be on day shift.

Saturday night's call-in du jour was a tech with one week left before our modest hospital disappears in her taillights. She's got a bad case of Idon'tgiveadamn. Sunday it was a phlebotomist who called in...the only one on staff on Sunday nights.

So Saturday I did the usual call-in ritual. Calling the phone list and trying to find someone: a) who would pick up the phone when they saw the hospital's number in the caller I.D., and b) was sober on Saturday night.

As it turned out, there was no one able to meet both criteria. So I stayed until 3:30 a.m. when a day-shifter would be in, drove a half hour home, fell into bed, crawled out of bed, and went back for another round.

St. Evie...that's me. Patron saint of suckers.

Sunday night, however was a different story. Sunday, Angela, my shiftmate (who is so steady she makes rocks look flighty), took the call and spent her evening trying to find someone to cover. Finally she called the phlebotomy supervisor, who helpfully informed her that he was too drunk to deal with it, and then she called our boss. Boss abdicated. Figure it out, says Boss. Call the phlebotomy supervisor. Maybe he can handle it.

I don't know how much anyone else knows about hospital guidelines, but we have minimum staffing guidelines monitored by a variety of organizations like JCAHO and the FDA. Being short isn't just inconvenient, it's illegal.

But Sunday night, we were screwed. So I called the E.R. and told them they'd have to do their own blood draws. Then I called the floors and said we'd be up for the stats, but not the routines. If they want it, they'd have to collect it themselves. Then I called the house charge and told him we'd be below minimum staffing.

He said, "Did you call Boss?" I said "Yep. He said 'figure it out'."

Yesterday I went to work and confronted Boss. We need a better solution. We need someone on call. We need a sober phlebotomy supervisor, or at least a backup person. We need someone to care that we're out of compliance. I told him we didn't have time to do his job plus our own, which involved actual patients in need of medical care.

He explained that he'd been useless, not due to a lack of responsibility on his part, but as a form of empowerment for us.

Empowerment?? I told him he'd confused empowerment with exploitation, and I don't make enough money to do both our jobs.

Kids, I'm already empowerful. I know how to ask, beg, wheedle, cajole, manipulate, coerce, and outright threaten any poor employee dumb enough to pick up the phone. But once they're on to me, I'm not empowerful enough to go to their houses and drag them out of bed, slap lab coats on them, and make them fulfill our staffing requirements.

Boss asked me what to do. Ah! This happens to be what I do best! I suck at empathy, but I rock out loud at "what to do."

What to do, of course, is to stop whining about how hard it is to be the boss and start making specific requests of specific people. I told him that if it were me, instead of sending out a big generic e-mail threatening to someday create an imaginary call schedule, send three e-mails.

- One to day shift, telling them that they'll be rotating a four hour call for the second half of night shift for one week per tech.

- One to evening shift saying the same thing. They'll be rotating a four hour call for the first half of night shift, one week per tech.

- One to night shift saying they'll be the back up, rotating coverage for an entire shift, at one week per tech.

Easy? Not if you're afraid of confrontation. He said some people won't like it and they'll get mad at him. I said no one will like it, but if we all have to do it, we can all not like it together.

The meeting ended the way all meetings with Boss end. In a conversation about how no one understands how stressful it is to be the boss.

I wonder if the ditch diggers and rag pickers are hiring.

Aw, Shucks! Schmucky Duck Muck. Yuck!

2009-06-02T01:15:00.004-05:00

Once again the volume of our things threaten to overwhelm us. We have too many trucks (3) too many dogs (3), too many cats (5), and too many ducks (18!). We have exactly the right number of turkeys, though. One per lap.

And much, much too much working. I've saved every freakin' life in Southern Illinois. Twice. Screw 'em. Next time one of you crybabies shows up in my E.R., it better be with your arm amputated and in a plastic baggie. I don't want to hear about your flu-like symptom or your vaginal itch. That's why they invented primary care doctors.

Since we're not going to winnow the pets or the poultry, the only thing that can give is the trucks. And the work. But the work, unfortunately, is firmly tied to the eating and the indoor living.

So I'm planning to round up a couple of the trucks and trade them in for one shiny truck made in this millennium. This will require a couple of things; it means that I'll have to make a Sophie's Choice about which ones to part with (Which do you love more...Cow or Chicken?). It also means that Lori and I will have to march down to Cape Girardeau and pretend we don't notice we're being swindled by a dealership that we now own, thanks to whichever round of bailout caused us to own Chrysler and G.M.

Oh...and we need to not scare the salesguy with Teh Gay, so that he doesn't screw us on our trade-in or spit in the soup or do whatever it is that Missourians do to show their disgust for the marriage sanctity-ruinin' Homosexual Agenda. Maybe the really risque Missourians make their bold statement about the sanctity of hetero marriage by plowing their fields in uneven rows.

Get it? Not straight? The rows? (sigh)

So...less trucks. Next, the ducks will have to move outside. They've spent the last couple of weeks growing to adolescence in our spare bedroom/weight room, and now we've pretty much had it. They're slobs. They mix their food, bedding and drinking water into a paste that they use to paper mache the wire of the pen every day while we're at work. Even Lori's had her fill of it.. They'll have to move out to the dome like big ducks or they'll be the duck version of veal by the weekend.

So...less trucks and less indoor ducks. And less other things that end in -uck.

By the end of this week, we plan to regain some control of our lives so that we can have out-of-town company and not look like Zsa-Zsa's lesbian neighbors on Green Acres. So consider yourself forewarned: if your name ends in "uck"...you can expect a change of venue soon. I'm just sayin'.

Pro-Life, My Ass

2009-05-31T20:03:00.003-05:00

Why don't the "pro-lifers" just drop the bullshit and call themselves the "pro-forced-birthers," since that's what they really are?

They don't give a damn about life, they only care about enforced procreation -- up until the birth, of course. After that, it's someone else's problem. Much like the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of life is somewhat lost on these people, as evidenced by the fact that the pro-forced-birthers have no apparent interest in (and certainly want no societal financial responsibility for) the nuts and bolts of these children's lives once they emerge from the womb ... and no moral objection to the torture or murder of adults. What, exactly, do they think infants grow up to be?

Stop calling it "life." Life is what happens between birth and death. You know, those years between the time you take away a pregnant woman's choice and the day one of you murders some elderly woman's grown child.

Sanctity, my ass. You don't know the meaning of the word.

Poultry Update

2009-05-30T23:58:00.003-05:00

The thing about ducklings is that they're sometimes hard to identify, especially when they're similarly hued in their infancy. As they've grown and developed a more duck-ly appearance this week, we've made the discovery that we probably have five breeds ... not three.

The brown ducklings, who were first identified as Indian Runners, on closer inspection appear to be three Chocolate Runners and two Khaki Campbells. We've determined this by noting that three of them are skinny, stand up very tall, walk really funny and look like dinosaurs in profile. The other two stand and waddle and look like ducks. Ipso facto, three Runners and two Campbells. I think. I've tentatively named the Runners "Godiva," "Cadbury," and "Nestle." I'm still trying to come up with suitably Scot names for the Campbells.

Likewise, the six yellow ducklings are no longer a mystery. Only four are wearing little feather hats, so I assumed the two hatless ones were either waiting to sprout them or were defective in some way. As the week wore on, the two hatless ducklings seemed to grow less yellow and more tan, and little brown stripes began to appear beside their eyes. After some research, we appear to have four Crested Pekins and two Buff Orpingtons. One of the crested ducks is actually friendly, which is more than I can say for any of the ducks from last year ... or the other 14 from this year. I'm considering calling the friendly one "Hedwig."

The four Blue Swedish ducklings have not pulled any fast ones or changed their plumage, so I think it's still safe to say they are what we thought they were from the outset. For the moment they are "Sven," "Olle," "Helga," and "Ingrid," but their names are subject to change when their gender becomes apparent. Not that any of their names matter, since I can never tell one from the other once their all grown up, but at least it gives me something to call them while I'm moving them in and out of their crate twice a day for housekeeping.

