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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 ...

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

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

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

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. :-)

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 ...

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!

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

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 »

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.