The Greedy Green-Eyed Middlemonster

Not that anyone with any authority whatsoever cares what I think, but I've been letting this bang around in my head like a pinball long enough. I need to put it into words.

The great overarching problem we're facing in this country is a simple one, and unless we address it, nothing we do to work around it is going to make any damn difference. There's a big huge monster in our national basement and we need to stop feeding it. Either starve it or shoot it, but stop feeding it. I call it the greedy green-eyed middlemonster. It's that entity that stands between each one of us and what we need, and everyone who has what we need and wants to provide it, and steals from both sides while giving almost nothing of value back to either of us.

In many cases, the greedy green-eyed middlemonster was a good idea when it was born, but a complete lack of control by the people it was created to protect has turned it into a voracious beast that no longer serves any purpose but to hunger, and to threaten our existence if we don't feed it.

Let's say you thought getting a puppy who would grow up to be a loyal dog and protect your property was a good idea, but instead of training it, or even supervising it, you just left it in the basement and threw food down there until it got big, hoping that it would feel some loyalty and gratitude for the kibble and come charging up the stairs in your time of need. Instead, that hell-hound grew so large it completely filled your basement. Now it's too large and cumbersome to even get up the stairs, much less care about you or your property. It lives to eat, and since you can't even begin to keep up with its intake demand, it begins eating the foundation and the support beams to sustain itself. If you venture into the basement it's likely to devour you, too. 

Health insurance seemed like a good idea. We'll all send in some money every month and they'll put it somewhere safe and then dole it back out to us as we needed it. Since we're all sending some in, and we don't all need it back at once, they can use some of mine to help out my neighbor when he's sick and use some of his to help me out when I'm sick. And since our piddly little individual amounts won't buy any of us much stock, they can put all of our money into one pot and invest it so it grows. They can even pay themselves something for the bookkeeping. But wait! They've stopped giving any of it back! They've paid themselves off the top and left less than half of what we need them to pay for and they try not to pay for any of it! They've created so many rules and regulations for us and our doctors (and none at all for themselves) that we can't afford to get a hangnail fixed out of our own pockets, and God knows THEY won't pay for it, because we've had that toe all our lives and that hangnail is pre-existing. My doctor will, of course, refer me to a health care lending company that will let me make payments to them for my care -- with compounding interest. It turns out we'd have been better off taking those insurance premiums we've been paying through employers for our entire working lives and putting them in a box under the bed every month. We'd have a tidy nest-egg by now. Plenty of cash to pay the doctor a fair price for the removal of a hangnail and maybe even a Pap smear while we're at it, and he could have his money the day he provides the service and not have to pay a phalanx of collectors to badger anyone into paying him a small percentage of his fee a year from now. So, how do I feel about health care reform and private insurance? Well, I don't feel good about it.

How about those mortgage lenders? You've got a house you need to sell and someone else needs a house to live in. Note, I said LIVE IN, not "flip" or invest in or turn into a rental to profit on -- live in. In the good old days, you and I would sit down and agree on a price for your house and we'd draw up a contract. I'd give you money every month until the house was paid for and then you'd sign it over to me. If I didn't pay you for it you'd still own it and you could sell it to someone else. You got every dime of my money to put in your pocket and I got a house to live in. But you had to wait for your money, so mortgage lending seemed like a good idea. You could get all your money upfront and I could still make payments. Of course, I'd have to pay a little interest fee to the broker so he could make a living, but it was a small amount over a long time, so that wasn't a big hardship. But, wait! Now you and I never meet! Your people talk to my people who all talk to people neither of us ever see, and we both pay all those people to negotiate this deal for us. Even then, the people we deal with aren't really the people we deal with. Those people are far, far away and have never even been to our neighborhood, but they decide what your house is worth and whether I'm worthy of buying it. They sell me a promissory note and then they sell that promissory note a half dozen more times, and by the time I've actually paid for your house I've paid half again the price we agreed on. You didn't get that money, did you? No, I didn't think so.

If you want a car you have to talk to a bank. If you want a new roof you have to talk to a bank. If you want to fix up your bathroom you have to talk to a bank. I've never seen a bank with a car lot attached to it or a pile of shingles or toilets out back, but they're still the place you have to go if you want those things, and they're going to take a big chunk out of the price of that car or those shingles or that toilet in order for you to have them AND the car and shingle and toilet guys to sell them to you. There's something really wrong with this picture, and what we here in Nowhere can't understand is why nobody minds. Why are we not all standing in front of banks and insurance companies and large corporate headquarters with pitchforks and buckets of hot tar?

Why do we accept that our government feels it's so vital to keep feeding these voracious middlemonsters? What's the worst that would happen if we didn't? We might have to go back to a real free enterprise system. We might have to deal with each other. We might have to buy our books from little bookstores and drink our coffee in little coffee shops and eat our meals in little restaurants. We might have to shake hands to buy a car or a house. We might have to save our money. We might have to make payments to our doctor for services rendered, and not pay a finance charge, just pay his damn bill on time. We might have to save our money for big-ticket items and then pay a fair market price for them right upfront. Or we might have to put them on layaway. Does anyone remember layaway???

Here in Nowhere we're about as close to being off the financial grid as you can be these days. We don't have a car payment, a mortgage, or a single credit card. Ev does have health insurance, but it's a joke. She works for the largest health care provider in Southern Illinois and her own company health insurance has to be strong-armed into paying a bill to the hospital she works in -- the place that actually takes the money OUT of her paycheck every month for health insurance. This is just nuts, people. None of this is benefiting people. It's not benefiting the supply side and it's not benefiting the demand side. It's benefiting the corporations that stand between the supply side and the demand side and preventing them from having anything but a passing acquaintance with one another. And don't even get me started on farms vs agribusiness. I don't want government regulations at this point. I want the whole damn thing to collapse and fail.

I want insurance companies to go belly up. I want banks to fold like cheap suits. I want CitiGroup to crumble back into the non-conglomerated business it was created from. And then I want people who want to sell something to have to court the people who BUY it, and I want them to charge a fair fucking price for it. I want some power as a consumer. I'm sick and tired of corporations putting pressure on the government to contrive to turn things that I "need" into things I can't survive without or am mandated by law to acquire and then contriving ways to charge me for them while simultaneously withholding them from me.

I want to buy my food from the people who produce it and buy my books from a little old dude in a quaint bookshop and eat my dinner in a restaurant that only exists in one location, where the family that owns it lives and works and cooks actual food and employs the local high school kids to wait tables. I want my tax dollars to go to things that benefit the whole, like a road that won't break my shocks or a school that actually teaches something, or a power line that doesn't snap in a light breeze. I want the money I pay someone for a service (like insuring that I will get needed health care when the fuck I need it) to actually be given back to me when I need it, and I don't want to be treated like a thief for asking for it.

Oh. And I want people who want to come and live and work here and have a better life to be able to come and live and work here and have a better life. It would be extra nice if we actually had a better life to offer them -- and ourselves. Is this so much to ask in the land of the free and the home of the brave?

No Puppy Pictures Today Either.

I haven't posted a blog post in a month. There are a couple of good reasons for that:

1. I don't have much to say.
2. I recently became aware of the fact that actual people read this blog. Not just our usual friends, family and stalkers, I'm talking about real people who could be doing real things but instead choose to piss away their waking hours here.

Obviously that's more of a commitment than I signed on for.

But here at 3 a.m. on the night before my only day off this week, on a day in which I'll be sending my oldest child out into the world (again!), I felt a need to say...something.

"Something" would include worrying. I worry about the kids, and I worry that I'll never get enough emotional distance to stop worrying about them. I worry about the lump in Lori's arm and her bad back. I worry about the crappy economy, the unfair economic hand the middle class has been dealt, the sorry state of my 401k, and the impact on the kids (who I've vowed to worry about less). I worry that we'll work until one or the other of us drops dead, and all that working and worrying will be for naught.