It's clear, at this point, that a large wire dog kennel is inadequate for housing 15 fast-growing ducklings. They've already tripled in size and are nearly as tall as their waterer in a mere 10 days. Fifteen ducklings is mathematically only twice the number we had last year, but they produce at least four times the amount of poop.

The turkeys are still little, being much slower growers, but have prodigious wings already, with which they can actually achieve something like short running flights across the bedroom floor. They have turned out to be affectionate and humorous puppies with feathers. They both appear to be boys, which is a shame because we were hoping to call them "Butterball" and "Jenny-O." But based on the tiny nubbin starting to protrude from their foreheads, which I assume is going to develop into the long snood that dangles down over male turkeys' beaks, "Jenny-O" is out of the question. I've also discovered that you can hypnotize a turkey by stroking the bottoms of its feet. Once you've done this, the turkey can be laid on it's back where it will proceed to sleep like a floppy baby.

When not sleeping like a baby or practicing his fast flying, Butterball enjoys re-enacting scenes from "Turkeyzilla" on the faux lawn of my dollhouse.

2009-05-28T16:18:00.002-05:00

According to the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), there are 1,138 federal statutory benefits, rights and privileges conferred by marriage.

The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act specifically bars any federal recognition of same sex marriage, or conveyance of marriage benefits to same sex couples through federal marriage law.

What this means to same sex couples, even in states where same sex marriage, civil union or domestic partnership are legal, is that these benefits, rights and privileges are still withheld at the federal level even if you do have a legal marriage in your state.

This is a very abbreviated list from Wikipedia, published here because some of our friends and co-workers have expressed that they "never really thought about" what they get automatically with their marriage license and what we don't get by having one withheld from us ... or even by having one that is only recognized at the state level. Sometimes people suggest that gay and lesbian couples can and should secure these rights for ourselves by drawing up legal contracts. Personally, I would resent paying tens of thousands of dollars to an attorney to get a fraction of what heterosexual couples can get for a two dollar license fee, even if it were possible. But really, good luck getting a legally binding contract to collect someone else's Social Security benefits.

Maybe we should stop assuming that people understand what we're being denied:

Rights and benefits of surviving spouse:

Social Security pension
veteran's pensions, indemnity compensation for service related deaths, medical care, nursing home care, right to burial in veterans' cemeteries, educational and housing assistance
survivor benefits for federal employees
survivor benefits for spouses of longshoremen, harbor workers, railroad workers
additional benefits to spouses of coal miners who die of black lung disease
$100,000 to spouse of any public safety officer killed in the line of duty
continuation of employer-sponsored health benefits
renewal and termination rights to spouse's copyrights on death of spouse
continued water rights of spouse in some circumstances
payment of wages and worker compensation benefits after worker death
making, revoking, and objecting to post-mortem anatomical gifts

Right to benefits while married:

employment assistance and transitional services for spouses of members being separated from military service; continued commissary privileges
per diem payment to spouse for federal civil service employees when relocating
Indian Health Service care for spouses of Native Americans (in some circumstances)
sponsor husband/wife for immigration benefits

Larger benefits under some programs if married, including:

veteran's disability
Supplemental Security Income
disability payments for federal employees
Medicaid
property tax exemption for homes of totally disabled veterans
income tax deductions, credits, rates exemption, and estimates

Joint and family-related rights:

joint filing of bankruptcy permitted
joint parenting rights, such as access to children's school records
family visitation rights for the spouse and non-biological children, such as to visit a spouse in a hospital or prison
next-of-kin status for emergency medical decisions or filing wrongful death claims
custodial rights to children, shared property, child support, and alimony after divorce
domestic violence intervention
access to "family only" services, such as reduced rate memberships to clubs & organizations or residency in certain neighborhoods
preferential hiring for spouses of veterans in government jobs
tax-free transfer of property between spouses (including on death) and exemption from "due-on-sale" clauses

Special consideration to spouses of citizens and resident aliens:

threats against spouses of various federal employees is a federal crime
right to continue living on land purchased from spouse by National Park Service when easement granted to spouse
court notice of probate proceedings
domestic violence protection orders
existing homestead lease continuation of rights
funeral and bereavement leave
joint adoption and foster care
joint tax filing
insurance licenses, coverage, eligibility, and benefits organization of mutual benefits society
legal status with stepchildren
making spousal medical decisions
permission to make funeral arrangements for a deceased spouse, including burial or cremation
right of survivorship of custodial trust
right to change surname upon marriage
right to enter into prenuptial agreement
right to inheritance of property
spousal privilege in court cases (the marital confidences privilege and the spousal testimonial privilege)

Another Day, Another Gay Rant

2009-05-28T11:05:00.010-05:00

By the end of this week the Illinois General Assembly will either vote on civil unions or table it for next year. Springfield been conspicuously quiet on the subject, so I'm assuming it won't be going to a vote anytime soon.

It's maddening. I finally want to get married for all the right reasons and can't...at least not in any meaningful way. We can have some sort of commitment ceremony, but to what end? We're already committed to each other and to the relationship; a ceremony with no legal muscle behind it seems like a waste of champagne.

Last night Lori and I were laying in bed talking about our day. She was telling me about an elderly decrepit patient who came shuffling in on a walker. Turns out the patient was only 68! Yeeks! That's only 20 years away for me, and less for Lori. We've got some time pressure here, folks. It's all well and good for marriage rights to evolve organically during the lives of our children, but we need to get on it now. There's no one who doesn't know it's coming...why don't we speed the process along so that nice middle-aged dykes like us can provide for our partner's security.

We both work in health care. My employer provides me with health insurance, but Lori's employer doesn't. I asked my H.R. department if we provide domestic partner benefits and she said, "No. There's really been no interest in something like that."

????

No interest? Who did they ask? It wasn't me or any of the other LGBT employees. Maybe there's no interest from the hospital administration or the insurance providers, but there's a lot of interest from those of us who have watched our partner file down a broken tooth with a Dremel tool or split her blood pressure pills in half to make them last longer.

We need for President Obama to do what he promised and be an agent for change. We don't need someone to pontificate about their moral conflict or sanctity of their marriage or the need for patience while the religious right gets used to us and sees what nice gals we are. We need an advocate in the White House that will tell the country that doing the right thing isn't always comfortable for everyone, but it's the best thing for our nation. That we've wasted enough time debating, and it's time to correct this injustice and move on.

Stand up and do the right thing, Barack. Don't study "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" for another decade. It's been studied to death. Even the Joint Chiefs think it's dumb. Sign the Executive Order to repeal it, and lets get down to the business of keeping the promises you made.

Start speaking out on behalf of the civil rights of 20 million gay Americans. Don't piss away your chance to be a visionary while you waste your time trying to make nice with Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney. Do the things we put you in office to do: be a voice for those of us who have gone unheard for the last decade.

I want to marry my partner. That's it. I want what you and Michelle have, what Rush Limbaugh and his last five wives have had, and what every oppositely-gendered American couple have: the safety net that the legal contract of marriage provides to our citizenry. I don't really care about your moral dilemmas and your political squeamishness. Those are your problems, made worse by the empty promises you made that are coming home to roost.

My dilemma is that the safety and security of my family are in the hands of someone who cares too much about the Bank of America, and not nearly enough about the families of America. Tear yourself away from the bailout of Wall Street for a minute and look at the families on Main Street that need your help.

Do the right thing, Barack, and do it right away. We'll be coming to see you in October. Let's make it a victory celebration instead of a protest march, okay?

A Deafening Silence

2009-05-27T08:22:00.002-05:00

"It’s wrong to have millions of Americans living as second-class citizens in this nation. And I ask for your support in this election so that together we can bring about real change for all LGBT Americans. I will never compromise on my commitment to equal rights for all LGBT Americans. As your President, I will use the bully pulpit to urge states to treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws. I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does. Americans are yearning for leadership that can empower us to reach for what we know is possible. I believe that we can achieve the goal of full equality for the millions of LGBT people in this country. To do that, we need leadership that can appeal to the best parts of the human spirit. Join with me, and I will provide that leadership. Together, we will achieve real equality for all Americans, gay and straight alike." – Barack Obama, February 2008

" " - President Barack Obama, May 26 2009

You want to know how big a pie-in-the-sky Pollyanna I really am? I believed this guy.

