Who the Hell Am I Becoming?

My interest in professional football is roughly equal to my interest in collecting the surgically excised foot callouses of elderly people and creating little works of skin art out of them, which is to say, I am not particularly interested.

Unlike elderly people's foot callouses, however, pro football is something that presents itself to me on a fairly regular basis just by virtue of living in America and owning any type of electronic device that connects me to the world outside of my home.  Sometimes it even finds its way into my home -- generally when it's wearing a Chicago Bears uniform.  Even a die-hard football shunner like myself cannot remain completely immune to the allure of Da Bears while living in Southern Illinois and sharing my life with a woman who came close to giving birth to her oldest daughter at Soldier Field during a play-off game.  C'mon, did you think I was a total cretin??

But -- as I'm sure you're aware -- professional football has recently left the grassy field, pulled off its helmet and stopped tugging at its jock strap long enough to wax downright eloquent on the subject of gay rights and marriage equality.  I, for one, am so tickled by and enamored of one Chris Kluwe that I might even turn on the television, find a Vikings game and watch him punt a football on purpose one of these days just so I can say that I support him in return!

So, there you have it.  I'm now an official fan of an NFL player.  I don't know if being a fan of his writing rather than his footballing counts, but hey, it's a big step for me!

Here's his blog.  You should check it out.   He's a well-spoken and thoughtful guy and a good writer.

Out Of Bounds - Chris Kluwe

Yo, Chris!  Boooyah!  Hut hut hut!  Gimme a high five, dude ... you totally rock!

Motherhood

Every mother on earth has performed this exact delicate caress of the impossibly tiny, impossibly soft ear of her newborn baby. It's an innate ritual of motherhood, right up there with counting fingers and toes and curling her thumb and forefinger around a tiny arm just to marvel at its smallness.

Following two miscarriages, Rebecca, a 29 year old western lowland gorilla who resides at the Frankfurt Zoo, gave birth on July 10th. Gender to be determined when Rebecca is good and ready to move the baby off her belly and not one minute before.  

*Photos courtesy of TwentyTwoWords.com

In Which the Kwachies Have Friends.

It appears that we've gone from lonely old friendless spinster ladies to in-demand social butterflies.  From Baby Jane and Greta Garbo to Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. We have several people who want to see us! In the same summer!











We've been invited to visit long lost friends in Oklahoma and a longtime Internet friend in St. Louis. I'm talking LONG TIME. Like we've been hanging out in the same chat rooms, message boards and Facebook timelines since the mid-90s, when cell phones came in bags and 64k was enough for anybody. How can you know somebody online for 20 years and never meet them? Especially when our original homes are less than two hours apart? It's the Interwebz, where corporeal friends are superfluous, at least for the first decade or so.

Yay for us! We have friends! WTF?!?

Uncle John

My Uncle John died yesterday. He was my uncle by marriage, married to my dad's sister Hazel. They divorced when I was a kid, probably sometime in the late 1970s. I lost touch with that side of the family a long time ago but reconnected slightly in the last few years, mostly due to my cousin Geoff's death and Facebook.

I remember Uncle John through a child's eyes, of course...I only knew him as a child. But I remember him as a hands-on guy. He was a carpet layer and he worked for himself, which seemed sort of exotic and bohemian to me. He was loud and funny and he liked us kids, but he used to roar at my cousin Brad...it seemed like they were always at odds over something. My dad wasn't a yeller. he was a fumer, so Uncle John's yelling was probably more impressive that it ought to have been.

He must have smoked like a chimney; I can't dredge up a single memory of him without either a cigarette in his hand or in the corner of his mouth and him squinting through the smoke. I remember that he could casually fix things, not like my family did, with a book spread out on the floor and the serious concentration of an operating room, but like a person who did it every day and understood the process. He owned a couple of used bookstores for a while and used to pay me $1 an hour to shelve books on Saturdays, which turned out to be just enough money to buy a record each week. So in a roundabout way, I have my uncle John to thank for my vast collection of 70s and 80s vinyl and the phrase "I had that on vinyl" every time a New Wave pop song come on the radio... a guaranteed laugh line with Lori.