Mostly, I worry that there are too many balls in the air for us normal folks to juggle, and that the only safety net we have is ourselves.

I don't have a nice picture of the puppy to post but Lori's planning to buy a new camera this weekend to replace the one that crapped out. But it doesn't matter anyway...I'm not in a puppy-picture mood. I'm in a circle-the-wagons, move-to-the-country-and-grow-your-own-vegetables-and-live-like-the-Unabomber mood.

When the sun comes out and the world looks brighter I plan to feel better. But for now...I worry. I hope your winter is smoother.

The Big Thaw

Boy, that took awhile! We were snowed/iced in for five days, but it's pretty much gone now and it's a beautiful, sunny, warm day out there today. I took the dogs out this morning in my bare feet, which was nice because mud washes off of bare feet much easier than shoes.

Super Bowl Sunday came along just as we were getting unstuck from the ice, so we headed over to Wal Mart for snack foods and ended up with more food than we could eat ... and a puppy.

She's a cardboard box puppy, courtesy of a homeless girl at a stoplight ... a suspiciously brindle mixed breed of indeterminate parentage, but this being Southern Illinois, it's a sure bet there's some pit bull in there, so we've named her Pickle.

That's right, we have five cats, seven ducks and three dogs. Does this officially qualify us for "crazy old lesbians in the woods" status? I think it does. Our Biggest Fan over on AOL thinks it does ... lol.

We've been spending too much time on Facebook lately and not enough time on the blog, but since things tend to go in cycles, I suspect this is also just a phase. In the meantime, we're playing with Pickle and watching out the windows for signs of actual Spring and not just this thing the weather does where it teases us in February and then lets loose with another blast of "fuck you, it's winter, bitches!"

No Visual Aids

I'm especially missing my camera this week, since we're just starting to recover from Winter Storm '09 (yes, they named it). We got a lot of ice, followed by more snow than we've gotten for the past three years. It started on Monday night, and by Wednesday night the combination of sleet, ice and snow was at least a foot thick. It was inconvenient for a few days, but absolutely gorgeous. Since I can't take any new pictures, I'll stick up a couple for last year. Just imagine about six inches more white stuff on top of the ice.

The dogs have been romping and eating snow, I made my first ever batch of snow ice cream (it's even better if you mix it with chocolate milk) and we had lots of days off work due to being unable to extricate our vehicles. Ev finally got her truck loose and was able to go to work yesterday, but my car wouldn't budge until late this afternoon. It took until yesterday for things to melt enough just to pry the six inch thick block of ice loose from my convertible top. That can't be good for it.

Now we're having a race to see whether our LP gas will hold out long enough for the gas man to be able to get his tanker up the driveway. We're hedging our bets by turning off the heater and keeping the fireplace going, thereby saving what gas we do have for cooking. I'm pretty sure we can at least make it through Super Bowl Sunday. Wish us luck!

The ducks don't know what to make of all this. They haven't ventured far from the dome and their little pen all week, but where would they go? There's so much snow you can't even see where the pond used to be. They do a lot of puffing themselves up, sitting in the snow and bitching loudly ... and their oviducts are on strike until Spring.

Cooper is enjoying her new home. She's eaten two bars of soap, two leather watchbands, a collection of assorted paper products (used Kleenex are her favorite) and some sticks. I'm not sure what her diet is lacking that she feels she's correcting with soap and fiber, but those seem to be the things she craves the most. She's also proven to be an incorrigible roamer. The snow has kept her in check a little, because it's damned cold out there when you have short hair, but once the sun came out she got that "I gotta be free!" gleam in her eye again.

I guess that's about all the home town news from Nowhere.

The Party's Over

President Obama's been in office for one week and, according to ABC News, the quality of life is already plummeting for one sector of the populace. The ridiculously fucking rich are crying in their Remy Martin’s Louis XIII’s Black Pearl.

The high-flying execs at Citigroup caved under pressure from President
Obama and decided today to abandon plans for a luxurious new $50 million corporate jet from France.

The decision
came 24 hours after the banking giant, which was rescued by a $45 billion
taxpayer lifeline, defended buying the state-of-the-art Dassault Falcon 7X -- one of nine to be flying in U.S. skies
-- as a smart business deal.

This particularly warms my heart:

ousted Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain said he would personally cough up the
$1 million he spent on remodeling his office after his brokerage was rescued
with billions in taxpayer cash.

I like shopping as much as the next person, but how in the holy hell do you spend a million dollars remodeling an office??? Furnish it in gold bullion?

Welcome to the world the rest of us live in, where paychecks are stretched thin, working for a living means actually working for a living, we put gas in our cars instead of fuel in our private jets, kids go to school in perfectly good second-hand clothes instead of designer fashions, towns are dying and Americans in one village in Alaska are having to choose between milk for their children or heating their shacks.

You had a nice long run at our expense, guys, but the party's over.

Too Scary for Primetime

Much has been said in both the public and private LGBT community since the announcement was made that vehemently anti-gay Rick Warren had been invited to open the Inaugural ceremony with an Invocation prayer. I don't have to tell you that most of it has been less than complimentary of the choice. In fact, it's cast a dark cloud over the occasion for more than a few of us.

One of the very public voices speaking out against this invitation of Rick Warren belongs to Bishop Gene Robinson, the openly gay bishop of the Anglican Church in New Hampshire.

Bishop Robinson, perhaps in an effort to provide some semblance of balance in these proceedings, was susequently invited to give the Invocation to open the first major public event of the Inauguration -- the concert at the Lincoln Memorial yesterday afternoon. With over 400,000 people in attendance, the theme of the concert was reflected in its title -- "We Are One."

I tuned in a little late to the program and missed Bishop Robinson's Invocation, which I was looking forward to hearing. I was disappointed to have missed it, but since HBO re-ran the concert a couple of hours later, I tuned in again to catch the few opening minutes I'd missed. Hmm. Somehow I still managed to miss the Invocation.

Apparently, so did the 400,000 people gathered on the Mall, as it was not broadcast over the loudspeakers, either. I heard Bishop Robinson on NPR this afternoon explaining that he arrived quite early in the morning to prepare, and was given a schedule shortly before the program began. His prayer was scheduled for 2:25. The concert was scheduled to go live at 2:30.

Bishop Robinson wasn't aware that the prayer he had worked so hard to prepare would go unheard by the people gathered there, nor be included in the HBO broadcast, but said he was satisfied that the President-Elect, the Vice-President Elect, their families and God had heard it.

I wasn't as satisfied as the good Bishop, so I went looking for it. I'm not a religious person, but it's a damn fine prayer, so I'm reprinting it here, as many are doing. There's also video of the Invocation available here, which (with any luck) will go viral and reach more people than it otherwise would have. Should I ever again decide to fork over some extravagant sum of money to purchase cable television, I'll go out of my way not to include HBO in that package.

Here it is ... the dangerous prayer of a gay priest that was Too Scary for Primetime:

"O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with tears - tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless this nation with anger - anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort at the easy, simplistic answers we've preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be fixed anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility, open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance, replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.

Bless us with compassion and generosity, remembering that every religion's God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable.

And God, we give you thanks for your child, Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, inspire him with President Lincoln's reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy's ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King's dream of a nation for all people.Give him a quiet heart, for our ship of state needs a steady, calm captain.

Give him stirring words; We will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters' childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we're asking far too much of this one. We implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand, that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity, and peace. Amen."


Amen.


UPDATE:

A source with Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration Committe (PIC) has confirmed to AfterElton.com that a rebroadcast of HBO's We Are One concert will be shown on Jumbotron screens on the National Mall as part of tomorrow's inauguration and will also include the invocation given by Rt. Reverend Gene Robinson. The invocation was originally not included in the HBO broadcast, an omission that struck many in the gay community as another example of the Obama administration's insensitivity toward and mishandling of gay issues.