A Hierachy of Citizenship?

2009-05-26T12:35:00.004-05:00

Good news, California! Your marriage will still be there when you get home from work! Your rights are still more righteous that my rights!

You won't have to turn your marriage license over to the gay couple down the street. There's no danger of Tim and Victor or Michelle and Jennifer getting the same cool rights as you. The California Supreme Court has confirmed your God-given right to be better than people like me! Woohoo!

If I were you, I'd take this opportunity to do something really uplifting to celebrate your freshly validated sanctity. Pizza? Beer? Hookers? How does one celebrate sanctity?

Mayhem in Nowhere

2009-05-26T10:45:00.003-05:00

I've decided that if the Supreme Court of California affirms Prop 8 today, I'm going to riot in the streets of Nowhere. I'm planning to take Pickle for the menacing part, and I'll have to siphon the gas out of the mower for the Molotov cocktails. I'm woefully unprepared. You'd think I'd keep a mayhem kit around the house for occasions like this.

I'll start at the Wal-Mart, where I can cause the maximum about of fear and panic. Then, if that goes well, I'll head down the road to the John Deere dealership. Fear me, Nowhere!

Well...if the rain lets up. I hate rioting in the rain.

Poultry 2009 - Day Two

2009-05-21T21:51:00.002-05:00

I had to reconfigure the carboard surrounding the ducks' crate this evening when I found one of them running around the bedroom. I'll be damned if I know how they're squeezing through those narrow openings, but at the rate they grow they should be too big to do it by this weekend ... I hope.

We have a runt again this year; a little brown duck I named Hershey. I always seem to have a soft spot for the underduck. Yesterday it was just a little bit smaller than the rest of them, but they grew and Hershey didn't, so today it's about half the size of the others. This puts it in the position of getting run over a lot when they're all scampering around, but it's eating and drinking and piling up with the rest of them to sleep, so hopefully it'll fluff up by tomorrow. I'm hoping it was just a late hatcher that got tossed in with some day-olds and will catch up to them soon.

The turkeys are pretty adorable. I read that overcrowding stresses them, and since I moved them to their own apartment away from the thundering horde of ducklings they've calmed down considerably, stopped pecking and become quite likeable. They're much cleaner and tidier tenants than the ducklings. They don't play in their water, they don't poop nearly as much and they're sort of dainty looking when they strut around on their long legs. Tonight they were fussing a lot, so I got them out and held them for awhile and they both fell asleep. So, we've learned that turkey poults and ducklings don't make good roommates.

Segregation is alive and well in Nowhere, IL.

In Which Katie's Room is Re-purposed

2009-05-20T21:38:00.008-05:00

You know how, when children leave home, some parents maintain their rooms exactly as they left them, as a sort of shrine? Or maybe they turn their rooms into something else after a suitable period of time? Well, we waited almost 24 hours to turn Katie's room into a home gym and hobby room for Ev and I ... and nearly four whole days to start raising poultry in it.

That's right, it's Springtime in Nowhere, IL and you know what that means. It's time for the annual McMurray Hatchery delivery!

The attrition rate of last years' ducks has been disheartening, especially since the pond thawed. Heading into winter we still had six Rouens and one Cayuga out of the original flock, but the Cayuga got snatched almost as soon as they returned to the pond. The two drakes disappeared a few weeks ago and today only three hens showed up at the back door for their kibble. Luckily, new ducklings were already on their way, and they arrived today.

We've decided that, although the ducks love the pond, it's not condusive to their health and longevity, so Richard can get his own damn ducks. We're going to erect a big sturdy fence around ours and put a drain in the wading pool so we can change the water more easily. Hopefully the predators have had their last free duck dinner around here.

Last year we knew what kind of ducks we wanted, but this time we opted to let the hatchery surprise us, so we ordered the Ducks Deluxe package. All you know when you place your order is that you'll get fifteen ducklings from three different breeds. They always seem to throw in an extra just in case, so sixteen ducklings arrived this morning, all alive and healthy. We got an interesting assortment! Five Blue Swedish, who are supposed to be gentle and tame, good layers and good mothers, five Chocolate Runners, who are supposed to be ridiculous looking AND prolific little egg producers (I named the runt "Hershey") and six Pekins (the AFLAC ducks) ... four of whom are crested. The crested ones look like they're wearing little feather yarmulkes.

If you're being observant, you'll notice that the bird falling asleep on its feet in the foreground does not have webbed feet. That's because we bought two baby turkeys on a whim while we were at Rural King picking up duck kibble. One of them (a Spanish Black) is mean as hell and had to be put into solitary confinement almost immediately. The sleepy one is a Bronze Breasted who turned out to be an escape artist. After finding it running around the bedroom twice, I hid and watched it squeeeeeeeze itself through the narrow bars of the cage ... and then moved it in with the other one in a separate container.

The "wading pool as brooder" method we used last year seemed less than secure with three dogs in the house (and I didn't want to scrub the thing and drag it back in the house anyway), so the ducklings have taken over Pickle's wire crate. And no, we do not drink Bud Light. We are merely using the carboard box to line the bottom of the crate. The temporary loss of her home means that Pickle has to bunk with Cooper in the big crate when we're gone. I'm not sure which of them is more appalled.

The dogs have all met the poultry and Pickle likes the turkeys the best because they peck her nose and she thinks that's playing. Cooper drools at them and Sage, as usual, couldn't care less.

More pictures to come, as ducklings grow rapidly!

Katie Goes to College

2009-05-16T09:32:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was my day off. I had originally planned to work on a couple of new Adirondack chairs for our upcoming company, but Katie reminded me Thursday night that Friday was her SIU orientation, and my presence was required. So I got up at 6:30 in the morning, which is about 4 hours before I usually get up, fortified myself with a pot of coffee, and met her at the Student Center at 8.

This event sounded like a good idea...it involved campus tours, meeting with the departmental advisor, registration assistance, help setting up bursars accounts, etc.

When we got there, everyone got a bag with a schedule, a 2009-2010 catalog and a few freebies. All the families met in a big ballroom with booths set up for different student activities...clubs, Greek stuff, GLBT stuff, ROTC, tutoring. Next we all went into an auditorium for what was billed as a Welcome! But which actually turned out to be 2 hours of speeches from Administration guys about how cool it was to be a Saluki. Unfortunately, they didn't make it sound cool. They made it sound noble and tedious, like going to church five times a week. I could see the kids disengage in the first 15 minutes...checking their phones, texting their friends, rifling through their goody bags...and the parents weren't much better. Finally, after the last Welcome to the Saluki Family! , we split off from our kids. The kids went to little Wellness workshops (Don't drink! Don't get raped!) and the parents went off with someone who was going to try to explain how we were going to afford this. I did neither. I went home to show the motor home to a guy interested in buying it. He didn't buy it, but I'm sure the hour in the truck listening to music in the sunshine was an hour better spent than listening to a speech from the University Comptroller.

So the first four hours went like that: shuffling from lecture to lecture, being welcomed repeatedly by dozens of speakers exhorting the kids to go to class, participate in campus life, and study.

Finally, after the iceberg salad and baked chicken disk lunch, we started doing the things we actually needed to do. Katie met with her College of Science advisor who was properly impressed with Katie's transcripts and ACT score and signed up for her classes (Calculus, Physiology, Honors English, Logic, and Art Appreciation). Then we went to the Math Department to see if she could test out of Calc I and into Calc II. She got information of some more scholarships available for math and science majors, and we bonded briefly with the only other woman in the math department. Apparently, it's just the two: Katie and the one female professor. Other than that, it's a boys club.

At this point it was 3 o'clock, there was less than an hour and a half left and we had a million things left to do. I was wishing for those four hours that were wasted on the speeches in the morning.

We decided to forego the tour of the College of Science in favor of getting her I.D., and setting up her Debit Dawg account (sweet deal, btw...parents pay into debit account, kids have beer money! Yay!), then took a 15 minute tram tour of the campus.