I wish I'd stayed in touch with him. I have a vague memory that his divorce from Aunt Hazel was acrimonious, but I can't for the life of me remember why. I'm not sure I ever knew, but since Aunt Hazel was my dad's sister, we got custody of her in the divorce and Uncle John fell off the radar. I think Brad grew up to be a lot like him...he sure seems that way on Facebook. Funny, considering how much they yelled at each other. Probably less funny when I think of how much I yelled at Carrie when she was a teenager. The things that make a person the most crazy in their kids are the things that looks the most like the dumb things we did when we were kids.

RIP, Uncle John.

Memorial Day 2012

The problem with Ev is her over-developed Midwestern work ethic, which grievously prevents her from being able to make the acquaintane of, much less deeply embrace, her inner Lazy Slug.

So far today she's hung a gutter and downspout, climbed around on an extension ladder inspecting the porch roof and planning how we're going to cover it with the rolled roofing we bought yesterday, filled the subsidence holes under the driveway with Quickcrete, watered the yard and is now preparing to cut down at least two eight-foot-tall arbor vitae in the ungodly heat and humidity.

I, having fully embraced my own Inner Slug, believe that there's absolutely no reason to anything today other than lay around with a cold drink and fan myself until it's time to cook burgers on the grill. But, because I was raised by a woman far more like Ev than like me, my finely honed guilty conscience is going to force me to go out there and offer to help.

Have I mentioned that I'm not a hot weather, manual labor outside person?

Ooooh! Ahhhh! Pretty!

My mother was a very artistic person and so is my son, but that gene pretty much passed right through me without leaving a hint of artistic DNA in its wake. I have an eye for decorating, I built a dollhouse from a kit and sewed a pretty weird looking coat for Cooper, but that's about the extent of my craftiness. I admire the craftiness of others, though, and occasionally try to duplicate something I see online (yes, I've become a Pinterest junkie), so when I saw faux Sun Jars all over the interwebz I thought to myself, "Hell's bells, any moron could do THAT!"  And it's true!!  Any moron CAN!

 
I made a couple of modifications from the online instructions that cut the actual work down to almost nothing, and I like the result a lot!

Supplies needed:

1 dozen wide mouthed pint canning jars with lids (under ten bucks)
1 dozen solar path lights - the 3" diameter cheap-o's ($2.98 each at WalMart)
1 spray can of glass frost
some type of tool to cut thin metal without hurting yourself - I used a Dremel with a reinforced cut-off wheel
glue (SuperGlue Glass Adhesive is probably the best)

Procedure:

1. Remove the lids from the jars and place them upside down for painting.
2. Spray the outside of the jars with glass frost - two or three coats should do it - dries pretty much instantly.
4. Twist the whole light/battery/solar panel assembly off the path light.
5. Cut a slit in the band so it can spread just a bit.
6. Apply glue to the threads on the glass jar and the threads on the inside of the band and stick them together as if the band was screwed on, with the little slit on the back side of the jar.
7. Pull the tab to allow the light to come on and insert the light assembly into the mouth of the jar. It will only go in about 1/3 of the way.
8. You're done.

It may not be water tight, but solar lights are made to get rained on, so ... meh.  If it gets water in it, dump it out.

Two Other Things

1. I accidentally stepped on a dead bird that Mr. Man(son) killed and left on the sidewalk. It made a horrible popping sound under my foot that I can't get out of my head.

2. After the State of Illinois garnished my paycheck and diverted my income tax refund for non-payment of a student loan which no longer exists, I got a refund check from the state today. I was sort of hoping for a heartfelt apology from Pat Quinn but in lieu of that, I'll take the cash.

Self-Indulgent Pre-Ladder Drivel. Enter At Your Own Risk

Lori encouraged me to go back and look at the first year of the blog, so I did.

What I see is life in the middle of transition: new town, new job, new orientation in the universe. The end of a crushing free fall, the first glimmers of light after a long ugly walk in grayness and the process of learning to navigate a new reality. A few devastating failures, a few surprising successes, the daily slog through a life that's not particularly remarkable or important, except to me.

Six years later I feel pretty good, which paradoxically has left me less inclined to process the minutia of my life in such excruciating detail. I feel like the actual stories of life have become straightforward now, but partially because I've learned things that were hard to accept. People just get smarter by living. Life lessons are like wrinkles: you don't see each one arrive.

