Keith.

Yesterday, Keith Olbermann delivered the most piercing, resonant, moving commentary on the fallout from the September 11 attacks I have yet heard. Period. Click on the link and listen, listen, listen again. The man's eloquence is beyond awesome.

When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…

When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

Of course, since W has roughly the same relationship with the news as the Wicked Witch had with jacuzzis, it's preaching to the choir. Too bad he's unlikely to get this message directly.

CIA prisons, ABS mockumentaries, bah! It's hockeytime!

Hockey season starts in a month, and I'm almost ready. This was step one:











Step two will be the fleece Notre Dame hockey helmet hat! Isn't it the best? I will be the best-dressed fan at Icecats games this year.

Honeybee, Adieu

When I first moved here from Chicago, 12+ years ago, I had rather dewy-eyed notions of the West and its open spaces, namely, that preservation was a priority. Ha. Hoo ha ha. Honeybee Canyon was opened to development within a week of my arrival, and the stucco-and-red-tile-roofed menace has since spread over huge tracts of formerly open desert and grassland north and northwest of Tucson.

Zip forward to yesterday. One of the few remaining undeveloped parcels near Honeybee, within the boundaries of the monstrous Rancho Vistoso development, is slated for its own batch of cookie-cutter houses in the near future. The builder of these, however, finds archaeology interesting rather than simply inconvenient, and, since his parcel sits gobsmack on top of a large Hohokam village, he donated 13 acres in the center as an archaeological preserve. My company is excavating the houses and trash mounds surrounding this central area (for nice photos and descriptions of Hohokam pithouses, please read Homer's post).

Several of us toured the site yesterday. It was simultaneously fascinating and utterly depressing. Fascinating because of the hundreds of houses, some with thickly plastered floors still intact. Utterly depressing because it's going to be bladed within the year, the thousand-year-old houses replaced with as many slapdash frame-and-stucco clone houses as can be crammed into the space.

The ridgetop the site sits on overlooks a wide valley holding the main drainage from the north side of the Santa Catalina Mountains. The pithouses near the center of the site are arranged in small courtyard groups, with the entryways facing in to the common space they shared. The pithouses on the edge of the ridge, though, all face out to the breathtaking view of the valley below, with its streamcourse, rocky outcrops, and saguaros marching up the foothills toward the mountains. Of course, the view now also includes roads bladed into the sides of the foothills to reach house lots bladed onto the hilltops, footprints of the march of the rich and influential to see who can get the site the farthest up the mountain before the national forest starts and physics make construction prohibitive. All for the vacation house that's lived in a month or two out of the year, but wrecks the view year-round.

I'm a bit cynical (shocking, yes) about the future of the central preserve. It was difficult yesterday to walk without stepping on artifacts. Seriously. Potsherds and stone flakes and groundstone tools are everywhere on the ground. Our instinct, thanks to our training as archaeologists, is to step around them, looking but not touching, or, if we pick something up to examine it more closely, putting it back exactly where it was rather than stuffing our pockets. The people who will be moving into the houses to be built here will not, I'm guessing, have the same scruples. Kids are going to pick up everything they find--not that I blame them; I couldn't resist arrowheads on the ground when I was a kid either--and I'd wager that more than a few of their parents will venture into the preserve at night and take a shovel to a trash mound in search of treasure. The standing stone walls of a compound at the center of the preserve will probably be augmented by well-meaning amateur reconstructionists. Coffee tables and mantels throughout the place will end up holding people's souvenirs; even though residents will likely be strongly cautioned against spoiling the preserve, the thousands of artifacts on the ground will make it hard for people to resist taking just one or two or a dozen.

All of this gone for a rabbit warren of crap houses and lousy traffic. And none of them will give a shit about what was destroyed so they can live in a house exactly like their neighbors' and exactly like any number of houses across the way in Continental Ranch, or in the upcoming Homes At Red Rock, or in Gilbert, or in Mesa, or in Anthem. What the hell. At least they won't need to ask where the bathroom is when they visit each other.

I Guess You're Only An Appeaser If Rummy Says You Are

How fascinating. Hot on the heels of Rumsfeld's "lessons of history" speech, in which he unfavorably compared anti-war folks to Neville Chamberlain, Pakistan has one-upped all of us over here who have been pointing out that the war in Iraq might be the wrong way to go about stopping al Qaeda (and al Qaeda "types," as Cheney likes to say, you know, the ones who were emboldened when Lieberman lost in his primary). Pakistan announced today that, should he be in Pakistan after all, Osama bin Laden will not be taken into custody as long as he "lives like a peaceful person." And, oh yeah, captured al Qaeda and Taliban fighters will be released from jail. And their weapons will be given back.