At a little after 4 0'clock we left, feeling sort of robbed. Eight hours would have been plenty of time to do all the things that needed doing, if only we hadn't wasted the first four. She's going to have to go back another day to finish the stuff we didn't get to...the financial aid stuff, the proficiency testing, and checking into the Marching Band.

But it's mostly done. She's registered, enrolled in classes, has an e-mail address, an ID card, and a bursars account. She's about to discover the secret to higher education. The secret is that there is no secret. It's like any other job...show up every day, do a good job, and eventually get a vacation. After a few years of that, you get to stop and get a paying job. After a few decades of that, you get to stop that, give up your paying job, and stay home a putter around in the yard. And then you die.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, during what sees like an absurdly short time, you have kids, raise them to adulthood, take them to their college orientation, and repeat the cycle.

It's kind of funny, isn't it? It seems like an awful lot of running around if you consider it in Geological Time. Sort of like ants, but with more bills.

WTF?

2009-05-14T01:24:00.003-05:00

We've had some weather.

Perhaps you've read about it? Friday's thunderstorms turned into an inland hurricane, whateverthehellthatis, and life was temporarily disrupted in Southern Illinois while all of our trees fell over. Now a week later the power is mostly back on and people are sorting out the mess. And we've got a shit-ton of firewood available to us. Black cloud/Silver lining. It's all good.

"Sorry about y'all's tragedy and all, but can we have that tree in your living room? Thanks."

Work's been interesting...running a hospital on generator power means that air conditioning and potable water become a luxury. As God is my witness, I'll never eat another cold-cut sandwich again. But the cookie bars were pretty good...

We read a blog post from a guy near here who wishes more than anything that our little faux-hurricane were Hurricane Katrina and we were being abandoned by the Feds in our hour of adversity...and probably that he were Anderson Cooper. But it wasn't, we weren't, and he isn't. Oh well...life's full of disappointments, guy. Maybe a novel about surviving the Inland Hurricane of Ought Nine will make you feel like your pain has been heard.

Otherwise? It's spring, our Ducks Deluxe package is in the mail, Katie's raking in the scholarship money, and I've got my semi-monthly case of poison ivy (Maybe this time I won't be allergic! Whoops! Not this time either!).

If we can get our camera woe squared away I'll add some pictures, but for now picture the bucolic Heartland with all the trees tipped over and guys in hardhats with their hands on their hips staring up at the places where the trees used to be. Now add a monkey.*

*This is our imaginary landscape. It can have a monkey if I want.

Insomnia! It's Whats For Breakfast!

2009-05-07T10:19:00.002-05:00

I went to be at 2 a.m. which is normal for me, and woke up at 5 a.m. which is NOT normal for me. The bed was comfy, Lori was (weirdly) snoring delicately in perfect sync with the bird outside the window (which was singing, btw...not snoring), and I was spinning like a top.

So now it's 10 a.m., I've been up for 5 hours and I have to go to work in three more, I've read the blogs, pestered everyone I can think of, lifted weights, sat on the porch with the dogs, sat on the porch without the dogs, and just for fun, tried to remember where everyone I know has moved to.

Finally, in desperation, I've returned to my long-neglected blog. Slunk back with my eye bags tucked between my legs (well, no...not really. Because if I could do THAT, I'd stop blogging and put that talent to good use.)

So in lieu of anything interesting to say, here are my thoughts:

1. Pickle is done growing, which means she'll always look like 6 different dogs welded together.

2. I'm proud of Maine and Iowa and New Hampshire for realizing that gay marriage won't hurt anyone except bigots, and they deserve to suffer anyway.

3. I spent a fun day with Lori yesterday, and I'm excited about the prospect of a week long vacation together.

4. I wish it would stop raining so I could get out and mow.

5. People you really like seem to drift away over time, but the crazies stick around forever.

6. I haven't seen my brother Daniel in 20 years, and I wonder about him all the time lately. I hope that doesn't mean something bad has happened.

7. I'm too wide awake to go back to sleep, but I'm too sleepy to get dressed and actually do something.

8. I'm worried about Katie, as usual. She's slowly recovering from her mono, while trying to rapidly get back to her life. Guess who's cooking up a little recipe for disaster flambe`?

So that's pretty much it, Friends, and Friends-We-Never-See (I'm talking to YOU, Hoosiers!). Today, Nowhere, IL is a profundity-free zone. Check your profundus at the door, pull on a pair of flannel jammie pants, and start staring out the window. Insomnia is in the house.

Healthcare Reform Needs You

2009-05-06T09:03:00.002-05:00

Congress has begun the arduous task of battling for healthcare reform. I, like a whole lot of other Americans, have found myself among the uninsured. I became uninsured, for the first time in my adult life, a year and a half ago when I changed employers and cut my hours to part-time. I had been insured through my employer with Blue Cross/Blue Shield, so I assumed it would be a simple matter to convert to a private policy. It was not so simple. In fact, it was not possible.

I was denied private insurance because of a pre-existing condition. That's right ... I, like millions of other middle-aged Americans, have high blood pressure. It's even higher these days, since I no longer take medication or have bi-monthly check-ups for it now that every jot and tittle of my healthcare needs -- along with the inflated price of everything else -- has to come out of my middle-class recession-impacted pocket.

I'm not willing to trust that those in Washington know my opinion about healthcare reform, so I've taken the opportunity to tell them myself. You should, too.

It's easy. Just go to Contacting the Congress and click on your state. Write to your own Congresspersons or Representatives.

Whether the private insurance sector is working for you or not, it isn't working for millions of your neighbors, co-workers, friends and family members. Healthcare reform without a public insurance option will not help those who need it. If you don't need it, that's wonderful and I'm happy for you, and you can keep your insurance under a real reform plan. Please don't sit on your insured hands when so many of the rest of us are not as fortunate.

Well, Idn't That Special!

2009-05-06T07:21:00.003-05:00

Some celebrities are lauded with honorary doctorates. Others have their body of work honored by lifetime achievement awards. The best and brightest are sometimes awarded the Nobel Prize in their field.

Sarah got a gun.

The all-white "Alaskan Hunter" - fashionable until Labor Day - is the civilian version of a modified M-4 rifle carried by U.S. troops overseas.

It's engraved with Palin's name and adorned with a map of the state on the collapsible stock - made legal after the expiration of the assault weapons ban in 2004. The Big Dipper from the state flag is etched on the magazine well behind a vented barrel guard.

The rifle is chambered in .50-caliber "Beowulf." It's the same caliber used by heavy machine guns, which can take down big game, and in war zones."

Let's see those Cheeto-eating, pj clad liberal Alaska bloggers and the gosh-darned negative nellies in the Alaska legislature try to mess with her now also too! Look out Putin, don't be rearing your head! Sarah can see your house from hers ... and she's armed to the teeth, gosh-darnit!

Oh, and Levi? Ixnay on the awyerlay.

Teabag St. Louis!!!!11!!1!! Or don't.

2009-04-15T14:41:00.009-05:00

Thanks to Draches over at Daily Kos, I'm able to share with you this fine photo of the turnout for today's St. Louis Tax Day Teabaggapalooza and Spelling Bee.To be fair and balanced, this is only about a third of the crowd-let.

Apparently there was a "t" shortage.

Morans.

We've Got Your Stimulus, Baby

2009-04-05T07:16:00.002-05:00

While Wall Street is puking into its million dollar toilets and the folks in Washington, DC are putting together economic survival kits and throwing a TARP over the country, one much-maligned state in the economically devastated Midwest has come up with a stimulus package of their own.

From the Des Moines Register this morning comes the news that by merely not obstructing its gay citizens right to marry each other, Iowa's economy stands to grow to the tune of 5.3 million dollars per year, create hundreds of jobs and attract new residents and new businesses to the state over the next two to five years. That's millions of dollars in tax, tourism and consumer revenue, jobs and industry by doing nothing but ending a ban on gay marriage. Hear me again. It's a gain of money, jobs and business that costs Iowa nothing ... zip ... zero ... nada ... and all they had to do was say that equal rights means equal rights for everyone. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty stimulated by that.