The source also clarified PIC's earlier statement — "We regret the error in executing this plan" — which struck some as pointing the blame back at HBO. In fact, the PIC source says that even though it was always their intention to include Reverend Robinson, it was their mistake it didn't get done and the blame is entirely theirs.

Even though millions of viewers will now see Rev. Robinson, the nation's only gay Episcopalian bishop, speak during Obama's inauguration, it is hard to imagine it having that much of an impact. Nonetheless, the reaction of the gay community to this, as with the passage of Prop 8 and the selection of Rick Warren to deliver the prayer during Obama's swearing in, once again shows we're fed up and not taking anything sitting down.


The blogosphere is abuzz over this. I'll just close by saying that I'd be satisfied if Rick Warren's invocation was "inadvertantly" blacked out tomorrow.

A Modest Mideast Proposal

Okay, so I've been listening to all sides of this question on NPR almost daily, and here's what I think about the Israeli/Palestinian situation:

Back in 1947, Britain took the country of Palestine, which they controlled, divided it up unequally, "relocated" the Arabs to a tiny little strip of land, gave the rest to the expatriated Jews from all over the world and called it Israel. Within a year, the Israeli's invaded the tiny little strip of land and occupied that, too. Ever since then (and for millenia before that) the Arabs and the Jews have been engaged in a struggle to reclaim their respective "homelands" and wipe each other off the map.

The Israeli's have the Palestinians in a choke-hold. The Gazans can't move, they can't purchase goods, they can't even get goods into their country to purchase because of the embargoes, and they can't protest or push back because their puny little weapons are no match for the Israeli army and their advanced weaponry.

A couple of weeks ago the cease-fire they've been under expired and the Palestinians fired some piddly half-assed short-range missiles at Israel and killed sixteen people. Israel retaliated with air strikes and a ground invasion, killing thousands of Palestinian civilians ... men, women and children. Israel's position is that they have a right to defend themselves. However, their "defense" doesn't seem (to me) to be a reasonable response to the offending behavior.

The US is complicit in this, because we've supported Israel, and because we're a bad fucking example. We taught Israel by example how to round up indigenous people and stick them on little bits of land where they could be "managed" and cut off from their homelands and the things they needed to survive and thrive. We've rattled our nuclear sabers and permitted, supported and contributed to the development of Israel's arsenal, while threatening or actually going to war (most recently with Iraq) on the pretense that our enemies might be thinking about possibly developing or buying or building or using weapons of mass destruction, which only our allies are supposed to have. We've taught the world, by our own actions, that might makes right and that some people aren't as valuable as others. We taught the world that it's only bullying if someone else does it. When the "good guys" do it, it's advancing democracy.

Israel says they only want to crush Hamas, not the Palestinian people. They also said they only wanted to crush Hezbollah, the PLO and Fatah. It looks (to me) as if Israel wants to crush any organized leadership in Gaza just as bad as the Palestinians want the Israelis drowned in the sea. I think that powerful nations like Israel and the US ought to be able to employ diplomacy better than they do. I think that doing otherwise in this global age only leads to more enmity, more hatred of the US and it's allies and a greater threat that some hothead is finally going to start pushing those buttons and waging all-out nuclear war. But since we don't do diplomacy anymore, we should employ a parenting trick known as "separate the squabbling siblings."

I think that if the US is so invested in the Nation of Israel we ought to cede Montana to the Jews.

We're barely using it anyway. It's plenty big enough and we've even got some old missile silos and stockpiled weapons up there we could throw in cheap. We could create much-needed American jobs by recreating Jerusalem on a site of the Israeli's choosing. Helena, for example. We recreated Paris, New York City, the Pyramids, Treasure Island and Camelot on the Las Vegas strip. We could totally recreate Jerusalem ... and maybe even put in some thrill rides and slots for the hell of it. I'd offer to give them Alaska, but Governor Palin has really stunk it up.

Moving Israel to Montana would be good for everyone. The Palestinians could spread out a little, American Jews wouldn't have to pay exorbitant international airfare to visit family, we wouldn't have to send troops halfway around the world to protect Israel's interests in the mideast -- soldiers could just hop in their own cars and drive up there for a weekend -- and we could LEAVE THE BROWN PEOPLE THE FUCK ALONE.

I'm sure the people who currently call Montana home would be happy to relocate ... perhaps to that narrow strip of land at the top of Idaho, strategically wedged between Israeltana and Washington, so Pastor Mark Driscoll and his New Calvinists could keep an eye on the western border of the Idaho strip. Israeltana could invade it periodically just for old time's sake.

So that's my plan. I'll be contacting President-Elect Obama and offering it to him next week in exchange for a financial bailout. We only need enough to get out from under Ev's student loan debt and buy a nice piece of rural property. Considering the current plunge in the housing market, a half million should be plenty.

Where does the time go?

I've been getting friendly little nudges letting me know that we have once again fallen down on the job here in Nowhere and ceased blogging. These little nudges generally come in the form of, "Post something, damnit!"

It's not that nothing happens around here, it's just that, aside from the occasional dwarf hitch-hiker or almost dead guy in the car, it's mostly the same stuff over and over again. We're creatures of habit for the most part.

Christmas and New Years have come and gone, the ornaments and decorations are packed away for another year and Cooper has settled in and made herself at home. I love her awful. The kids got "Guitar Hero - World Tour" from their dad for Christmas and I've been sneaking around playing it ... woohoo!

The lab is short-staffed so Ev's been working grueling long hours covering extra half shifts into the wee small hours, and she's pooped.

It's cold and muddy with no end in sight for awhile and life here in Nowhere is about par for the bleak mid-winter course. We're short on sunshine and short on humorous stories. I promise that if anything interesting happens we'll let you know.

Honey, I'm Home.

We picked up Cooper yesterday. Actually, we'd need a crane to pick up Cooper, but we fetched her home yesterday. We were expecting someone a little shy and nervous about strangers, but what we got was a big affectionate moose who jumped in our car and plopped herself in the back seat before we even got to introduce ourselves.

She's big. Eighty pounds and still filling out, and her head can almost rest on the countertops, which makes feeding the cats interesting. The "bed" we bought her now looks more like a throw pillow, but somehow she manages to curl up like a corkscrew and fit herself on it.

She's met all the cats and only got her nose scratched once (but that may be because only one of them has claws). She likes them ... they aren't sure about her yet, but at least they don't loathe her, which is more than I can say for some dogs. She's completely non-threatening, even though she's the size of small pony. Sage is still a bit reticent, and Cooper looks a little too interested in the ducks for comfort, but she understands the notion of "sit" and "stay" and "no!" so we'll see how that goes.

I bought her some edible Nylabone chewies thinking that she could gnaw on them for awhile, but they only lasted about 30 seconds. Perhaps something in the cow leg department might last longer?

A Home for the Holidays

Ev and I are getting each other a Christmas present after all.

It involves a Christmas Eve shopping trip to Rural King and a four hour drive to St. Louis and back to pick it up, and her name is Cooper ... and, of course, there's a story behind her.

Cooper is a seven year old female weimaraner who was surrendered to a rescue organization a year ago and placed in bad foster care. A different rescue organization got her in August ... hairless and nearly starved to death with a large hematoma on one ear ... and put her in veterinary care. After a month with a vet she was placed back in foster care, where she's bounced around a bit waiting to be adopted. She's gained her weight back, had her ear operated on and is trying to grow back her hair. We found her on the WonderWeimsRescue website last weekend and applied to adopt her. I got the official notification yesterday that she can come home with us.

We're going today to buy her a dog bed and some bowls and toys, and we'll drive to Missouri on Friday to fetch her home.

This is how we acquire pets, and these are the kinds of pets we acquire.