This is coming from the country that was trumpeted as our Number One Ally, the key to securing a foothold in the Middle East and vanquishing the Islamofascists at their source. Now they're throwing up their hands, throwing open the cell doors, and saying they've had it with even the cursory bits of anti-terrorism actions they'd undertaken so far. Note to Rummy: this is what appeasement looks like, asshole. Questioning the proper application of American military force and foreign policy is not appeasing al Qaeda. Telling Osama to put his feet up and set a spell while you rummage through the shed to get all those AKs you took from his boys most certainly is.

Not that anyone reading this likely needs reminding, but the Pakistanis also have nukes. Where do they fall, now, on that fabled You're Either With Us Or With The Terrorists continuum the president so swaggeringly trotted out a few years ago? Think he was planning on this nifty little turn of events when he said that? Think anyone at the White House who supported Pakistan's nuclear bid is wondering now what the hell happens when this bit of Osama appeasement morphs into something more closely resembling collaboration?

I'm holding my breath for the official reaction. It's Saudi without the oil, but with bigger guns. Maybe Bush will skip around Crawford holding hands with Musharraf now.

Our Lady of Perpetual Adolescence

In a refreshing change, the drive to Flagstaff was much more of an ordeal than the visit itself. We actually had a very pleasant time with the folks. The trip up there, unfortunately, joins the annals of Travel Disasters on I-17. Several years ago--my first trip up there, in fact, after my dad had moved from Illinois--we were delayed for a few hours by a minivan hauling a trailer that flipped on the winding, windy stretch of road south of Black Canyon City. It's an unpopulated area of desert mountains with no frontage roads, alternate routes, or easy access to services, so when you're stuck there, you're stuck. It's why you never travel without a couple of gallons of water, even for a routine 4-hour-drive up the hill.

Friday, of course, was the start of the three-day weekend, so traffic sucked even before we got out of Tucson. We'd made it to north Phoenix when the interstate message boards flashed the warning that a crash at Sunset Point (near Black Canyon City) had closed both northbound lanes, backing traffic up over 20 miles to Anthem (godforsaken Pulte insta-city development just north of Phoenix). It was 6 pm at this point and still ungodly hot. I weighed the options for no more than a minute before deciding to divert to the west, approaching Flagstaff via Prescott and Sedona. Looking at the map, I guessed it might add an hour to the trip, but at least I'd be moving rather than sitting and roasting on the highway.

Note to self: sitting and roasting might be preferable to trying to drive through freaking Sun City at 6:30 on a Friday. Christ on a Triscuit. We crawled and sweated and finally made it to Surprise, then Wickenburg (alarmingly full of Len Munsil for Governor placards), and eventually Prescott. I have decided that when I publish an atlas, I will color-code the roads according to average speed limit. The reassuringly short linear distance from Prescott to Sedona to Flagstaff is, in reality, spanned by a road that twists up and down several mountains via no fewer than seven bezillion switchbacks.

I might have averaged 20 miles an hour. The clock marched along merrily; the odometer sullenly refused to budge. 9:30, 10:30, 11:00. The small patches of sky visible through the pine canopy were pitch black and occasionally illuminated by distant lightning; for the most part I was driving on an unfamiliar road in a very small bubble lit by my headlights in front and closing to nothing behind. Dark, twisting, dark, brake, dark, hairpin curve, dark, accelerate, dark, 20 minutes gone, 5 miles traveled, the litany starting in my head, fuckinfuckFUCKfuckwherethefuckarewe?

As it got later and traffic fell off to nothing but me, the constant curves provided enough stimulation to keep me awake and functional, but the weirdness of it all started to play with my brain. Maybe we were the wreck on I-17 after all, I thought, and now while my dad waits for us we're driving around in Purgatory for the next bit of forever before the universe decides whether to spit us up or down. Maybe we're driving on a giant cosmic treadmill. Maybe that isn't ponderosa pine and wood smoke I'm smelling, but incense. Are we dead? Have we really been driving forever? What the fuck?

Then a cop pulled me over outside Jerome for a busted license plate light. Apparently we weren't dead after all, or the dead bulb was a metaphor for minimal karmic transgressions, and we got to Flag alive, if tired, at 11:30.