I'm also tickled pink to read that people are finally waking up and realizing that we are a sought-after commodity. Is the economy in your state struggling? Are businesses closing? Are people leaving your state in droves to find work elsewhere? Attract Teh Gays.

Unlike Connecticut and Massachusetts - the other states that permit gay marriage - Iowa has no nearby competitors for same-sex couples who want to marry. Businesses could see $160 million in new wedding and tourism spending over the next three years, according to a study from researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Iowa pretty much has the Midwest all to itself," said Lee Badgett, a University of Massachusetts economist who co-authored the 2008 report. "It's in the middle of a lot of states that have a lot of same-sex couples. It's in a good position."

That's right. Iowa has cornered the market on us, and the rest of you Heartland states are going to have to hustle to catch the gravy train before it pulls out of the station taking all your queers with it. Compete for us, bitches.

"It makes Iowa overall a more welcoming state," Redlawsk said. "That's a good thing from the standpoint of businesses who, frankly, are concerned about quality of life issues for their employees."

Honestly, I can't wait until this trend catches on. I eagerly await the day the whole Midwest is dotted with billboards advertising gay wedding chapels and papered with ads offering gay honeymoon getaway packages.

And why are we worth so much to Iowa (and potentially to your state, too)?

Same-sex marriage will yield an estimated net gain of $5.3 million per year for Iowa state government, according to the report from UCLA's Williams Institute, a nonprofit think tank that studies sexual orientation and public policy. "It's not going to have a huge impact," Badgett said. "But the impact will be positive. "Fewer gays and lesbians in Iowa will qualify for public benefits such as Medicaid if they marry and combine incomes, the study found. Nearly 90 percent of same-sex married couples who file their taxes jointly also would pay more because of their higher earnings.

Sales tax revenue would rise because of increased spending on florists, hotels and other wedding expenses. The increases would offset the married gay couples who pay less or receive other marriage-related deductions, according to the study."What people care about right now are their pocketbooks," Redlawsk said. "The moral issues are just not as high on anybody's list right now, given the economic environment."

(See, that's what I love about moral issues. They're flexible!) I'd also like to state that, while I'm sure the wedding industry does benefit, there are other important economic reasons for getting the hell out of the obstructionist way of same-sex marriage. Dependent insurance premiums will rise thanks to the inclusion of a name on that line for "spouse." Home and automobile purchases will rise thanks to the ability to include both incomes on a loan application without having to jump through hoops and explain that, no, the other name on the application isn't your parent or your co-signer. There are just a whole hell of a lot of things heterosexual people take for granted and don't even think about with regard to what "marriage" means after the wedding is over. I'd like to thank Iowa, personally, for thinking about those.

Of course, not everyone sees the Iowa decision as a victory. There are some who still believe that the "will of the people" is for gays and lesbians to be denied their civil rights, even though polling shows that as high as 75% of voters favor some kind of legalized form of marriage or civil union for their gay and lesbian family, friends, co-workers and neighbors. For those nay-sayers who want to let the people decide this issue by voting to amend rather than follow the Constitution, they're going to have to wait awhile.

Iowa Gov. Chet Culver, an opponent of gay marriage in the past, said Friday he was reviewing the court's ruling. But there are significant hurdles to overcome to amend the Iowa Constitution.The Legislature must approve a constitutional amendment during two consecutive sessions before the issue goes to a statewide ballot, meaning the earliest that could happen would be in 2012. Massachusetts has a nearly identical process. "Opponents in Massachusetts couldn't do anything immediately," Redlawsk said. "As time went by, people realized that the sky hasn't fallen, the world hasn't ended."

That's right. While they're waiting, Iowans (and the rest of the country) are going to be learning what they've already learned in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont. When gay and lesbian people get married nothing cataclysmic happens. Heterosexual marriage licenses don't become null and void. Heterosexual couples are not struck with unexplained infertility leading to death of the human species. Children are not snatched off the streets and turned into gay and lesbian sex slaves. Natural disasters don't increase in frequency or degree of devastation. No one demands the right to marry their cat.

Now, whose next in line for the Gay and Lesbian Economic Stimulus Plan? Illinois? Illinois?? Hello, Illinois? Are you listening?

Meet the New Neighbors!

2009-04-04T09:00:00.004-05:00

We worked our butts off cleaning the rental house so we could return it to the landlord last weekend. Two days ago we walked him through it to show him the things HE needed to address ... like the still-slow drains, the still-inadequate wiring, the still-backed up septic system, the new termite trails in the wood floors, the leaking roof, the broken window, the storm door that's just an empty frame without a screen, the cracked front door you can see daylight through and the new mouse hole. He took copious notes, hugged us for the cleanup, and then promptly ignored every single one of the items on HIS list and moved a large family of skanky redneck hillbillies into the house "as is" yesterday.

If I tell you we're not thrilled, I'm underreporting.The head of this household is a sixtyish man named Barney, whose only redeeming virtue is his ability to play the banjo, dobro and mandolin (or so he claims). There is a large disabled wife who was unable to hoist herself out of her porch chair for an introduction, two thirty-something sons with the distinctive "high-as-a-kite, no teeth and facial sores" appearance that only a certain segment of the population can achieve at that age, at least one live-in girlfriend of indeterminate age who was passed out in the truck during the moving process and an obese pug dog named Dollar Bill.

On the bright side, they got rid of a lot of the broken appliances, odd junk and discarded trash we had piled up waiting for Big Trash Pickup Day next week ... by carrying it back into the house we just dragged it out of. They call us "neighbor" ... as in, "The yard looks good, neighbor!" and "Can we have that stuff you're throwin' away, neighbor?" and "Is that shed for us? Oh, it's yours, neighbor? Can we use half of it?"

We call them the Meth-Heads ... as in, "The meth-heads are going to steal our stuff," and, "Kids, you can't play with the meth-heads ... or buy their meth."

Under Every Pile of Crap There Might Be a Pony

2009-03-29T10:55:00.002-05:00

Black Clouds:

1. My camera is dead. I hear that it may be recovering with a friend in Alabama, or it may need to be replaced, but one way or t'other, we're out of the picture taking biz temporarily, and we have things we should be taking pictures of.

2. Carrie left us a crap-ass mess to clean up in the house she was renting.

3. I inherited a boatload of pictures when my mother died that I've been carting around with me like an unexamined albatross.

4. Sage has the cancer.

Silver Lining:

Sage's cancer has had me thinking I should go through those photo boxes and find her puppy pictures, so yesterday I dragged them all out and we started going through them. I found many excellent ones of Sage, along with a ton of pictures of my son and other cool stuff, and in the very last box I discovered a treasure trove of photos of my childhood in my mom's stuff that I had no idea even existed.

One of the things Carrie abandoned in her rental house was a printer/copier/scanner.

We hooked it up and it works like a charm, so we've been scanning our brains out and will soon have photos again ... the cool old kind!

Also, my co-worker is remodeling her house after a flood and we scored a great piece of furniture she didn't want after she ordered it. Wooohooo, more bookshelves!

We love serendipity.

More Stuff About Stuff...This Time It's Family Stuff.

2009-03-26T11:31:00.002-05:00

Last week we had a bad three-car car wreck on a highway near the hospital where I work. The center of the three car sandwich was a family who's car was rear ended and pushed into oncoming traffic, where they were hit head on. One child was ejected out onto the highway, one had his head crushed when he flew around inside the car, and the third was unharmed in her carseat.

I was working the blood bank that evening. There's nothing more awful for a parent than working a trauma with children. Most of your brain is working on work: crossmatching as fast as you can for multiple people at the same time and then sending units out the door. Again and again and again until the E.R. runners stop showing up at your elbow, the phone stops ringing, the helicopters take off, and you can look around and breathe.

But I think it's especially difficult for us parents. The thought periodically pops into our heads, "What if those were my kids?" It reminds us of ever stupid thing we ever did raising our own and how many ways it could have gone bad.

The parents in the car were relatively unharmed. The little boy died, and his sister was flown to St. Louis by helicopter to a full-service pediatric trauma center, where I suspect she'll be a guest for a fairly long time.