Our elderly dog, Sage, was adopted from the Humane Society when she was a year old. She'd been adopted and abandoned three times before I got her and she'd been beaten so much that she was hand-shy and had become a destructive chewer. She didn't chew up underwear, she chewed up upholstered furniture and berber area rugs. It took six months to cure her and turn her into a wonderful dog.

Cuppy, the one-eyed cat, was purchased from a breeder when she was "retired" from a breeding program. She was infected with Feline Herpesvirus and had a chronic upper respiratory infection. The FHV eventually led to corneal ulcers and the loss of her eye, and requires us to clean up copious amounts of cat snot, but she's worth it.

Melon Kiwi was a greasy gray and black kitten living under a truck in the parking lot of the local barbecue joint when Ev found him, bloated with worms. He grew up to be the handsomest and fluffiest black and white cat in the world, and Ev's soul mate.

Brian and Slipper were the products of the unplanned teen pregnancy of Carrie's cat, Princess Sophia, who started out life as a runty and boneless kitten found in a box in the PetCo parking lot. Brian isn't very bright, probably owing to some lack of oxygen during his traumatic birth, but he's our world-class string game guy and we love the tuxedo boys to pieces.

Mrs Underfoot was an outdoor cat who was abandoned when her people moved away and became the neighborhood cat. She was living on mice and birds and the kindness of strangers when Ev's ex-husband brought her to us the summer before last and asked if she could live in our yard. She moved indoors last winter after six months of coaxing ... and an ice storm.

When Ev and the kids talk about the pets they've had in the past, they all have stories. They were snatched from a sack of puppies tossed in a pond, picked up on the side of the road, plucked out of a litter of feral kittens living in a basement or under a shed or saved from some other bad fate. My first dog was a black lab dropped out of a truck that sped off from a local lake on a busy weekend ... my first cat was found wandering across a busy street in downtown Phoenix.

And now there'll be Cooper. She'll come to us already getting on in years, with patchy hair and a food allergy. She'll be wary and unsure of us. The cats will hiss at her and Sage will be afraid of being pounced on. She'll probably chew up something and she might chase the ducks. But she'll be home, and she'll turn into a good dog, and life in Nowhere, IL will be the best thing that's ever happened to her, just like it's the best thing that's ever happened to the rest of us.

The fact that it will happen at Christmas will make a great story for years to come, and we're all about the stories!

The Meaning of Christmas?

It's less than a week before Christmas, and I don't care. Not in that depressed way that people don't-care-because-they-might-as-well-be-dead-because-it-doesn't-matter-anyway. I don't care because...well...I don't have to. Our kids are grown. We have no money. The kids have no money. So instead we've decided to have a nice family holiday with good food...sort of Thanksgiving, Part Two.

It feels tremendously liberating. I'm not a Christmas person anyway...I'm an Atheist, so the Jesus part doesn't speak to me. I hate shopping, so the consumerism just pisses me off. Oh...and I loathe Christmas music. The only part of it I really like is the food and family, decorations with twinkly lights, and the smell of pine trees and a roast cooking.

I've been talking with friends and coworkers, and there seems to be a consensus brewing that Christmas isn't fun anymore. I don't know if it was ever fun for adults, really. Did our parents stress about the money too? I remember going to Chicago with my mother to see the Christmas display in the window of Marshall Field, but I don't remember the money part. I wonder if my parents put their heads together and tried to decide which bills to put off or which credit cards to max out in order to buy us Six Finger cap pistols and Easy Bake ovens.

My childhood family managed to fuck up holidays in much the same way we managed to fuck up every other event, so this is yet another place where I have only the vaguest idea of what "normal" people do. And I'm somewhat suspicious about the existence of normal people anyway. Who are the mythic functional families that provide the counterpoint to our dysfunctional ones? No one I know. Maybe there's an undiscovered pocket of emotionally healthy people who can enjoy their holidays without angst...I'd like to meet them. Maybe sit at their feet and learn their secrets.

So this year we get to have the parts I like without the parts I don't like. That'll make me happy, but I worry a little a little about everyone else. It's one thing to say we want our Christmas to look like this, but another thing to actually live it. I've had 45 years to hone my dislike of Christmas to a razor's edge. I sort of understand that the rest of the world may not feel like I do about it. I love my family more than anything in the world, so...I worry. A little.

Ice Storm '08.3

The weather forecast is for a massive ice storm today. Our local news program, which scrambles around to find any actual news to report ("Three car wreck on Rt. 3! Glass broken! Film at 10.), has long ago settled on being the Weather Catastrophe Channel. Their favorite kind of news is forecasting upcoming weather catastrophes, but in a pinch, they'll relive weather catastrophes from the past. Lori and I love the segments where they interview people who lived through news-making weather in bygone years.

"What was it like, the ice storm of '08?"
"Well...it was cold. Real cold. Mama din't come out da house for near a week."
"Does your mother plan to leave the house in the face of this storm?"
"Naw. We got a freezer fulla squirrels. We can hunker down for nigh on a month."

So now the Weather Catastrophe Channel is forecasting our first ice storm of the season. Lori had to go to East Bumfuck, IL to see patients who won't actually show up, since there's an ice storm and they're elderly folks who can't see. They didn't make it this long by being stupid. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that if there's an inch of ice on the roads...stay home.

Except for Lori's boss. He's going to get to East Bumfuck from Evansville, Indiana in his 4 wheel drive Tundrapalooza SUV with the roll bars, fog lights, studded tires, GPS, and the cow catcher on the front. And he wants Lori and Pamela to meet him there.

I feel like Christopher Columbus' gay lover (Hello? Didn't you notice the tights?), waiting for Chris to discover something (maybe East Bumfuck?) and get the hell back home for a cup of hot cocoa and a change of tights.

If Lori and Pamela end up in a ditch because Dr. Testosterone wants to test the limits of his lunar lander SUV in inclement weather, be forewarned. Somebody's Hoosier ass will be kicked. Don't make me plant a Yak Trak up your ass, Big Guy. I'm a mother...I'm scary when I'm mad. Just ask the kids.

In the immortal words of my son, "I tried anger management, but I had to stop going because it made me angry."

I hab a co'd

I never used to get colds. I have one now, though, and it's a doozy. Coughing, sneezing, stuffy head, runny nose, sore throat and that weird feeling like your eyeballs might melt. And I can't even enjoy it, because we're about to have weather. The midwestern kind you need to be aware of and plan for. This is a most inopportune time to be sickie-poo.

There's a big angry arctic front bearing down on Nowhere, Illinois (I blame Chicago and Rod Blagojevich for this, by the way). Starting tonight, and lasting through Wednesday, we're expecting freezing rain, ice, sleet, howling winds, ice again, more sleet ... repeat as necessary. Ev is working this weekend so this means that today I need to be battening down the hatches. My "to do" list includes filling the utility room with firewood, making sure we've laid in enough cat food, dog food and duck food (the 50 pound bag of corn is in my trunk), securing the severely depressed ducks in their dome and spreading more dry straw for them, stocking up on coffee and cigarettes in case we can't leave the house for a couple of days, and doing a zillion things that require me to be out of my jammies, off the couch and out in the cold, windy world.

I don't wanna.

I hafta.

The days are wicked short, and since I slept until noon (thank you, Nyquil) I have about three hours to get it all done before it's dark again.

So much for a gay lifestyle of irresponsible wanton hedonism.

New and Improved!

Dear Mr. O'Cedar:

There is nothing new and improved about a mop. It's a sponge on a stick. The only thing "new" about it is that this year's sponge doesn't fit on last year's stick, forcing me to purchase a whole new sponge on a whole new stick, for which I won't be able to buy a replacement sponge the next time I need one. This is not an improvement.