It occurred to me on the (mercifully uneventful) drive home that these visits are somehow juvenilizing. I don't know if that's a real word. If it is, it encompasses me going to Dad's house and barely noticing that it's twice the size of my house and filled with real wood floors, fine tilework, matched furniture, lots of tools. This doesn't register with me much more than the blue sky does, because it's always been that way. He picks up the tab at the pool hall and at the restaurant because that's what dads do. We walk down to my uncle's house, which is even bigger than Dad's, and while I marvel at the new addition he's built, some part of my brain kicks in to tell me that this is the natural order of things.

I'm up there with my kid, but, for whatever reason, this doesn't make me feel like more of an adult. We sit obediently side-by-side at the counter while the folks serve up breakfast and ask if we'd like more eggs, we carry our plates to the sink and brush up our crumbs. Maybe it's because my partner's not there; her presence might have jolted me into some vague recognition that I'm not the same little kid on the same visit I've always made...

It isn't until I pull away from his house that I wonder why I don't feel any more grownup when I'm up there. It isn't a resentful thing; I don't feel like I'm being treated like a child. It's simply that our relative status hasn't changed that much. I have maybe 25 bucks in my pocket and not much more in the bank to last the week. He slips me money to pay for the new starter I had to put in the truck last week. I come home, buy groceries, figure out what I can cook to last a few days, what I can send with the kid for lunch. I wonder if I will ever feel like an equal to my father and his brothers, or if I will always be the overgrown kid waiting for full adulthood to somehow magically happen.

Spambusters

I love my brother, truly I do. I generally ignore the right-wing crap he forwards my way, figuring that his time in Baghdad bought him several years' worth of me not taking his head off for not critically evaluating the stuff in his e-mails. I couldn't let this one go, although I did show admirable restraint in not sending my response to everyone else on his distribution list.

Have we all seen this one yet?

I found an interesting statistic for those who think we should pull out of Iraq because we have lost some military personel. I do not belittle their sacrifice, just trying to make a point. It may very well be safer to go to Iraq then to stay in the USA. Read this snippet: If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq Theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq. Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of Washington.

Groan. Basic math. Basic math, people! My response is below:

Statistics are fun! A correction to the stats provided: 2,112 deaths in an average population of 160,000 comes to 1,320 deaths per 100,000, although the majority of those are due to IED rather than gunfire. The original e-mail also assumes that the entire deployed force saw the same casualty rates, although the majority of the violence is centered in the Sunni Triangle. For comparison, troop strength in Baghdad has been increased over the summer to roughly 13,500 from 8,000. Working from the larger number, the 668 casualties from Baghdad still gives a rate of 4,948 per 100,000.

Current murders in DC stand at 188 in a population of roughly 550,000, which comes to roughly 34 deaths per 100,000.

In any event, neither is a particularly good place to be.

The dishonest use of casualty stats to justify the continued occupation of Iraq (hey, some guys died, but it's not as bad as... the Battle of the Somme!) or to vaguely argue against gun control laws is fairly distasteful. And what really pisses me off is the likelihood that probably 75% of the people on my bro's mailing list will read that stuff uncritically and swallow it whole.

Wheeeeeeee

The amazing find we can't talk about continues to consume the days. People file in and out of the room I work in, looking and looking at the artifacts, marveling at how this or that is the most incredible example of ________ they've ever seen. The energy level approaches giddiness; despite how jaded I have felt from time to time over the years (ho hum, here's another pile of artifacts to analyze), the buzz from this one still hasn't receded from the level of DAMN.

Meanwhile, my hand cramps from clutching a pen for hours on end. Note to all you Rapidograph warriors out there: the Staedtler Pigment Liner comes in 0.05 and 0.10 widths, nice one-piece throwaway pens that come very close to Rapidograph line quality with the added bonus of not bleeding or clogging in low-humidity settings when you stop drawing for more than 20 seconds. Drying time is longer than for Rapidograph india ink, but moving on to the next two, three, thirty points gives plenty of lag time before erasing.

While I've been busy, Rummy's been talking.

"What bothers me the most is how clever the enemy is," he said. Islamic extremist groups are trying to undermine Western support for the war on terror, he said.

"They are actively manipulating the media in this country" by, for example, falsely blaming U.S. troops for civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.