The parents had to leave the hospital, get in a car and go home with their new reality. The accident wasn't their fault, but the unbelted kids were. They'll have the rest of their lives to wish for that moment back.

I'm currently mad at my grown daughter. She and I have gotten crossways in about all the ways a relationship can get crossways. I'm so mad, in fact, that when she moved to Chicago last week I told her to give me a few months to cool down before she gets in touch.

I know I'll get over it. Like the lady at the City Hall said yesterday, "Honey, they don't even think about growing up until they're 30."

The juxtaposition of my anger with my daughter and the death of someone else's children nags at me. Forgiveness is a gift for everyone; it doesn't make anyone's life better to hang on to old grievences. It also doesn't make life better to be a doormat...there's a balance to be struck there somewhere. However, it's not a straight line from here to there. There's all sorts of curvy side paths on the way...a mix of how could you, sprinkled with some recognition of the same selfish behavior from our own past, plus the nagging thought that this may be my fault somehow.

I love my kids. Hell, everyone loves their kids. But it's easy to think about all the times we've done things with them that could have had disasterous consequences. It's amazing that people survive their childhoods, and that parents survive their parenthood. But we do mostly, and then the kids grow up and have their own kids who make them crazy with anger and fear and love and pride, sometimes all at once, just like we did to our own parents. It's a contract that families have: I'll forgive you for every crappy thing you did on your path to adulthood, but the price you have to pay for that is forgiving your own kids their crappy behavior.

Like Katie used to say, "It's the ciwcle of yife."

It's the Mother's Curse...Someday you'll have children just like you. We hope. If you're lucky.

Shameless Self-Indulgence Warning

2009-03-24T09:25:00.002-05:00

Get out your hankies, because I'm going to talk about my dog. If you've heard parts of this before you'll just have to indulge me, because I need to do this from the beginning:

Sage is a 13-year-old red chow-shiba inu mix. (Ev calls her an "eeboo beeboo.") My son and I adopted her from the pound when he was ten and she was a year old. She was his first dog. He'd always begged for a dog, but we lived in rentals, so she was our first acquisition when I bought my first house.

We were three needy creatures in those days!

I'd been through three marriages that were utter failures. My son was struggling to cope with not having a dad and I wasn't filling the void. Sage had been through three owners who all gave up on her because she was a destructive chewer. It was love at first sight for all of us misfits.

We got off to a bit of a rough start. She destroyed a chair, a rug, the mail and a six foot stuffed dolphin in the first couple of months, but she was such a sweet girl otherwise that I invested in a professional dog trainer to teach us all some obedience training. She probably needed it the least of the three of us and was the quickest learner. After six months of crating her for her separation anxiety she's never again laid her mouth on another thing but kibble and chewies. Oh, and that groundhog. And that possum.

At any rate, we've gloated often in the ensuing years over what a really great dog she is and how dumb those other people were to give her up. Until she got old and cranky she was the most even-tempered and patient dog in the world with people and other animals (except that possum and that groundhog). She's always loved everything else that came into her life ... cats, dogs, ducks, ferrets ... and she probably wanted to love the possum and the groundhog too, but it didn't work out. But seriously, all you have to do is look at her eyes to know how much she wants to please you.

Sage has been struggling with arthritis for at least the past five years, but it's really been bad for the past two. She's having more and more trouble getting up and down, getting more and more stiff and sore, being less and less willing to hobble all the way outside to go to the potty ... and getting way grumpier about being groomed because even her skin hurts.

A couple of weeks ago we found a mass on her abdomen and she had surgery last week to remove it. It turned out to be an adenocarcinoma of her mammary gland ... she's got malignant breast cancer.

We've known for the past year or so that Sage was winding down and we've talked about what that will look like for her and for us. We aren't those pet owners who put our pets through extraordinary measures to prolong their lives, so we were okay with letting nature and old age take its course. Now we know what that course will be and we have a better sense of how short an amount of borrowed time we're on.

I want to talk about her while she's still alive, though, and talk about the Sage-ness of her and what she's taught me.

Sage was my son's first dog, but she's really my first dog, too, and we've had a lot to learn from each other. The other dogs in my life were childhood pets, which meant they were really my parents' dogs, or they were temporary dogs who came in and out of my life with roommates or weren't kept for one reason or another (usually because I wasn't responsible enough to keep them). Sage is the first dog I ever made a full-out, lifelong commitment to and kept it. She's shared my adult life, made every move with me, been through three relationships with me, been there while my son grew up and left the nest, and impacted my domicile choices. No Sage? No deal. I've moved her across the city and across the state and across the country, shared houses when we had them and rooms in someone else's house when we didn't. She's sometimes been the only friend I had. I've cried on her shoulder and gotten snot on her fur and she doesn't mind. She's my dog, and she's taught me what that means.

When I got Sage she was shy and nervous and had bad habits and was scared of everything. I had to teach her to play tug-of-war because she would just give up and let the human have whatever the human seemed to want. She always thought she was in trouble. I worked hard to teach her (and me) to trust herself and people, and that autonomy is a good thing and it's okay to hang onto what you want and fight for it, within reason. Today she can snarl and take no crap from the puppy instead of giving up her food and her bed. Yay, Sage!

The one thing she loves is to run. She can't run fast anymore, but when she was a youngster ... hoo, boy! She would run huge laps around our big grassy yard at breakneck speeds, almost laid over on her side taking the corners, and grinning from ear to ear. Now she walks her big grassy yard and lays in the sun. She's taught me that big grassy yards are good for the soul at all stages of life and one should always have one.

She's a tidy girl who doesn't like to get her feet wet or dirty, and until she lived on three acres she used to pick one spot in the yard for her bathroom and not leave land mines in the lawn. She's more devil-may-care about that these days. Her outside fastidiousness is occasionally overcome by her tendency to be sort of high-strung and nervous indoors (and to try and "hold it" forever), so she occasionally does what we call the "exploding dog" trick. The first time it happened (from one end of the new house to the other on the beige wall-to-wall berber carpeting) I just sat down and cried. Sage has taught me the uselessness of rage over poop on the carpet and the value of owning your own steam cleaner.

Sage has taught me that when you make a commitment to a relationship (be it with a dog or a human) you take it seriously, and it's forever. Relationships (with dogs and humans) aren't always going to be without frustration or anger, and they aren't always going to personally fulfilling. Sometimes they'll be hard, nasty work. Sometimes they'll be "stuck in the house in the winter." Sometimes, however, they'll be full of romping in the sun. Sage has taught me that relationships are much more about comfortable companionship than about tug-of-war and excitement, and you don't get there by turning in the old one for a new one when the old one isn't fun anymore.

As much as she's taught me about making a commitment, she's also taught me about letting go, and that jealousy is a wasted emotion. I used to the the primary human in her life, but I'm not anymore ... she's moved on. Katie is her first choice and Ev is her second. Dogs can be fickle that way. So can people. We've been a little bit estranged for the past couple of years even though we live in the same house. We acknowledge each other, but she doesn't come easily to me when I call her anymore, or wag and bark when I come home like she does for Ev and Katie. Maybe I'm just a part of her landscape after all these years and nothing to get excited about anymore. She's taught me that it's okay not to be the whole world to someone or have all their affection and attention ... there's plenty to go around.

Sage taught me about unconditional responsibility to another living being at a time in my life when I was clueless about such things. She's taught me loyalty.

In exchange for all the things she's taught me, I've tried to give Sage a good life. She hasn't suffered abuse or neglect from me (although her matted coat would make you wonder sometimes). She's had safety and security and some freedom to explore her world. She's had experiences and gone places and had all kinds of animal friends and sniffed a wide assortment of butts. She's been warm in the winter, cool in the summer and dry when it's raining. She's been well fed and well loved. The best thing I've ever done for her (and for me) was finding Ev and her kids and moving to Southern Illinois, where the grass is plentiful and the sunshine is warm and the bunnies are ripe for the chasing. It's been a good place for Sage to live out the last years of her life and she's a happy dog. What more can you ask, really?