Facebook

Lori and I joined Facebook this week, which means several things. Firstly, it means that we've been finding our old friends and acquaintances and reconnecting. Secondly, it takes up solidly out of the "pathetic old dinosaurs" category, and into "trendy and shallow"...which is a much more amusing place to be. Lastly, it means that any of you who are on Facebook and don't friend us? You suck ass. I mean that. Just stay away from my humble little blog. Go read something like Pandagon or some other popular blog where they don't need friends.

Now that we're on Facebook we've made some interesting reconnections. Lori friended (and then unfriended) a guy she used to go to high school with who's now an unrepentant bible-thumping homophobe. Oh...and she unfriended Paula Poundstone after Paula's automated update shook her down for cash. Lori's pretty ruthless that way. She refused to bail out GM also.

Paula and General Motors? Don't come to Nowhere looking for a handout. It ain't happening.

Lori tracked down one ex that still likes her and one that doesn't. My two long term lesbian exes include a deeply closeted woman who'll never appear in public somewhere where she might be caught being gay (like Facebook), and one who is happily technologically-impaired. Not much likelihood of bumping into either of them on the Internets. But I did meet up with her son, and he turned into a man when I wasn't looking. I guess they do that.

Since it's my day off and I've got a cold, I'm extra low on ambition. I took a nap on the floor in front of the fireplace with Cuppy, ran the granddog out in the field, and learned to navigate Facebook. Now I'm prepared. Friends, quasi-friends, pseudo-friends, and frenemies...bring it on. I know how to send Mistletoe and fishes now. I'm ready.

Two Mules for Sister Sarah

Q: What does Sarah Palin hate worse than Democrats?

A: Illinois Democrats.

Sarah is so last week. In the finest tradition of Chicago politics, we're having our own little Turkey Massacree in three part harmony here in the Land of Lincoln, and I'm afraid Sarah's been kicked off the front page by an Illinois Democrat again.

Sarah, step aside for the new leader of the Governor's To Watch Out For pack. You may have cool glasses and Naughty Monkey pumps, but Rod has those beady sunken eyes ... that sneery non-existant upper lip ... that prodigious cappilosity! (He looks a little bit like Alvin the Chipmunk, doesn't he?)

You can see Russia from your house, but I can hear the ink drying on the drawing boards of political cartoonists all over the globe from mine.

Thank heaven we can finally be done with all those puerile "gosh darnit"s and "you betcha"s, also too. With Rod you get pure unadulterated gutter profanity ... and no damn winking! President-Elect Obama doesn't want to play ball and fork over an ambassadorship, a cabinet position or the high paid chairmanship of a specious non-profit organization? "Fuck him!" A seat in the Senate? It ain't just a chair, it's a "fucking golden thing and you don't fucking give it away for nothing." If Blagojevich's phone had a cuss-o-meter the needle would redline.

I don't ever want to hear about Sarah Palin's abuse of power again, either, also. She's a total lightweight.

The Governor of Alaska got one teensy-weensy little public servant fired. The Governor of Illinois tried to blackmail the entire Tribune company into firing every journalist who ever wrote anything negative about him. Now that's some firin'.

Palin's pedestrian little per-diem ripoff? Peanuts. Rod won't even entertain a guest in the Governor's office for less than half a mil.

So head's up, Alaska. Your Governor may be a goof-ball, but our Governor can kick your Governor's ass in the National Embarassment sweepstakes!

The Dead Guy

Last night Lori and I drove to Evansville, IN, 3 hours east of here, for her annual Christmas party. We would have been right on time, except we got a little lost...no doubt due to faulty intelligence. The directions were crappy, I swear.

But we made it,. We ate the free food, drank the free beer, won the table's centerpiece, and bugged out at a respectable hour. We decided to share $40 of her Christmas bonus with the riverboat casino in Evansville, and did what we always do...dinked around on the penny slots until 3 a.m.

At 3 we looked at our watches, cashed in our $20 ticket, cursed ourselves for staying out so late, and headed for the car.

This would be an opportunity to mention that the Casino Aztar in Evansville is HUGE. And we were tired. So we wandered a little looking for the car.

"I thought we parked on level 2."
"So did I. Maybe not."

We checked level 2. Nada. Level 1? Nope. Level 3? uh-uh.

So we put our heads together, finally remembered where we parked.. in the very, very back corner of level two. We got off the elevator and made the trek across the cold parking lot in. And it was cold - really cold - like 18 degrees.

As we approached the car, I saw something in the passenger seat. I was a little bit ahead of Lori and I looked in the driver's side window...there was a guy in the passenger seat of our car.

He was a big guy; his eyes were closed and he was slumped forward with his hands in the om position, in a long sleeve t-shirt with no coat. I said, "There's a man in our car."

Lori said, "What??"

"There's a man in our car. Look."

Lori bent down, looked in the window, and smacked it really hard with the palm of her hand. It made a lot of noise, but he didn't move. We looked at each other over the top of the car, and I sent Lori back in to the casino to find a security guard. I stayed by the car to keep an eye on it. He didn't look like he was going anywhere, but I was thinking that if he did, I'd want to know.

So I stood a few yards behind the car, looking at him through the back window, and speculated about why he was in our car. Was he drunk and got into the wrong car? Did he lose the rent playing poker and kill himself? Did someone else kill him and leave him there? Did he pass out and freeze to death?

The question uppermost in my mind however...was there going to be anything gross in our car?

I was trying to remember how to do CPR if I needed to. 5 and 1? 10 and 2? Maybe he'd be so dead I wouldn't have to remember. Please, please...don't have splattered your brains all over our car. Please. I sort of envisioned being stuck in Evansville, our car a crime scene, calling our family for a ride home.

"Uh, Rob? We're in Evansville and there's a dead guy in our car. The police need to keep it for a while...can you come get us? "

Rob's a nice guy, but really...I'll bet he's getting tired of rescuing us from our weird disasters.

By this time my ears were freezing and I was wondering where Lori was. I started edging back towards the door, keeping an eye on the car, until finally she came out with a security guy. Apparently the security guard she had approached had to interrogate her for a few minutes before doing anything. Was she sure it was her car? Was the guy someone she knew?

No and no. He finally called another security guy...the parking lot security guy. Lori and the security guy walked towards me while she explained to him that we'd come out of the casino to find a large, unresponsive man in the passenger seat of our car. Thy approached the car and the security guy tapped on the window and said, "Hey, buddy?" Nothing. The guy never moved.He opened the door, put a hand on the guy's shoulder and shook him gently. Nothing.

The cop started shaking him harder and harder, saying, "Buddy? Hey buddy? Can you hear me?" No response.

Oh shit, I thought. Dead. Damn it. This is going to be really inconvenient. "Does he look dead?", I asked.
"No, he's drooling, and his eyelids are fluttering.", said the cop.
Lori said, "Don't make him puke, okay? And please tell my he didn't piss in my car."

The cop continued shaking him and yelling in his ear. Finally the guy's eyes slid opened. The cop said, "What are you doing?" And the guy said, "Waiting for you."

He was clearly shitfaced drunk, but he hopped out of the car with surprising agility considering it's so low and he's so big. And drunk. He was mumbling incoherently, and the cop was holding his arm, asking him questions.. Where's your car? Do you have a car? I thought "Holy fuck. You're not going to let him drive, are you?" The cop asked if we wanted to have him arrested and we said no, we just wanted to go home. He led him away by the elbow, and we got in the car which reeked of beer, but thankfully, not of urine or vomit.

Lori said, "On the bright side, I'm not sleepy anymore."

Later, when we were laughing about what a good story this would be, she said, "You know, this stuff only happens to us. We're magnets for this kind of weird stuff. And this stuff never happened before I met you. It must be you that attracts it. And who's going to believe it? Bikers, dwarfs, strange drunk guys in our car...people will think we make this stuff up."

But no. You people know us. You know it's true, don't you. It's just another day in Nowhere with Kwach and Ev.