That was Monday, reported without comment. Then, yesterday, he delivered what shall surely stand the test of time as the Gem of the Week as he managed to fulfill Godwin's Law in a rant against people who are calling for a phased withdrawal from Iraq:

Rumsfeld alluded to the failure to stop Nazism in the 1930s. Without naming Bush critics at home or abroad, he said, "It is apparent that many have still not learned history's lessons. I recount this history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism," he said.

Oh, no doubt, the man is finally speaking the truth. He just didn't realize exactly what he was talking about.

Another Sunday, Another Hike

Saturday was taken up with a bunch of stuff I don't quite remember, not due to any altered states of consciousness, but rather to my brain increasingly failing to remember the mundane shit. Laundry may have been involved, if the pile of unfolded but clean clothes on the nightstand is a reliable indicator.

Sunday was far more interesting. The Boy and I hiked part of the Butterfly Trail up in the Catalinas, starting at 7900 feet and dropping a couple hundred over the first mile. So of course we practically skipped down for the first hour and a half. He also skipped the hour and a half back; I trudged. I swear it's a miracle I can even fucking walk around on level ground since I apparently have no quads any more.

Anyway. It was lovely. Yellow columbine claimed the best sunny spots, competing with red penstemons and blue lupine.

Here is a junco enjoying the bird bath provided by a big puddle caught in a fallen tree. Several juncos and some smaller birds that wouldn't hold still long enough for me to identify flitted around the water.

I also discovered that the "foliage" preset on the Canon SureShot 3.2 works well for closeups of flowers, but defaults to a sloooooow shutter speed. Greens and yellows are nicely enhanced, but the small LCD display doesn't always clue you in to minor blurring. Thus the lack of more than a few good shots from this hike.

In real world news, the primaries are coming up. If you live in AZ-8, please consider Jeff Latas.

Yowza

I've been busy the past couple of days, called out for emergency duty manning the map on one of our sites. Several profound legal issues apparently make it impossible to publicize any specifics, so for now I will leave it at the appropriately vague "wow" level of commentary. I got to watch the most amazing archaeological feature I've ever seen be excavated, and I got to draw the pictures of it. I even got to pick some of the cool stuff out of the screens. The heat exhaustion and dehydration were definitely worth it.

Grand Finale

Did I mention the wonderful monsoon? It's winding up with some short-lived but intense evening storms that hit at just about the right time to be lit up by the sunset.

This one dumped seven minutes of rain on TEP.




















Nuthin' like the glow of the sun half an hour before it sets.

Oops!

Okay, he finally said it. All you numbnuts out there who have clung stubbornly to the fictitious Iraq-September 11 link, you now have it from the lips of your War President himself: what did Iraq have to do with the attacks? Nothing.

Click, play, repeat, as many times as it takes for reality to sink in. Iraq was not connected to the September 11 attacks. The war you so heartily supported was sold to you like a Nigerian inheritance scam, with only slightly less flowery language and generally good subject-verb agreements.

Remember Osama? He's the relevant bad guy here. As you go to the polls this November, think about the thousands of good American soldiers, marines, and sailors who have been blown apart in your megalomaniacal president's exercise in ego-stroking, and then ask yourself how many of those deaths and life-ruining maimings have brought us even one step closer to catching Osama, or ensuring the nation's security.

Pretty Pretty Mud

The monsoon this year has been just capital. After a few years of fizzling storms that didn't deliver much moisture, the Rillito River actually looked like a river for much of the summer, rather than its usual state as a 15-foot-deep, 100-yard-wide dry ditch. Monster storms at the end of July had it running bankful. We were drawn to the edges to gawk at All That Water.

I set out last week along the river path to enjoy the last bit of gurgling water sounds. Evidence of the water's depth and power were still evident everywhere, with tree branches and uprooted desert broom wrapped head-high around power poles and bridge supports.













This cottonwood was putting out new leaves like mad, oblivious to the debris wrapped around its trunk.

A few days ago the same walk was weirdly quiet, unaccompanied by the soothing water sounds that had been surprisingly easy to get accustomed to. Except for a few patches of damp sand and mud shaded by bushes laid low by the now-gone torrent, the riverbed was dry, littered with rocks, brush, the occasional shoe, the odd shopping cart. Water is a marvelous sculptor and painter, shaping the bed and dropping different sizes of sediment as its velocity decreases and its trajectory is changed by the very mud it itself changes.

I thought they were fascinating, anyway, these wet little moonscapes doomed to crumble in the sun. I'll leave you with four of them (oh, only four pictures of flippin' mud? yes, I am cruel).