This weekend I'm going to tackle my fear of ladders by hanging some gutters and roofing a little patch of porch roof.  In anticipation of that I've been walking laps around the house looking at the roof and reminding myself that all sorts of people work on ladders all the time and live to tell the story, and that I don't have to be fearless, I just have to be brave.

Which led me to bravery, which leads me to:

I work in a tiny community hospital now, with a weensy E.R. and 26 inpatient beds, mostly occupied by elderly people approaching the end of their lives. I feel lucky to have this opportunity to meet them and watch their journey, even though at some point every damn one of them looks at my badge and tells me that they had a sister named Evelyn but she passed. I may be the only Evelyn left alive on earth.

My old people (because they become mine after a few months of waking them up at 4 a.m. and drawing their blood) are mostly small town people. Many of them have rarely left the county they were born in, and they think I'm impossibly worldly and exotic for having lived in Arizona. They're smart and funny and brave and petulant and sullen and immature and kind and ugly and beautiful and boring. They talk too much or not at all. They apologize for having bad veins, laugh at my jokes, yell at me for turning the lights on (or for turning them off), bitch about the food, worry about their pets, reminisce about their youth. They are almost certainly the same people at 80 that they were at 8 but with more layers and nuances. And eventually they die. They lead small quiet lives and die small quiet deaths. The process leaves me in awe.

I wonder if they realize how many people they touch?

Weasel McPander-pants

It's almost June and you know what that means!  It's time for politicians everywhere to support Teh Gay and solicit our votes and our contributions!  Yay, Pride Month!

The President has come out for Marriage Equality, but Mitt's a little busy on the campaign trail right now, so we'll have to settle for this flier from his campaign when he ran for Governor of Massachusetts.

Thanks, Mitt!  We're equally sincere in wishing YOU the best, too!

Anatomy of a Project

We've done quite a few projects on the house now, but we almost never take pictures of the reason for the project or the process itself, because that would mean taking pictures of things that look crappy to us, and we're all about the "real estate photos" that carefully avoid showing the crappy. This time I thought I'd provide before, during and after photos of my current project:  Repainting the Porch Stairs.

It's important to note that the reason we do these projects in the first place is that something is wrong enough to require a project to correct it. Where the outside projects are concerned, the big raised bed is covering a ginormous sinkhole. The brick flower beds are making up for the fact that you can't dig in the yard because there's a house pushed into its own basement about three inches below the surface. The patio replaced a shady, sloping yard that grew clover, weeds and wild violets like crazy, but wouldn't grow grass.

Almost all of the actual house projects seem to involve paint. The red door replaced an atrocious black paint job. All the woodwork in the remodeled room upstairs had been painted and was a mess, as were the plaster walls. Like all the projects we do, we generally uncover whatever it was the last people were covering up with whatever we're removing somewhere along the line, and this project is no different.

First you notice that the peeling paint has gotten REALLY bad.

It starts out simple enough. The paint is peeling off in strips and you can pick it off with your fingers. It's gotten worse every year, and the weather is very nice this spring, so you figure it ought to be easy to scrape it off and get it to a paintable state and this would be a great time to do it.

Under the peeling part  you find the older, crackled paint. 

But this is a 115 year old house, so what ought to be isn't always. In this case, it appears that the original paint job was a good one, with the right kind of paint over concrete sealer and primer. Unfortunately, when it aged and cracked, the half-ass touch-up job was done with latex paint over the cracked paint, and only the latex comes off easily, which is obviously why they did it that way in the first place.

tap ... tap ... yep, it's hollow all the way from top to bottom

Damnit!  There's a mystery!  While scraping, I discovered some kind of repair I haven't quite figured out. The three other banisters are solid poured cement, but this whole section is hollow under that crack, which runs the length of the banister and seems to be a layer of concrete veneer of some sort. And the paint is REALLY falling off this one banister, so now I'm motivated to keep going and get it off.


These are the things you only find out after you've started something you can't un-start. We aren't restoration nazis, but when the options are to slap another half-ass touch-up over it or try to do it better so it will last awhile, I'd rather opt for last awhile if I can.


So that's where I am now.  Dalmation spotted stairs.  Luckily, I have acquired an amazing collection of scraping tools in the past three years and the stairs aren't going anywhere, and the weather is still coolish.

