Author's posts

But if I did, well really, what’s it to you? (reprise)

Here I go. Hot button item. Why am I repeating myself?  

Why open up wounds and unanswered questions and misunderstandings and anger, to throw it all into the arena again for debate? Women’s rights are human rights everywhere.

There is one thing that should be perfectly clear. If you understand that women’s bodies are their own, do not vote for John McCain.

It goes like this

the fourth the fifth,

the minor fall and the major lift…

(Normally, I don’t like to retrace old ground. But the topic of human rights, women’s rights, pro-choice, pro-life, whatever your favorite tagline – is such a godd**m muddle for so many voters who don’t have the time, the backstory on the candidate, or the inclination to understand who it is they are voting for. So I’m throwing up an issue I’ve written about before, just a hair over two years ago to this day, revised it and dusted it off a bit, and added some newly relevant links. Will it add clarity? I don’t know. But thanks for reading.)

Lost objects, second chances, claim tickets

I’m not so careful with second chances. I’ve had a few and I’ve made a mess of most of ’em. And I’ve lost things over the years; lost ideas from memory, faces and names of people I should recall, relationships with friends I should have maintained. I’ve let go of objects I’ve created and loved, or things I took a special hand in designing. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes through negligence, sometimes through a perverse need to purge while initially denying the emotional investment in the loss.

Two hawks flying

Above the highway

They play so much like  us.

One always runs away…

I’ve had this song sleeping in my head over thirty years, and I’ve lost the title and the artist’s name.  

“…and say why not.”

“Blank document”. I recall older Word versions and I seem to think it used to be “New Document”. New is so much more positive than Blank.

I had an English teacher in high school, Teresa Brandon, who’d say “Go for the guts.” She was a rebel teacher who brought Dunkin Donuts to our early morning English Lit/Shakespeare class each Wednesday, in defiance of the “No food in class” rules. Beyond her exemplary teaching, she also had an extraordinary talent – she could neatly shove a billiard ball in her mouth without locking her jaw. These are skills that impress a high school junior.

You are forewarned: if you are not up for reading ramblings of a reminiscent, tangential and seemingly unrelated nature, please move to the next diary…;)

In honor of Ms. Brandon (though against her desire of clean, concise length), I’ll unashamedly go for the gut and dammit, I won’t apologize. And this is not purely a candidate diary.

That said…

(crossposted at Dailykos)

Do you recognize this document?

Subtitle: When is a pocket veto not a pocket veto?

Article 1, Section 7, Clause 2

If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law

There have been so many Bush crimes, so many little ones and big ones.  This is my first 2008 personal “V-8” moment.

Bush’s “pocket veto” of the Defense Authorization Bill on December 29, 2007.  Yeah, so I’m a bit slow – give me a break. I’ve been on vacation.

But Congress hasn’t been on vacation.

who wants to live forever?

What is this thing that builds our dreams yet slips away from us

Who wants to live forever  

Who wants to live forever?  

 

I watched as you passed by and thought I felt your breath for just a moment on my face, a gentle faerie vapor in the still air of the night. I brushed your hand in my dreams with my hand, an ethereal transfer of warmth from my flesh to spirit to your incorporeal flesh. That moment of space between life and death was filled, again, too briefly with transient comfort of your presence.  

But touch my tears with your lips

Touch my world with your fingertips

And we can have forever

And we can love forever

(also published in modified format at Dailykos)

it’s a wonderful life

Driving home from work overwhelms me if I let it. I see the hundreds of drivers in their solitary cars, some passengers, few passengers. I realize I, too, am alone in my car on a drive that could be achieved with far less stress and daily environmental angst if a decent light rail or a well-planned bus system existed in the Northwest metropolis I live in. It takes an hour and a half one way and three buses to attempt to public transit it to work from where I live, and a mere fifteen to twenty minutes by car. I have a car to drive, which is either a hybrid or a beater Nissan Sentra, both of which cost way too much of my income in insurance and gas costs with two teenagers at home.

You – you said – what’d you say a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they’re so old and broken down that they… Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars?

it’s a wonderful life

Driving home from work overwhelms me if I let it. I see the hundreds of drivers in their solitary cars, some passengers, few passengers. I realize I, too, am alone in my car on a drive that could be achieved with far less stress and daily environmental angst if a decent light rail or a well-planned bus system existed in the Northwest metropolis I live in. It takes an hour and a half one way and three buses to attempt to public transit it to work from where I live, and a mere fifteen to twenty minutes by car. I have a car to drive, which is either a hybrid or a beater Nissan Sentra, both of which cost way too much of my income in insurance and gas costs with two teenagers at home.

You – you said – what’d you say a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they’re so old and broken down that they… Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars?

Dead reckoning

I stepped out on the porch a few weeks ago and saw a Mexican wedding cookie moon, sliced gently in half and laid on the silent cool black table of the night sky. Gauzy high clouds formed a foggy backdrop scrim against an inky proscenium.

The straight-edge half of the moon was dialed down to east-nor’east, as a quarter hour of midnight drained away on the clock of the galaxy.

Shoe fetish

I’m finding it really difficult to write lately. Instead, I’ll offer some pictures and some words from others. Forgive me.

Van Gogh Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

Martin Heidegger

Reconciliation. A revisit and an update.

I'm revisiting a previous piece of writing from August of last year. Today is my oldest sister's birthday – Jackie would have been 71 years old, born September 28, 1936. Midst of the Great Depression, midpoint between the Great Crash of 1929 and the final year of WWII, 1945.

In reading through this again, I realize that I wrote it as if I knew her. But really, how can a much younger sister, only a teenager so many years ago, know a sibling who is in their middle thirties? I write with a great deal of supposition as I carry the anecdotal memories of the other parts of my family forward. Most of all these last few years, I listened to the sometimes faulty, often biased, almost always self-focused stories of my other sister, Sharon. I heard her side of things, and sometimes her perspective filled in gaps in the hollows of the family legends initially created for me by my mother. Sometimes Sharon's words served to underline the inequalities of family dynamics. A family organic pulses in that way –  the web that connects us as family is either nourished or fermented by how each of us share memories or opinions with each other.

The constancy of tides


Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. iv. 43

There are some things that will always be constant. Things infinite in the sense that it is beyond imagining a time ahead in which such things do not occur or exist. The tide is one of these things.

The Big Blow, forty-five years ago

I was outside, here in Seattle, in the gentle drizzle late last night. Rain draped down like sheers against the foggy night sky. The sound of rain is not just one sound, but a muted march of percussionists – the rum pum pum of water across the overhang; the steady tingtingting of the drops landing on the skin of the earth; the beat beat beat heading south in a gutter. It’s possible the first drummer mimicked sounds he heard in his own beating heart. I’m sure he heard the drums of rain.

It’s chilly. Did I mark the onset of Autumn last year? I returned to a diary written on September 14, 2006…Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men

September and it’s raining again in the Northwest. Blessed rain. We haven’t had much of it here this season, believe it or not.  Watching the weather is one of my obsessions and my way of marking time perhaps.
Saving old messages on my cell phone that I rarely track back through – it’s another peculiar habit I have. Sure, I get prompted every few weeks to save or delete. My oldest message on my cell dates to September 2005. The message is from my son-in-law on the evening he left for Iraq last year for his first tour.

Load more