Birthday

Today I turn 39, round about 3:12 pm Illinois time. Birthdays stopped being a big deal a while ago. I'm not really concerned about adding years to my age; it clearly beats the alternative. The part-time housemate is taking me, the partner, and the kids to Vivace tonight in honor of both birthdays (the partner's birthday is tomorrow). Crab-stuffed chicken breast and tiramisu, here I come. It will be a welcome and (hopefully) mellow denouement to a draining week.

I certainly never expected this level of grief. It's on par with how wrecked I felt after my grandfather passed.

Anyway. Moving on. The upside is having had contact with people I haven't talked to for 20 years. Feeling a sense of community after so much time even when it's from far, far away and delivered by pixels on a screen is a fairly awesome experience.

Well, hell. It's my birthday. I might just possibly have ice cream for lunch, because I can.

A Peep of Reason

Finally. The NSA warrantless wiretapping program has been ruled unconstitutional, and the government has been ordered to halt it immediately. Holding for the official WH response...

Anyway, the federal judge's ruling is the peep of reason. In other news, it seems that the immediate threat of the British liquid bomb plot may have been played up just a tad. I won't get into the discussion of whether some exaggerations were made or the schedule pushed up at American insistence to satisfy political ends--no energy for it this morning--but this, on the heels of the revelation that the three guys arrested in Michigan for mass cell-phone purchases (allegedly to blow up the Mackinac Bridge) were not, after all, terrorists, but just three guys looking to run an eBay scam... well, it makes a body weary. Credibility has to be one of the basic tools of the Homeland Security folks; without it they're some amalgamation of the boy who cried wolf and Chicken Little when they should be that industrious ant (it was an ant, right? the one being dissed by the grasshopper or cricket or other random ornithoptera).

Some people will stay ever-vigilant, ready to turn in the neighbors at the slightest whiff of strange activity, but I'm betting the majority of the public is going to become jaded by the constant stream of hysterical terror alerts that increasingly (not "inevitably;" I'm not that cynical yet) are followed by an official Never Mind. If they're not that jaded already.

Navel-Gazing Music

I love Mogwai. Mogwai works particularly well when it's a rainy day and you're feeling introspective. Go here and click away.

This is why, still.

I'll get back to the political yowling in a day or so. For now I'm contemplating the impact one man had on hundreds of people, evidenced by the numbers who showed up at the first memorial service. A lot of people have come to this blog by way of googling his name (hi, Tish!). He was the kind of teacher they make movies about, and I'd venture that the sheer numbers of us who count ourselves lucky to have been his students make it a happy ending.

How We Grieve

Terse e-mails from former classmates. Entries in the funeral home's electronic guestbook. I didn't really cry until I read his obituary today. I suppose if I were still the good little Catholic girl who sat in his classroom 22 years ago, I would have spent last night at a church, lighting candles and saying a couple decades of the rosary for the repose of his eternal soul. But I figure if a merit-based heaven does exist, he doesn't need my help to sail to the front of the line.

I wandered around a few bookstores instead, remembering how he introduced me to the amazing world of used books, how he gave everyone in his class a card from The Haunted Bookshop with his signature on the back guaranteeing the bearer a 10% discount. I still have the card, someplace, and I still have all the books I bought there in my junior year, the big Collected Works of Emerson, the Thoreau, the Hawthorne. So last night I stood in Bookman's feeling stupid to have tears in my eyes when I reached out to touch the titles--some of them the same editions--I'd written papers from back then.

I housesat for him and his wife for a week the summer after I graduated. One of the rooms downstairs in their little house was his library, all its walls covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with great literature. I made it a point to write down every author on those shelves so that someday I could have the same library. Last night I bought a few more volumes toward that end, Cooper, Chekhov, Stein. It seemed the most fitting tribute I could make, at least of the quiet, personal variety.

Tom Gerencher, Rest...

E-mail came in at 2:11 this afternoon to say that Tom had died this morning. The finest teacher I ever had, the fabled high school mentor who made all the difference. He was... for a while there he was everything in my life. Taught me how to write, how to think. Books, books, books.

He was walking around the track at the school and had a heart attack. It's fitting, I suppose, that he died there. He graduated from the school himself and came back after college to teach literature and media (which essentially boiled down to all Beatles, all the time). This would have been his 34th year there, if memory serves. He commanded respect and not a little fear, but allowed students to call him by his first name. My early papers were handed back with so much red ink on them they looked like they'd been used to mop up a car wreck. My later papers were college level writing and clean.