I wanted to get all this down now, while she's still around for me to appreciate, and I wanted to get some of the sadness out of my system so I can enjoy the time we've got left. This is something I actually learned from my mother's death, after which we said, "Wouldn't it be great if we'd throw big memorial get-togethers for people and talk about what they meant to us BEFORE they died???" So this is that. It's Sage's pre-memorial, and we both thank you for attending.

So what do I need from Sage at this point? Not a damn thing. It's her turn to do the needing. I want the time we've got left to be good time for her, and when it's not good time for her I want to do the kindest thing I can do for her and help her go peacefully, surrounded by people who love her. And I don't want to only be able to tell her story in the past tense. I hope she gets one more Spring and Summer. She likes those the best.

Pull The Plug

2009-03-22T09:37:00.002-05:00

I have a message from the Grassroots to the leadership in Washington:

You don't have to let it fail

... IT ALREADY HAS ...

you can turn off the life support now.

Perhaps you didn't notice, but the "financial industry" stopped serving the public quite awhile ago and has been solely in the business of stealing whatever wealth this country had and burying it in its own caves for a long damn time.

What we're engaged in here isn't a "bailout" or the shoring up of a necessary financial base for the citizens of the United States. It's a war. It's a war between the majority of US citizens and those who have manipulated our economy for their own greed and are fast leaving the rest of us jobless, homeless and penniless without a backward glance. They may have all the money, but we outnumber the bastards and we're angry. We also have the advantage of being in better shape for this war because we've actually had to work for a living (and cut way back on our food intake) than those fat pasty assholes. And really, we're getting angry enough to do something drastic, fellas. This may be the actual "bipartisanship" the country needs ... EVERYBODY is pissed off, and everybody is pissed off at the same goddamned people.

It doesn't matter how much Monopoly money we print at this point, they've already got all the real wealth ... but they'll be just as happy to take the funny money, too, just for good measure.

This is not rocket science ... or even complicated economics. I have a contract with my company which states that they will pay me "x" in exchange for my doing "y" amount of work. "X" is contingent upon my doing "y" in an ethical and legal manner and upon the company thriving, at least partly due to that work, or my contract is null and void and I will not be collecting "x" ... I will be sitting home on my couch perusing the newspaper for another job. If the economy causes my company to flounder because people cannot afford our services, it's possible that I will not be collecting "x" no matter how well I perform "y" because the company will no longer be able to afford "x" ... and I will be sitting home on my couch perusing the newspaper for another job. If I am caught stealing from my company or rifling through the purses of our customers and stealing their money, I will not be paid "x" ... I will be sitting home on my couch perusing the newspaper for another job. If the whole damn company goes under because no one can afford our services we will not be getting a bailout from anyone ... no one will be paid "x" ... we will all be sitting home on our various couches perusing newspapers for jobs. Our customers will not be perusing their respective newspapers because they will be blind due to their inability to access our services and will be receiving disability "x".

AIG is the current and handiest example of a company whose top executives have broken every one of the "if 'x' then 'y'" rules of business as the majority of Americans understand them. Why are they still collecting "x" (and "x" to the "nth" power) and not sitting on their couches perusing their newspapers looking for other jobs?

And really, here's the news flash for President Obama and the new administration:

AIG is not keeping America afloat. It is sinking the country. The country has become a life support system for a bloated corpse that has done nothing to deserve to be kept alive. The majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. The majority of Americans have credit scores that can't hope to be astronomically high enough to please most lenders in this economy, even though they make ample money to cover a non-usurious mortgage or car payment. The majority of Americans (those who, coincidentally, voted for CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN) are not being served by AIG ... or by the public servants we elected. The "change" we were looking for was not the pennies left in the dryer at the laundromat.

Someone will have to prove to me -- and not in convoluted theoretical economics -- how the death of a bloated economic giant could possibly make a nickle's worth of negative difference in the day to day life of the average American.

Spring Sprang Sprung

2009-03-12T08:45:00.004-05:00

Spring dropped by to taunt us like a neighbor running up on the porch to show off her winning lottery ticket and then running away to cash it in. But in the brief couple of days it was here, teasing us with its sunshine and 70 degree temperatures, the grass turned green, the daffodils sprang up in bunches alongside the road and many trees began sporting their bright pink Spring coats. Can Easter eggs be far behind?

Today they're forecasting a light snow in the afternoon and a high of 34.

We spent our day off yesterday being frivolous and carefree and staying away from the house and out in the world for eight whole hours of grownup, kid-free girlfriend time.

I will spend today stoking the fire in the fireplace and shampooing the lakes of dog vomit out of the carpet. That's the price that must be paid for spending eight hours away from home and leaving the dogs with a softhearted teenager who thinks it's a little bit mean to crate them and was sure we'd be right back because we never go anywhere.

(We sometimes wonder exactly what Cooper gets into and eats when no one's looking that makes her barf so prodigiously, but we're pretty sure we don't really want to know. Last week I had to pry a credit card out of her mouth before she swallowed it.)

The next time Spring arrives on our doorstep we're going to club it over the head and tie it up in the yard so it can't get away again.

Whither Civil Unions This Time?

2009-03-10T10:24:00.005-05:00

A civil union bill is once again creeping through the Illinois General Assembly. We're watching it closely, to say the least. Besides the fact that Lori and I would like the opportunity for official validation to give our relationship some legal backbone, I'd also like to add her to my mediocre, overpriced health insurance policy. Oh...and I love her. A lot.

Conservative groups in Illinois say that the civil union bill is just a smokescreen for a law demanding full marriage rights and once we get our hands on marriage equality, all manner of mayhem will break loose. Traditional marriage as we know it will be destroyed. The divorce rate among heteros will skyrocket, families will be led by a single parent, and serial marriage and childbirth out of wedlock will become normalized.

oh...wait. That's what's happening now. WITH the sanctity intact.

Let's face it. Heterosexuals have not been great stewards of the sacred institution of marriage for the last century or so. Why not let us queers give it a try? What's the worst we can do? Get divorced? Gad, what a scandal that would be!

And for all you proponents of the Slippery Slope Theory of legislative permissiveness, I promise not to use this as a gateway to marry:

1. My pets (who smell bad and don't carry their weight with regard to household chores).
2. Children (see above).
3. Multiple women and/or men.
4. Inanimate objects.

Now you in turn, Protectors of America's Morality, have to return the favor. You have to give up:

1. Sex with children (I'm talking to you, Catholic Church)
2. Multiple spouses (Hear me, Mormons?)
3. Sex outside the bonds of your Holy Matrimony (that one is especially for you, Larry Craigs and David Vitters of the world. No more hookers or bathroom trysts, unless they're with your sacred, government-sanctioned wife).

I was talking about my desire to civil union Lori (and really, it would be worth letting us get married to avoid verbs like "civil unioning") with some coworkers yesterday, and one of them asked if we would have a ceremony.

I explained my extreme stage fright, and said probably not, and she said, Oh, you should. Just invite a few friends who accept your lifestyle and have a small ceremony."

Accept our lifestyle?

You mean the one in which we go to work every day, put our kids through college, pay our taxes and fret about our bills? That lifestyle?

Or the one where I have a monogamous lifelong relationship with a person that I love, and would like to know that in the event of my death she could keep our home and live out her years on my life insurance and retirement benefits? Is that the subversive lifestyle we're referring to?

There's an ongoing debate about gay marriage among gay people that it's hetero-normative and it actually gives unfair weight to the outdated construct of marriage as a moral institution as opposed to a legal one. I get that. I'm not trying to force anyone to do anything different with their own lives. I'm not interested in a church-sanctioned religious ceremony performed by a minister choking back his bile with the gun of State Authority in his back. I promise...I'll stay out of your church if you'll stay out of my relationship.

The reality is that hetero-normative marriages are the kinds of marriages we grew up with, and that's the structure many of us feel most comfortable in. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here...I just want the same boring old marriage the rest of you get into (and out of) with such ease.

Please, Illinois General Assembly? Pretty please with wedding cake frosting? We promise not to be weird. Well...maybe not too weird.

Facebook

2009-03-09T01:26:00.000-05:00

Robin? I saw Rainbow Beardsley on Facebook. I'm just sayin'. NOW do you want to sign up?