Shopping, the Kwach and Ev Way

We've been in negotiation for the last few days with a woman selling an antique wood burning stove on Craiglist. It's been absurdly difficult; at one point Lori had to use me as a surrogate because the negotiations fell through. Geneva Accords? Feh! Nothing! Those pussies should try bargaining with an antique seller via e-mail.

However, last night, in my firmest mommy font, I put my foot down. It's now or never, Woodstove Lady. Put up or shut up.

She crumbled like the streusel on yesterday's apple pie.

So this morning we got up at the crack of 8 o'clock and headed for Barnhart, MO with out little truck to pick this up:


It's in decent shape...needs a few repairs, but overall sound. It's got pretty green and cream enamel and six burners, a wood box and a couple of warmers up top. It's exactly what we wanted. In fact, Lori saw it's twin in an antique shop a few years ago, and we've been visiting it ever since.

So we hit the road, me driving and Lori in charge of the radio and sorting the two weeks accumulation of junk mail that always collects on the seat next to me. I stop at the mailbox every day on my way to work, and I'm pretty good about taking the real mail in when I get home, but I tend to leave the sale fliers and credit card ads in the truck.

Lori was reading the Bed, Bath & Beyond flier, which was loaded with expensive, useless crap. I mean loaded. They had a battery powered soap dispenser, an automatic towel warmer, a cool and warm wind blower for your feet, and an automatic device to press your pants on the hanger...like a pants clamp, sort of.

We got into a conversation about what kinds of people would actually buy this stuff. Could you imagine walking into someone's house and seeing their heated foot blower, pants flattener, and electronic hands-free soap dispenser in use? No. That's the kind of crap people give to their Dads when they still haven't got a gift and it's Christmas Eve at 8 p.m. We don't own any of that kind of stuff. In fact, any of that stuff that we used to own broke long ago and has joined their crap-gift sistren and brethren in the rapidly overfilling county landfill. Now we pretty much own stuff we use.

So we drove up to Barnhart, looked at the stove and listened to the nice man lie about it for a little while. He was having trouble with the lying though, since he was being pestered from the moment we pulled into the driveway by Meghan, a small child who was the spiritual twin of our eponymous Hunter (Don't Take Your Guns To Town, Hunter). Rather than the pleading requests for "a few minutes to talk to the people, Honey," Meghan really needed to be dragged out to the yard by the elbow and threatened with a horrible death unless she shut the hell up right now and let Daddy finish selling the stove so they could eat next week.


We finished up our business over the background noise of Meghan's ceaseless demands, decided that we could fix the defects in the stove, and handed the nice man $300. He helped us take it apart and load it in the truck, made a perfunctory effort to sell us more crap, and we headed for home.

But you know us...home is not a linear process. We decided to take old Route 61 instead of I-55 and go through some of those old town with antique shops. We stopped in St. Mary's, MO at their big antique store, found some accessories for the stove, and discovered the secret truth about commerce: nothing is ever new.

The antique store carried a variety of cast iron pants flatteners (and some plug-in varieties) as well as several wood-powered foot warmers and a manual soap dispenser in an easy to use bar form. Handy!

We left there and continued down Rte. 61 through some of the brilliantly named small towns of South East Missouri: Lithium, Herculeneum, Festus, and Whispering Hills. We figured Lithium is where you go when the Hills start whispering about you specifically.

When we drive, we talk. A lot. About anything, no matter how stupid. So with that in mind, we drove into Jackson and admired it's large stately courthouse, marred only by it's green copper dome. Lori said, no...that was fine, it was just it's patina.

We decided that Patina would make a fine name, as would Levitra, Januvia, and Boniva. We actually knew a poor kid who's mother had named him Courvoisier. She should be shot.

By the time we got home, we'd driven 230 miles and peed in some of the finer gas stations in Southeast MO. This was our route:



















We can drive 200 miles without leaving the county (we hit every little gravel road and roadside marker and highway fatality shrine in a 30
mile radius. Who knew there was such entertainment riches in our little county??), So the distance was nothing. But this time we actually left the state, and turned a 4 hour errand into a 9 hour social critique. That's a good day!

Live, from Nowhere, It's Thanksgiving!

I want to start by saying that the thing I'm most grateful for in my life is Ev. One of the reasons I'm so grateful for her is that she has given me the space and the encouragement to peel away a lot of surface gunk and be more honestly who I am, and she doesn't love me less for it ... she loves me more. That's a completely foreign idea to me, and it's taken me awhile to really believe it, but I like it ... a lot.

The most recent layer of gunk to be peeled away has to do with the Performance Art that was Thanksgiving in my family. All holidays, really, but Thanksgiving is where it really shone in all it's sick and twisted glory, because there were no gifts or other distractions ... it was all about the formidable force known as Mother.

Last week I finally confessed my dirty little secret ... I hate Thanksgiving. It fills me with performance anxiety and I turn into a kitchen nazi. In my mind it's eight hours of cooking, followed by 15 minutes of eating, followed by two hours of cleaning it up. I wake up pre-stressed about that last minute rush to get the potatoes mashed, the gravy made and the rolls out of the oven so everything comes to the table warm and together. I'm annoyed when the kids eat everything on the relish tray before dinner. I'm just not lovable on Thanksgiving.

Ev and her kids do Thanksgiving easily and they love it. Obviously they didn't get the memo that Thanksgiving is not supposed to be fun. They cook at a leisurely pace, they don't care when they eat, they don't worry about whether every little thing is perfect and they goof around together on Thanksgiving. My mother would be appalled.

My mother did Thanksgiving like she did everything else ... perfectly ... and she did it mostly alone, while entertaining the audience in her kitchen. No one helped cook because no one else did it "right" (except my dad, who was in charge of mashing the potatoes because she'd taught him how). This allowed her to take all the credit and also complain afterward that no one helped.

The only Thanksgiving dinner she missed cooking was the year my sister was born ... on Thanksgiving day. You can bet your ass if she'd been born the day before, or the day after, my mother would have cooked dinner. She shone brightest under extremes of hardship. This was epitomized the year she prepared and served Thanksgiving dinner for twelve, in her robe and pajamas, one week after a radical mastectomy. And it was perfect.

Not only can I not meet her standards, I don't even want to. And it's the "not wanting to" that makes me feel guilty. It's one thing to try and fail, because at least you tried. It's another thing entirely to not bother to try. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I heard that in my life. So, for me, to sit here on the couch not lifting a finger while the minutes tick by is fraught with anxiety.

But I'm determined that this is going to be the Thanksgiving when I beat that demon. Ev and her kids are going to do Thanksgiving at Carrie's house this year and my only job is to show up and eat ... and I'm going to do it that way if it kills me.

I've Got a Plan

I haven't had much to say lately for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I haven't had anything to say. Literally. I'm just sort of shocked by the world. I'm thrilled beyond words that Obama won the election, even though I know he's inherited an ungodly mess that will take decades to straighten out and will almost certainly make him the political scapegoat for the upcoming unpleasantness.

And the unpleasantness will certainly be unpleasant. As we've been told repeatedly over the last few weeks, it'll get worse before it gets better.

Worse before it gets better? For whom? Not for Bear-Stearns, or AIG, or Citigroup. At the merest hint of "worse"...it got better! Huh! If it was that easy to make "worse" into "better", why not do it for the rest of us, too?

So here we sit in a house we like, on property we love, waiting for the other shoe to fall. Not even because our own personal worse-ness is coming home to roost, but because our landlord's financial house of cards is collapsing, and we're going down with it.

He's a nice guy with a wallet problem...he can't close it. So for the last couple of years he's run up a fortune in consumer debt, bought an enormous mansion on a hill surrounded by five bucolic acres with a subprime balloon mortgage, and generally lived above his means in the way typical Americans have been living above their means for the last 30 years. Unfortunately, now he's been downsized out of a job, since no one can afford high-end motorcycles in a credit crunch. The balloon mortgage has ballooned, the creditors would like some money please, and the mansion's on the block.