We kept in touch over the years, primarily through Christmas cards. My consolation is that I did make sure to tell him exactly how much he meant to me and how important his touch on my life has been. Hardly a day goes by that I don't think of him or some lesson he taught me. He's in my head always.

Godspeed, Tom, and God help St. Peter if he stammers and says "um..." at the pearly gates, or tries to pass off an uninformed bias as a well-supported argument.

The Job I'm Glad I Don't Have

Channeling Michael Chertoff is not the way I prefer to pass time in the shower, but sometimes it just happens.

I was thinking of him standing there at his presser, detailing the new security rules that don't ban all liquids but allow up to four ounces of nonprescription meds, solid lipstick, and gel-based diabetic supplies, and imaginging what maybe he would like to say, were he able to shed his bureaucratic flunky shell and be nakedly honest for a few minutes:

Hello, my name is Michael Chertoff. Please make sure your cameras are powered up, your satellite feeds clean, and your pencils sharp, because I am about to commit political suicide and I'm only going to say this once.

The TSA is taking away your toothpaste, shampoo, and Chanel No. 5 because we have to do something to make it look like we're on top of things. We hope that if you're stuck in line for five hours waiting to pour your Diet Coke into an official trash can with all the other liquids, gels, soft solids, and random goos we can strip from your fellow travelers, you'll be too exhausted and frazzled to think about the thousands of pounds of cargo riding in the belly of the jet under your feet.

Because we don't look at that stuff. We don't have the funding or personnel, and if you think a GOP-controlled Congress will mandate security measures the airlines have to pay for themselves, well, you're wrong. So we put on our dog-and-pony show at the security gate with a handful of underpaid, undertrained workers and hope that makes you feel safe enough that you won't ask the hard questions.

The simple fact, ladies and gents, is that the potential for terrorist attacks is this big, with "this big" representing roughly the size of the universe.


And what we're able to do to ameliorate that is about this big on a good day. This "this big" is actual size.

The country's just too damn big and technology allows nefarious devices to be ever smaller, more concealable. Communication is instant. Very destructive materials can be packaged in very small delivery systems. If al Qaeda or my crazy Uncle Joe want to blow ten airliners out of the air simultaneously, they can do it and there's not a damn thing the US government can do to stop them.

The only impediment, really, is the incompetence of the foot soldiers they send out to do the job. Will somebody get nervous and blow his cover, or panic and back out at the last second? That's about the best we can hope for. Richard Reid can't quite get his sneaker lit, so the TSA makes everyone send their shoes through the X-ray machine. The Brits find a ring of guys trying to get their liquid explosives straightened out and the TSA bans lip gloss. Does this make you any more than marginally safer? No. It doesn't.

The point is that it doesn't matter what we find out about and add to the list of hoops you have to jump through before getting on a plane. There are always other ways, other things we just haven't thought of yet and won't until somebody tries them. We could, as so many people have groused, simply strip you all naked and have you ride in cages. That wouldn't do a damn thing to keep a Semtex-stuffed teddy bear wired to a timer sitting inside an iPod shell in checked baggage or undisguised Semtex in an air cargo crate from blowing the 6:15 to Cleveland right out of the sky. It won't do a damn thing to keep the uninspected suitcases on the Sunset Limited (read: all of them) from detonating as the train chugs past the munitions depot in Yuma or pulls into downtown LA. It won't do jack to stop coordinated hits in small towns throughout the Midwest--you know, away from any targets of tactical value, but right in the heart of what you thought were the last safe spots in America.

We can't do shit. We can, at best, protect you from the really stupid or incompetent terrorists who can't think outside the traditional knife-to-the-throat box of airplane hijackings. So we make you traipse through the security gate barefoot and dry to assuage your fears with the veneer of Doing Something, and hope that the majority of you will think that's great and continue to consider Republicans the Party of Strong on Terror.

You want consolation? Here's your consolation. In a nation of 300 million people, your odds of survival are pretty good. Thank you and have a nice day.

I Don't Fly, But Still...

Oh, where to start? It bothers me that I have become so jaded by the administration's breathless announcements of terra situations--coincidentally timed to wipe out negative news like Libby's indictment or Lieberman's primary loss--that my first reaction to the Liquid Bombs On A Plane story is to doubt it, or at least to question the true extent and signficance of it compared to the ominous picture initally painted.