I'm beginning to think that removing old paint and replacing it with new paint is some kind of metaphor for life.

Gone Like a Leaf, but With More Gone and Less Packed-into-the-Bottom-of-the-Fence...

I have dispatched Baby Katie to the next station on the Overground Railroad: Dane's house. I'll miss her again. I wish I had more children. Oh, wait...

Back in the Saddle?

I dunno. Maybe more like taking the saddle out the the box and circling it warily and kicking the dust off, then gingerly flipping it up with my toe to check for brown recluse spiders that might bite me and cause a gigantic necrotic festering wound on my ass if I actually get onto the saddle.

Here's my deal this evening: I just got a snotty email from the retirement services provider for my employer because she calls the lab every day and can't get hold of me. Apparently her inability to complete her annual goal rest squarely on my selfish shoulders.

Right. Because I work nights. She knows that. I tell everyone, every time they ask and often when no one asks. Working night shift doesn't mean I'm available all day and then stay up for an extra 12 hours to work my shift. Working night shift means that I sleep all day, drink coffee and shower at 5pm, and put on my scrubs and come to work at 7pm. Picture that functioning somewhat like your own life, but 12 hours later...and then earlier...and then later...and then earlier. People who work night shift aren't being difficult, they're sleeping. In much the same way I don't call you at 3 am and then say "Oh...were you sleeping? I need to discuss your job with you. No I can't call back, I leave work at 5 am.", you can't expect to call me at noon and then be indignant if I'm not excited to hear from you.

If you need to make contact with me, you may have to inconvenience yourself slightly by calling at a specific mutually agreed upon time. This might curtail your freedom to be the sort of devil-may-care hippie financial analyst who makes phone calls based on your astrological portentions or the mysterious pattern of tea leaves in your chai tea from lunch. It might require you to organize your schedule, put off your golf game, stay sober for an extra half hour during Happy Hour or similarly inconvenience yourself. In return, I agree to let you manage (or mismanage, Ms. Madoff) my retirement fund for the next 20 years. With interest.

This is potentially a mutually beneficial relationship, provided you LET ME SLEEP EIGHT HOURS A DAY LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. Otherwise, if you insist on waking me up out of a sound sleep to make financial decisions that will affect the next 40 years of my life, my financial decision might very well be to find a company with a retirement specialist smart enough to figure out why people who work night shift are asleep during other people's office hours.

It's ALIVE!

Due to the overwhelming number of requests we've received to revive the blog (okay, there was one request), I thought I'd take a stab at it.  It's entirely possible the request was made so I'd stop haranguing and offending people on Facebook with my a) politics, b) homosectional agenda and c) potty mouth.  But, whatever the reason, let me just catch you up on what's been happening in Nowhere, IL since last October. Just think of this as one of those (very belated) newsy Christmas letters and skim to the parts that interest you.

We had a slight windfall last summer which we put to good use doing some remodeling, some traveling, improving the quality of our food and beer intake and generally living a few inches higher on the hog.  It was  fun while it lasted, but all good things must come to an end, so we're back to our usual status ... poor, but happy.  I'll just hit the highlights.

Remodeling:

We finally decided to start tackling some of the cosmetic changes we'd been planning, starting with the removal of the previous owner's ill-advised and poorly executed attempt to collect a little more rent money by creating a creepy fourth bedroom out of what used to be a spacious open landing upstairs. We knocked down walls, tore out the unfinished closet, removed a door, pulled up the carpet, pried up the old linoleum, scraped the tar paper off the oak floor, refinished it, bought a fancy sofa and chair, bookshelves, a faux fireplace entertainment center and a flat screen TV, installed a satellite dish and turned the space into a sort of family room / tv room / sitting room. It's awesome.

We bought a new fridge and freezer to replace the rusty old freezer and the assortment of beer and apartment fridges we'd been living out of like teenagers for two years, and refinished the wood floors in the dining room and entry hall.  There's one more floor to refinish downstairs, but I've discovered that refinishing floors is like childbirth. You have to let enough time pass to forget the pain before you dive in and do it again. Not enough time has passed yet.

Traveling:

About three months after we moved Katie to Wichita, Ev moved her to Chicago. I had to work, and there isn't room for three people in her truck anyway, so she was on her own for this one, and it was a killer. I've lost track of how many days she was awake, but it was way too many for human beings. 