Which would all be fine, except that in the event that someone actually buys that overpriced white elephant, guess where landlord plans to live? As he succinctly put it on Sunday, "Well...we've got to live somewhere."

You guessed it: somewhere is here, in our modest little Nowhere, IL. And as far as I know, he's not planning to live penitently in the wicker room at the end of the hall, contemplating his financial shortsightedness and determined not to let his stupidity screw up our lives. I'm pretty sure that he's planning to live in the whole house, which will make it uncomfortably snug for our families.

Plus, they're slobs...and that'll piss off Lori to no end.

So it appears that we'll be moving sometime in the next year or so. Besides the fact that this will be a pain in the ass for us, it is a pretty good snapshot of the economy. Even if you're not the one that's leveraged up to the eyeballs, you may end up being the one to pay the price.

So I'm putting together a package to present to the White House for a bailout of my family. I'm tentatively planning to ask for the government to guarantee 90% of our debts, plus shore up our shaky housing situation to avoid undermining our confidence in the market. In exchange, I'll forego my executive compensation package that I was planning to give myself from the kid's savings, and instead take an undisclosed lump sum buyout from the Treasury Department.

I want you taxpayers to understand how hard it is for me to accept this government handout, but it's the right thing to do to get me back on my feet. I also want to assure you all that the lessons of these hard times haven't been lost on us. Our next house of cards will be built with the face cards instead of the cards with numbers on them. Additionally, we plan to rearrange the deck chairs, and put lipstick on the pig. I feel confident that that will prevent any future problems with our cash flow. Thank you.

Can I vote on YOUR family?

Yesterday afternoon I had a surprise visit from Ev's son, who dropped by to see his sister and stayed long enough to climb up on a ladder in the chilly wind and tack down the tarp on the duck dome for me while I ran to town for a heat lamp to keep them warm. When I got home, he and his sisters were sitting around the living room laughing and discussing Katie's college plans. She's a National Merit Scholar (in case we haven't already mentioned that) and she's being courted by so many colleges and universities that we're hard pressed to find any mail for us in our cram-packed mailbox every day. She recently won the local VFW scholarship for her video essay on patriotism.

We're proud of our kids. As Ev has mentioned before, Carrie is an Executive Chef at the age of 23. Robbie, at 21, is trying to decide between an engineering degree and some entrepreneurial endeavors that interest him. Katie is planning to earn a mathematics degree. My son is moving here to go to college at SIU and get an art degree.

Why am I telling you all that? Because I feel it's my duty to point out that lesbians are perfectly capable of raising healthy, well-adjusted, successful children. In fact, lesbians are perfectly capable of being healthy, well-adjusted and successful human beings.

I feel that it's important to point that out, because, according to Dan Savage's op-ed in the NYTimes today, there are a whole lot of people in a whole lot of places who'd like to have you think otherwise. And, should they be successful in that endeavor, children like ours may go the way of the Dodo.

Most ominous, once “pro-family” groups start arguing that gay couples are unfit to raise children we might adopt, how long before they argue that we’re unfit to raise those we’ve already adopted? If lesbian couples are unfit to care for foster children, are they fit to care for their own biological children?

The loss in California last week was heartbreaking. But what may be coming next is terrifying.

Mustang Bobby, over at Shakesville, has a post up today about the trial in Miami-Dade County that's going on right now to determine whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt children. I'll quote just this part of his excellent post:

Rekers and Schumm argued that lawmakers were justified in excluding gay people from adoption because research shows that they are at greater risk of developing a host of impairments that can harm children, such as mental illness, alcohol or drug abuse, and the virus that causes AIDS.

Schumm testified that, based on research involving 2,847 children, the children of gay men and lesbians are far more likely to also become gay -- about 19 percent of children raised by gay parents, compared with 4 percent of children with straight parents.

Schumm said he was also concerned by a study that said that 47 percent of gay teenagers had seriously considered suicide, and that 36 percent had attempted it. ''If a child is gay, lesbian or bisexual, this is, in some sense, a life-threatening issue,'' he said.

Gay men and lesbians have two to four times the likelihood of suffering from major depression, anxiety or substance abuse, based on several national studies, Rekers testified. Gay men, he said, are four times more likely than straight men to attempt suicide.

It appears, according to Mr. Schumm's study, that Ev and I are failing our children miserably. Not one of them is gay.

I do believe that more children are likely to come out in families where "the gay" is acceptable, but not because it's contagious. It's just easier to be who you are in a non-repressive atmosphere, in a nurturing and accepting family. Mr. Schumm doesn't go on to say what happens to children raised in repressive and unaccepting families, but look around. Who are "the gay" and how did they get here, and how recently have gay families been out and visible? Speaking as the child of a "traditional" family, that's where the majority of gay people who are now old enough to be engaged in the raising of children came from.

I'd also like to point out to Mr. Schumm that it's not "the gay" that causes suicidal depression. It's being marginalized, demonized, harassed, picketed, legislated against, being denied civil rights, being unprotected by hate crimes legislation and being used by people like you to advance narrow-minded bigotry in the name of religion. You, Mr. Schumm, are guilty of both the mental and spiritual abuse of children, and quite possibly physical abuse by keeping them from the very nurturing they need, which makes you the one who is a danger to their well being.

God! I Used to be Fun!

I worked with a phlebotomist today that I used to know when I worked here the last time. She's normally a morning shifter so I hardly ever bump into her, but today she's covering our shift. We used to pal around a lot, so when we were talking today and she was asking me if I remember this or that, I had to have The Talk about the head injury with her.

I said, "Marty, I have only the very vaguest recollection of working here. I remembered that I liked you, but I can't remember why. In between go-rounds with this hospital I got hit in the head and I have enormous swathes of memory missing, including the years I worked here."

Luckily, she wasn't offended. But she did proceed to regale me with an hour's worth of stories about what a wild child I was back then. Who knew that a person's face could get this red without having an actual stroke? I was a lot more fun then, and apparently I raised ho-baggery from an art to a science.

It's good to have a mission in life. Mine was apparently to sleep with every woman in Southern Illinois who showed even the slightest interest in a shallow, meaningless lesbian tryst. I wonder if any of that recruiting ever stuck? Maybe I flipped legions of women and don't know it. Or...maybe not. :-)

It's funny to have other people own more of my history that I own myself. Maybe she made it all up.

New and Improved Nowhere, IL - Now with More Cussin'!

What with the "mom troubles," the duck sex and the election, we've managed to increase our Cuss-o-Meter rating by a whopping 7% since last count! We've made it into the top 5% of known potty-mouthed bloggers. I think it might have been the duck sex and "fuck you, Solomon Brown" that put us over.


Created by OnePlusYou - Free Dating Site

In other news, the sun came out today and is rumored to be planning to stay out for the next few days. This doesn't make it any warmer, but it does give the mud a fighting chance to dry up. Since the lack of cloud cover means less heat retention and colder nights, I'm going to have to "go to town" today and buy a heat lamp for the duck dome before we drop down into the 20's tonight, and spend some time on the ladder banging more staples into the tarp over their roof. The wind has been playing hell with it the past few days.

I need to split some more of the wood on the woodpile, too.

A woman's work is never done.

Mud Season Again

Ev used to tell me that there are three seasons in Southern Illinois ... winter, summer and mud. It's not true. There are actually four seasons:

Winter

Warm Mud

Summer

Cold Mud

This would be Cold Mud season. It's been raining for days and the temperature has been steadily falling. Today dawned cold and drizzly and progressed to cloudy, gray and windy with a high of about 38 degrees. The world outside is a miasma of thick, schmucky, mud dotted with big puddles and covered over with a growing mat of wet, fallen leaves that were pretty two weeks ago but are now a layer of soggy mulch. They say we could get snow flurries tonight, but I just want stuff to stop falling out of the sky.