Questions? I got questions. If the bad guys have been rounded up and the threat neutralized, why is the terra alert system jacked up to Kiss-You-Ass-Goodbye red? Isn't this more of a parallel How Bad It Could Have Been system at work instead?

If liquids pose such a deadly threat, to the extent that even the minute volumes contained in eyewetting drop bottles or lip gloss could destroy an aircraft, why did the TSA have passengers dumping them all indiscriminantly into the same plastic trash barrels at the security gate (as pointed out on AmericaBlog)? Seriously, how are we supposed to trust either the claimed level of the threat or the measures put in place to ameliorate it when this is the response?

Were I a terrorist mastermind (note to my NSA minders: I'm not really a terrorist mastermind, not yet, so this is pure conjecture), I swear I would send my lower-level flunkies onto planes with all sorts of absurd incendiary modifications in their clothing and necessary personal items. I'd pack plastique into a female flunky's underwire but leave the detonator cord dangling in plain view, so it would be discovered and the TSA would require all female passengers to shed their bras before boarding. I'd have an eldery flunky attempt to ignite his hearing aid. I'd have one make frequent trips to the bathroom, where he would make ominous clanking and beeping noises, to ensure that all the bathrooms on every jet would be boarded up.

Dance, dammit! Lemme see you dance!!!

Or maybe I'd just realize that every piece of checked baggage isn't opened and screened. If you're sophisticated enough to measure out quantities of explosives and disguise them as eyeliner, you're sure as hell sophisticated enough to put together a device that will detonate in the cargo hold. 60% of that stuff goes uninspected.

Anecdote time. Traveling more than ten miles through Peru can be a hassle, and was especially hassle-ish in the late '80s when the Maoist rebel group Sendero Luminoso was quite effectively blowing stuff up and killing people throughout the southern Andes. Airport security was unbelievably tight, but efficient. You showed up two hours before your flight, and the boarding process involved going to the waiting room designated for your flight, displaying your ticket, having it matched to your passport, and then plopping your checked bag on a table and opening it for the nice army officer to go through. Every folded bit of clothing was patted down, containers opened, unfamiliar items required to be explained (case in point: tampons). When the inspection was finished, you closed your bag and they sealed it with tape, and it went to the cart. The cart was then escorted to the plane by armed guards.

Nerve-wracking but effective, and definitely made more efficient by the sheer numbers of guys they had working the inspection tables. It would, of course, require a complete reconfiguration of airport security in this country. But I can't help thinking it would do more to actually ensure the security of an airplane than patting down a random sample of passengers, taking their shoes off, or confiscating their potentially deadly liquids by mixing them all in the same vat.

Death By Yoga

I have discovered a pathway that opens up heretofore unknown levels of self-loathing. It is called "Gentle Kripalu Yoga" and I am certain it was spawned by Satan, as I exited the hour and a half class (hour and a half!) contemplating the many forms of suicide that might be immediately available between the yoga room door and the front desk of the racquet club.

KRIPALU - A gentle class for a beginner or OLDER yoga student.

I love how "older" is double-emphasized, although I guess they could have twisted the knife a bit more with boldface and italics. Anyway. I think I was supposed to tap into my inner consciouness and external energy patterns and some fountain of light, but I ended up spending 90 minutes cataloguing all the body parts I hate and the new, wonderful ways my new friend Kripalu was making them hurt.

In rough order, I hate my ripped-up knees that keep me from sitting cross-legged like a good little yogista, my tweaked hip flexor that compounds the cross-legged-sitting pain, and my beer gut that gets in the way of the legs and prevents the key breathing from (through? I wasn't sure) my navel, then I circle back around for a fresh round of specific hate directed at the surgically repaired left knee that can't tolerate being knelt on, even on a squishy yoga mat, for more than about 15 seconds, then more general hate of my left achilles tendon, which refuses to be anything approaching pliable, of my repeatedly banged and partially separated and now arthritic shoulders, and finally of my neck, which grinds and pops alarmingly when put through what are supposed to be soothing rotations.

I turn 39 next week. The last 30 years of competetive sports have apparently aged my joints a bit ahead of the rest of me. All in all, a discouraging experience, although it was an interesting study in good old negative spiraling. It made me want to run up to the weight room and do pulldowns in a blind rage, but the instructor had cunningly put her mat right in front of the door, so there was no escaping.

On my list of things to do once I have attained that marvelous grownup age next Friday is to be more accepting of both the moment and my existence within it. Hoo ha ha. I'll keep you all posted on how that's going.