Our other trips were much more fun. We went to Pineville, Kentucky in September to meet a couple of longtime online friends, Ron (who lives in Pineville) and Lou (who drove down from New Jersey) and attend the Great American Dulcimer Convention. It was a great trip!  I got to see Harlan county, which I'd heard about for years since my ex mother-in-law grew up there. We enjoyed good music and great company. Ron and Lou are even more fun in person!  In fact, we had such a good time that we've made reservations to go back this September and do it all over again. 

When Christmas rolled around we came up childless for the first time in recorded history.  Ev's kids are all living in Chicago now and wanted to do an All Sibling Christmas, and my son is living in Nashville and couldn't get time off work, so Kwach and Ev decided to do something different this year. We didn't decorate, we didn't cook, we didn't buy the tiniest of gifts ... we started a new holiday tradition we'd like to call Jackpots for Baby Jesus. We'd like to call it that, but we can't, so we'll just call it the No, Virginia, They Don't Loosen Up the Slots For Christmas casino tour of  St. Louis. We got a fantastic deal on a room at the Omni Majestic Hotel and practically had the hotel and downtown St. Louis to ourselves ... free parking everywhere!  Woohoo!  Christmas dinner in the hotel restaurant was fan-tabulous, the gambling was less than fan-tabulous, but lots of fun, and we fnished our trip with the tour of the Schlafly bottleworks we've been promising ourselves but never got around to. Bought lots of spiffy Schlafly memorabilia and a few cases of beer, gave the last of our gambling money to the Casino Queen and headed home having enjoyed the best no-stress, non-Christmas ever. If fate is kind we'll do THAT again, too ... but with more winning.

Pets:

It hasn't been a great couple of years for Smith-Rubinas pets.  First we lost Mrs Underfoot to a pack of dogs in our front yard, then Cuppy got too old and too sick and was dangerously close to losing her other eye, so we made the decision to put her down. I couldn't bear to do it, so Ev was kind enough to take her for me. Unfortunately, I paid her back in kind much too soon.  It seemed like we barely turned around before I had to do her the same favor with Melon Kiwi who just couldn't bounce back from another flare-up of the kitty AIDS. We were both a pitiful mess over the loss of these two. 

We settled into our new two dog, four cat status, but the Circle of Yife turned around yet again. Cooper had been going downhill for awhile, developed a chronic cough thing, had a strange bout of vestibular disorder that scared the hell out of me because she couldn't walk or stand up without falling over and running into walls for about twelve hours. She got over that and within a week had a full gastric torsion after eating her breakfast on New Year's day and was in heart failure by the time we reached the vet's office. She was such a big goofy pain in the ass ... balding, covered with fat lumps and skin bumps, deaf from chronic ear infections, allergic to everything but air (and maybe that, too) and had about the grossest assortment of behaviors known to dogdom, but damnit, I miss her something fierce. I hope we're done losing pets for awhile. 

So 2012 started out badly, but it's been going very well since then.  We barely had a winter, we managed not to be evacuated due to flooding this year and Spring came early and went completely nuts in our yard. Everything is growing like crazy, all the flowers are blooming, the tomatoes are starting to appear, Ev finished her big raised bed project and filled it with hostas, irises, an assortment of lilies and various and sundry other plants, and we've added a little paving stone path, a variety of whimsical decor items and a nifty spinning brass sprinkler. I made a gnome door for the tree at the back of it just this morning. We installed a tiered garden fountain we got from a friend who was moving and built a patio we just love, added more flower beds, planted some hops along the wall of the shed and I FINALLY got the front door project finished ... stripped off the old black paint and painted the ten foot tall front door bright red.  Now everyone in town knows which house is ours. They no longer say, "There's a house there?"  Now they say, "Oh!  The house with the red door!"  

I'm still opinionated, Ev still loves her new job and her co-workers, she's made a new best friend, the kids are all loving their lives, the remaining pets are healthy, the house is "coming along" as Ev says and we still feel like we won the relationship lottery. Oh, and we got Android phones just like people!  Android phones and TV?  Who are we???


Other than an end to the War on Women, a Democratic majority in Congress and the death of religious extremism in America, what more could anyone ask?

Page 1

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.

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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.