This is a season you can only truly appreciate if you've lived in the Midwest. God knows, I had no idea when I was an Arizonan, bitching about the 90 degree temperatures while all my friends east of the Mississippi were chillin' in front of their fireplaces.

Now I understand. The fireplace is not there for ambience.

Brrrrrr.

Playing with Fire

I have a cat who plays with fire.

Being mostly hairless she suffers from a certain vulnerability to the cold which makes her somewhat fearless in approaching sources of heat. As winter creeps up on us here in the great north-south east-midwest (and the cost of LP gas keeps furnace derived heat a longed for but as yet unattained luxury), we have once again begun creating the nightly conflagrations in the living room fireplace to which the cat is drawn like -- well -- a hairless cat to the flame.

So great is the cat's love of fire that I've seen her put her tiny paws on the sizzling hot fire screen as if she were praying to the god of fire and offering her little body as a sacrifice, that she might curl up in the embers if only she could. Her deep longing to experience the fullness of the heat within the magic cave of the fireplace seems to overcome whatever instinct she should have, as a small animal, to avoid immolation.

Her lusty devotion to fire finally came to its inevitable disastrous result last week. While sitting on the hearth, rotating like a chicken on a rotisserie, she flipped the tip of her tail into the fireplace and left it there. In the few seconds it took for the "ahhhhhhhhh, warm!" message to travel up her tail, spread hotly along her little spine and reach, in screaming decibels, the ganglia of her walnut-sized brain, she burned the shit out of her tail. She has carried it in a gingerly fashion since then. As I watch her relationship to the fireplace now, it appears that even a hairless old cat with a walnut-sized brain can learn. She avoids the hearth now, content to remain on the carpet in front of it. She has learned that, while fire can be your comforting friend, a cat must not underestimate its potential for harm. One must keep a safe distance. Heat is one thing and self-immolation is quite another.

People do not seem to learn this kind of lesson as quickly as a hairless old cat with a walnut-sized brain.

One would think that, having been burned by the fire of religious zealotry on more than one historic occasion, human beings would have learned that religion, like fire, is best kept at a safe working distance. While it might feel wonderful to come close to it and curl up in the warmth of its message, its best not to lay one's tail in the molten heart of it.

We should have learned that with the lesson of the Crusades -- 300 years of Holy Wars, during which soldiers and laypersons "took up the cross" in a bloody march across Europe to rid the world of evil in the form of Muslims, Jews, Slavs, Mongols, Prussians, Greek Orthodox Christians, pagans and heretics.

We should have learned it during the Spanish Inquisition -- 400 years of heterodoxy, during which priests sought to root out heresy by torturing and murdering some 50,000 Jews, Muslims, Protestants, bigamists, homosexuals, sodomites, Freemasons, blasphemers and heretics, including (but not limited to) witches.

We should have learned it in the late 1600's when 60,000 people in Europe were murdered for the crime of "witchcraft" -- or in our own country, when our Puritan ancestors established the rule of theocracy in Massachusetts that led to the witch hunts in Salem, Ipswich, Boston, Andover and Charlestown.

We should have learned it every time religion has been co-opted by zealots to persecute and demonize other human beings, but apparently we haven't. We still approach religion like a warm fire in the fireplace, forgetting that it can also decimate a forest or destroy a city ... or burn your tail.

Proposition 8 is merely another go-round. It's hate and fear and demonization wrapped in the cloak of godliness, and just like the Crusades and the Inquisition and the witch trials ... and the Taliban and the Holocaust and a hundred other examples of zealotry showing its true face ... it is narrow-minded fear-mongering craziness.

Spirituality is a good thing. Faith-based persecution and religious craziness are not.

Pull your tails out of the fire.

It's a great week for America. Probably one of the five great weeks. Against all odds, President Elect Barack Obama is going to the White House in a few short weeks.

I've tried not to write this post, but it refuses to go away quietly. My absolute elation on Tuesday night gave way very quickly to shock and sorrow, and over the next couple of days -- as story after story spilled across the airwaves and teh internets about the historical importance of this election and the message it sends to the world about the dream of American democracy and the culmination of our national Civil Rights struggle -- I got angry. I had almost talked myself down for the hundredth time when I woke up this morning and read this.

I reference this post on CNN in which 18-year-old Solomon Brown explains his vote to write discrimination into the California State Constitution thusly:

The war in Iraq and the economy were the main issues Brown, 18, a first-time voter, said he considered in choosing a president. But when the time came to vote on the "one man and one woman" issue, he followed his moral beliefs and voted in support of California's Proposition 8. He said he isn't at all surprised that many voters did the same.

"They did that because of religion," Brown said of voters. "They wanted change for the country but weren't going to change their religion."

He had no qualms about voting for Obama, either, and adds that his choice wasn't related to race. But he worries what moral beliefs will be taught in coming years.

"I don't want a man and a man to be married," Brown said. "When I have kids, I don't want them to see that."

Still, he says he doesn't hate gay people and has several gay friends. He emphasizes that he dislikes the fact that people are gay, but not the individuals themselves.

"I can't be prejudiced against them, with me being an African-American," Brown said. "That would be hypocritical in my eyes."

Against the backdrop of the election of Barack Obama -- the mixed-race child of a single mother born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement -- we have Arizona, California, Florida and Arkansas writing discrimination into their Constitutions and being heavily supported in that effort by black voters, and I'm angry.

Civil Rights in this country did not come easily, and did not come without hard work and risk and often loss of life on the part of people who were not black. It was not accomplished in a racial vacuum. It was not accomplished by black people alone against the larger society. White students rode those Freedom buses and sat at those lunch counters alongside black students. White women defied their husbands and their communities to drive black citizens during the bus boycotts and work with black women to create the integrated YWCA. White men defied the Klan to fight for black voting rights.

Men, women and children who were not black stood up and said that wrong is wrong, even if the wrong wasn't being done directly to them. They understood. as I understand, that discrimination and marginalization of any group of Americans is bad for all Americans, and bad for humanity at large. They understood that the circumstances of your birth should not be a limiting factor in your right to be a free and equal partner in this country.

What I would like to say to young Mr. Solomon Brown is "you're welcome." Thanks to people you never knew, you grew up not having to live in fear for your life if you looked a white woman in the eye. You didn't have to drink from a water fountain marked "Colored" or sit at the back of the bus unless you wanted to. You never had to sit in the Colored section at the diner, if you were even allowed in. Thanks to people who were not black and did not have to fight for your Civil Rights, you can even fall in love and marry outside of your race in a "non-traditional marriage" if you choose to do so, without fear of reprisal or worry that you and your bride will be murdered for it.

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner weren't so lucky. Matthew Shepard and Harvey Milk weren't so lucky.

Homosexuals are the last minority in America who can be legally discriminated against in hiring and housing. We are the last minority in America who can be openly ridiculed and for whom there are no standards of political correctness or protection from hate crimes. We are the last minority who are not allowed to be legally married or adopt children. On television and in movies we are the new Steppin' Fetchit and Amos 'n Andy. Gay is the new Nigger.

What I would like to tell Mr. Solomon Brown is that I'm proud of the work that was done by people like me to tear down the walls of legally sanctioned discrimination, and point out that he owes to people like me the very fact that he was able to exercise that hard-won freedom and the power of his vote to rebuild that wall and put people like me behind it.

If Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were to give his "I Have a Dream" speech today -- that awe-inspiring speech which included these wonderful passages -- it might end something like this [editing mine]:

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

Many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Unless you're gay.

I suppose I could have summed up all of this with these few words ...

Fuck you, Solomon Brown.

Live Election Results

You can watch the results here as they come in, courtesy of MSNBC. The widget updates every two minutes and the first polls will be closing in just under an hour.

I've promised God I'll go to church if this works out.