America's Lost Decade

2009-03-08T12:58:00.003-05:00

Please, if you read nothing else today, read this. Read it, repost it somewhere ... pass it on. Here's an idea; print it out and send copies to your elected representatives:

America's Lost Decade

Hunter Mar 8, 2009 1:06 PM - Show original item

It is difficult to muster any sympathy whatsoever for the goddamned banks. This is a crisis entirely of their own manufacture. Yes, the housing market went down -- which anyone with an ounce of sense could have predicted, and did. Any bank betting the entirety of its assets many-times-over on that not happening deserves to fail as spectacularly as possible, its corporate leadership condemned to no greater future responsibilities than bussing tables.

Of the two current largest zombie banks -- Citibank and AIG, neither of which has any rational chance of survival, short of the government simply pouring cash down their gullets until they are well and truly satiated -- I have a special loathing of Citibank. A bank dedicated towards building consumer debt in ever more creative ways, they helped to push for the infamous bankruptcy bill that made it impossible for the struggling middle class to get out from under credit card debts, explicitly. As it turns out, that was probably a wonderfully stupid move on their parts. What happens when people can't pay credit card debts, and you pass a law saying they have to, period, no matter what? They don't magically have more money than they did before the law was passed, so something else has to give. Something like, say... their mortgages?

Well, there you go, brain trust. Well played.

In any event, the American political arena is currently locked in mortal combat over such words as "nationalization", because when given the choice between doing something according to common sense or according to asinine and petty mantra, no politician or pundit will ever chose the common sense approach. Call it nationalization, or socialization, or a bailout, or lemon capitalism, or temporary restructuring -- call it beagleization or mangrove dispepticism for all any of us care, the fact of the matter is that insolvent banks are insolvent banks, and we have a choice: we can take them over, as form of government-backed insurance of the marketplace, or we can let them burn. Our hearts say let them burn, and with as many of those insufferable, rich-as-hell and dirty-as-snot Masters of the Universe inside them as possible. Our heads, though, say we don't want to wait in Depression-style bread lines just for a bit of schadenfreude, and so we're going to be taking over these banks. The alternatives are letting them fail, which is economically devastating, or simply printing new dollars by the trillions and giving it to them free of charge or restraint until all their debts suddenly become manageable, which is impossible. So fine; we'll be taking them over, in at least some capacity.
You know it, I know it, the politicians know it, and the banks know it. The expectation that that will be happening is, in fact, one of the few moderating influences on the current market.

While their may once have been a time when Wall Street could have been considered the engine of American finance, it has become in actual practice little but a high-fashion casino. (Perhaps Bernie Madoff made it too explicit, but in reality his Ponzi scheme functioned for so long, and with so little investigation, precisely because it did operate much as any of the other high-roller operations that it mimicked.) Credit default swaps (at least, as they were implemented) served exactly one purpose, which was to give uninvolved parties a roundabout way to bet large amounts of money on something that was, due to the inherently untangleable mess of the underlying "assets", of unknowable value. Like much of the financial inventions of the last decade or two, it did nothing to stimulate any part of the economy other than finance itself. It created no jobs, except the jobs required to push paperwork from one desk to another. It created no new products, and invented no new technologies, and it gave no money to any party interested in doing either. And America boomed because of it.

That is the nature of the new kind of "finance" that continued to represent a larger and larger share of America's ostensible "prosperity". We have become a nation incapable of effectively making textiles, cars, steel, electronics or other physical things, because those things only allow for a little profit. Instead, we choose to dabble in the strictly theoretical profits of high finance -- imaginary profits on imaginary wealth. Finance became more and more speculatory, and less and less encumbered by physical products, or assets, or services.

And the rich have done exceedingly well for themselves, in that new economy. As for the rest of the nation, the middle class found themselves subjectively in a recession for the entirety of the Bush years. Food prices, gas prices, housing prices -- on every front, it became harder and harder for the middle and poorer classes simply maintain the status quo, and yet none of this counted as recession or poverty, because we simply kept redefining the terms to exclude such unpleasantness.

What did we gain? Ask yourself -- what, exactly, did the nation create during those years? What new projects did America embark on? What betterments did we make to the lives, or health, or happiness of our citizens? What did we do?

The answer is jack-squat. We did nothing. We were attacked, and so we had a war. We suffered recession, and so we were told that to save our economy we should go to the malls and buy more things. We presided over the draining of our own wealth, and did nothing, and under what truly must count as the most dysfunctional American government -- legislative, executive and judicial -- of many decades, we actually were told we should feel proud over all of it, or at the very least to shut up about it.

We are aware of Japan's "Lost Decade", a period of real estate collapse and economic stagnation. We have, though, been in our own Lost Decade since the turn of the millennium, and only now that the higher echelons of our society have found themselves in as unpalatable a situation as the rest of us have been in has anyone important deigned to notice. We have had a decade of doing nothing, and two decades of offshoring our every competence, leaving us to putter in our financial closets and declare ourselves kings of all we could see.

If there is anything to be learned from any of this, is that at some point, America simply must invest in itself again. If we can no longer build cars, so be it -- but perhaps we can build a new energy infrastructure. If America is uninterested in even maintaining the highway infrastructure that a past generation built, fine -- perhaps in this hundred years, we can evolve past them. We have already faced fifty years of price shocks, petro-dictatorships, and every sort of punishment as a result of our stubborn insistence that oil is the One and Only Possible Energy Source -- why, exactly? How did America get, to put it too damn bluntly, so dumb? We once could reach the moon -- now we cannot. We once could provide both pensions and healthcare to our citizens -- now we cannot. We once led the world in technology in nearly every field -- now we do not.
We could be leaders, if we simply regained our interest in leading. If we were interested in technological leadership, or educational leadership, or having the best infrastructure, or having the best healthcare, or having the best anything, save military might, we could have it. We are gladly pouring over trillion dollars into propping up the necessary fictions of speculatory finance, money that exists in no form other than numbers in the computers and file cabinets of the world; what would a trillion dollars do, if invested towards infrastructure, of any sort? A trillion dollars could not only cure cancer, it could turn it into ice cream. A trillion dollars could not just build high speed trains to replace our crowded airports, but create an army of robots to wash your damn car while you were away. We could do anything, if we were as dedicated to the prospect of doing anything as we were to doing nothing.

We have spent a decade -- and yes, it should be said, under the proud banner of conservatism -- doing nothing, as a nation. We have wasted our advantages, and put our own infrastructure in hock, and allowed the greediest and most crooked among us to dictate how the rest of us should live. We were told that giving money to the rich was good, and giving respite to the poor was sinful. We were told in supposedly serious books by supposedly serious men that giving up our jobs and industries would make our nation rich. We were told that our companies knew more about how to govern a nation than our citizens -- and we let them draft our laws, and lobby our government, and we squeezed the middle class at every possible opportunity. We were told many, many stupid things by people who now, by any rights, should end up on street corners wearing nothing more than rags made out of their own past pronouncements, but who sadly will never be nearly as inconvenienced by their actions as you or I have been.

We are likely about to enter a second Lost Decade, one in which the pain will be far more widespread than the first. Still, though, the shining beacons of conservative thought have little to say other than meeting at CPAC and calling people gay; the party of Goldwater or the smashingly well-spoken racist Buckley now can only find wisdom in the dimwitted buffoonery of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Joe the Plumber. We seem bound and determined not to do anything too bold, or invest in ourselves too much. We can never expect a thimbleful of apology from those that led us into this wreck, but it also seems that we also should not expect even the base acknowledgement that things have gone wrong.

It seems that in order to avoid a true Depression, we must more than anything else simply believe in investing in our own nation, as collective action. We may not even get that much.

See, that's the thing I keep trying to wrap my head around. Everything feels so goddamned fictional ... money that isn't real, a patchwork of lies and subterfuge and manipulation and sleight-of-hand ... and we didn't step up and put our collective feet down and put a stop to it. I think he hit the nail on the head when he says:

We could do anything, if we were as dedicated to the prospect of doing anything as we were to doing nothing.