Back to Normal

One of my favorite memories of being broked up with is from Ashland. In that weird time period between my averring that there was no way it could possibly be over, her subsequent magical job of talking me into leaving and my actual departure, there was a few days of maudlin drinking in bars.
The Wild Goose did a lot of what I wanted to have done for me in those couple of days. It had a couple of pool tables, lots of good feeling-sorry-for-yourself country on the jukebox, and an interesting crowd.
This was on the edge of town, where actual people lived. Not college students, tourists or those who had relocated from California to enjoy the unfettered life. No, these were the people who worked at Safeway, or the Shop n' Kart, if you didn't have a union gig, and still had the pleasure of paying the 'prepared food tax', which meant not only a bigger bill at a real restaurant, but even chipping in a bit more for a Slurpee. Or a Meximelt from Taco Bell. In theory, this tax caused us to have far better services, like not drinking the same awful water that Medford drinks.
A fair amount of true rednecks drank there, and there was a small bunch of them in there one gray Sunday afternoon. I was shooting a game of pool to myself, and they were just near enough by that I got involved, at points, in their conversation.
One of them so strongly resembled one of my Jewish Redneck step-uncles, that I just had to ask whether or not he was related to any of the family from Les Schwab country. I don't really know what he thought about that: there's lots of families all over Christendom who haven't admitted that they were Jewish since the Inquisition, and have had centuries upon centuries of inter-marriage since. In any case, we found other conversation topics.
I was working on a crossword puzzle at a table nearby. I was just looped enough to ask one of them for a hint on one of the clues:
"Well," he said, "You need an apostrophe to show the posessive..."
"Dude, " I said, "They don't use those in crosswords."
Then, at some unheard-at-least-to-me cue, everyone in the main part of the bar stood up. As one, they began moving all the tables and chairs to the periphery of the room. I had noticed before that the Goose had Astro Turf floors, but it was hardly the only place I'd seen that be the case. As all these people continued rearranging the furniture, the outlines of the bigger picture emerged: there were little cups nested in the floor.
The entire bar was a miniature golf course, albeit without windmills or big cartoony traps for your balls, but a real live course, all the same. They all got tiny clubs and went right to it.
I laughed my ass off all the way back to Normal Avenue, where I lived. The street was so named for the normal school (which is to say, an 1800's school for teachers) that had been nearby, once. A few days later, I caught a bus in the Safeway parking lot, and was on my way back to my beloved Portland.
The first person I saw off the bus was my friend Daphna, who hadn't seen the hideous bleach job that my girlfriend had insisted I inflict upon my poor scalp.
"What did they do to you?", she asked.
"They bleached my brain...Apparently."
Apparently. Why would I have moved there otherwise?
"Yeah, well it's true what they say..." She reached up to stroke my head. "Blonde hair and blue eyes really do go together."
Sorry I haven't written lately. I'll be getting back to it.

Euphemisms

First off, a delightful piece of film made from public domain photos available to yours n' you on the internet.
Actually, maybe that's all I got at the moment. More content rich describings, soon.

Night Falls

I started a discussion, quietly, over at ER's place, about abortion. What I said in a nutshell (since I just love saying things into nutshells) was that there now exists thirty-some-odd years of legal precedent set for the protest of legal actions, in this case, abortion. Let's state that a bit more clearly.
Abortion has been legal since 1973. Ever since then, we have had the pleasure of revisiting the statutes of what constitutes free speech and acceptable protest, in this case regarding something that the highest court of our nation had decided was legal conduct. All right.
So-if it has been decided, and it recently was, that we can not stop people from protesting at a site- where legal activities are being conducted- under current anti-racketeering laws then I should be able to harrass and condemn those who attend right-wing churches, and work in the state houses of South Dakota and Mississippi (so far).
Matter of fact, loving man of Gawd and former Republican Party Chair-idiot Haley Barbour is currently the governor of that fine, fine state that speaks hard truths about our polity to the rest of the world. They're saying that even if it's rape or incest, bitch gotta carry that li'l sack o' joy. To term. Because we fat white cracker fucks say so.
Which brings me to my next point. Remember the 'Nuremberg Trials' website, in which many loving people of Gawd put up lists of abortion doctors who they felt (in their loving, god-like way) should be killed for doing something that was entirely legal? Well, there was a lot of court cases there, and ultimately I believe some sane person decided that that sort of thing made us look like a bunch of mud-worshippers, and put a stop to it. But...
Precedent certainly exists now for the official representatives of a movement going on record and simply deploring things like that, while secretly nodding in approval, and definitely giving their god-loving money to such enterprises.
Since I'm not a fucking savage, I'll stop short of what those waterheads did. I'll say that we don't need to threaten death to all who would seek to take the freedom of powerless others...I'll just say that we need to see to it that they are forced to live in the same circumstances as those they would seek to disenfranchise.
You know; an eye for an eye. In theory, these loving men of god love that shit.
How about we see to it that you work your whole damn life for crap wages, no chance of decent medical care that you can afford, the highest thing you can do with your children is sacrifice them to whatever madness abroad whatever idiot democrat or republican has seen fit to embroil us in, and conform to the Bronze Age beliefs of the stupidest among us (since the nice men who run the show don't really believe any of that: they just know they can use it to control other people).
We'll even see to it that you no longer have a fair trial, if accused of something nasty by your paranoid neighbor, or just some angry, underpaid, control-issues mama's boy cop. How 'bout we see to it that your well-fed ass doesn't get a pass to walk down the street anymore if you sponsor legislation that strips the people who make our corporations rich of their constitutional rights? A lot of decent, humane things have been drowned by the real possibility of murder: how about reactionary-ism taking a similar road trip?