Not Much Else Going On, So How About Some Abstinence Talk?

Aimee Short (of the BreakDown abstinence Shorts, as ABB might say) is back. She left a lengthy comment while I was away, so I've not gotten around to responding until now. I'll give her this much; she's persistent.

Now about the blog posted on June 18th in response to my comment. It is encouraging to know that the blogger is not heartless and has the ability to step away from her strong opinions and see not just the values of another person, but the PERSON behind those values. It's easy to put another person into a box that they do not deserve when you know very little about them or what they really do. I have been guilty of that myself from time to time. But, I do not, nor does BreakDown as an organization fit into the "abstinence" box.

There is one major difficulty that I have with this blog. It is stated as a fact that "Ms. Short offers no solution beyond don't have sex." Now how would you know that? Have you been to a high school classroom with me anytime over the last 6 years while I am teaching a 5 hour course on sex, abstinence and relationships? How can you be so sure that I say "just say no" for 5 hours and throw a ring or a pledge card at the students as they are running as fast as they can from my class? Let me answer my own question. Because you put me, and the entire "abstinence movement" into a tiny little box.

Well, like you are with your responses to the postings and comments on my blog, I'm only going with the information I have. The newspaper articles I referenced didn't give details about the curriculum of your five-hour classes; they focused on encouraging abstinence through dancing and positive messages about self-worth. If I came away with the impression that your abstinence program presented an overly simplified view of human sexuality, it's because that's how it was presented.

You are correct when you say that sex is a powerful, powerful thing. I agree wholeheartedly. That's why I do what I do. Because sex is so powerful it has the potential to be so painful. 2 minutes of sex can destroy a lifetime. Young people usually find this out the hard way. I just want to be the voice of encouragement that inspires some young people to avoid the consequences all together, possibly even save their lives. People can write what they want and criticize, but I for one do not want to be remembered for sitting back and allowing the young people around me to have the accuse that nobody cared enough to tell them the truth and that they are worth more than our society gives them credit for. I want to be one who offers hope of a better way, inspires young people to believe in and value themselves, their bodies and their futures.

I'm all over that. Seriously, I am. Could it be that you've done your own bit of box-building, assuming that people like me, who object to abstinence-only education, are hedonists trying to rid society of the last remaining strictures against personal pleasure at all costs? I think abstinence is absolutely necessary for the vast majority of teenagers. Hell, there are plenty of emotionally immature or unstable adults who would do well to take a vow fo chastity until they get their personal shit together.

My objection has never been to the idea of abstinence for kids, but to the school of thought that demands abstinence education be completely devoid of accurate information about physiology and birth control methods. Let's face it--if you communicate your message of abstinence effectively enough, if it really takes root in a kid's head, the additional knowledge about condoms and less risky sexual behaviors is not going to compel him to run out and have sex despite truly believing he shouldn't. If your message doesn't convince a kid to remain abstinent until marriage, accurate information about safer sex practices will greatly reduce the risk of him impregnating someone or contracting a disease. I mean, it was drilled into me fairly early in life that shooting people is wrong. Subsequently learning to fire a rifle when I was in high school didn't make me more disposed to chuck my moral framework and start plinking folks from a clock tower.

I fail to understand how presenting the full spectrum of information necessary for healthy sexual behavior falls into the category of disrespecting kids, or is somehow designed to convince them their intrinsic worth is less than if we don't bother to teach them about condoms, or mutual masturbation, or piggybacking barrier contraception with the pill.

Yes, I understand that abstinence is the best way to avoid pregnancy and STDs. I truly hope that your curriculum does all you claim, that you present kids with realistic, workable options for making good choices and protecting themselves against coercion. I simply don't believe that withholding information about protection is morally defensible, given human nature and the extent to which teenagers are hard-wired to get it on. Yes, I believe that humans can rise above their instincts, if you want to look at it that way, and that teaching kids accurately about the risks of sexual behavior should and can make them decide to put it off until they're physically and emotionally ready. But knowledge about contraception has to be there as a backup. Withholding that knowledge puts kids at sea without a life raft, and I find that unconscionable.

Good old anecdotal evidence can prove anything you want it to, but I was fully versed in the physiology of reproduction from a young age. The sex ed curriculum in my grammar school covered the range of contraception available at that time, along with the effectiveness rates of each when used correctly. It also talked about the emotional risks of becoming sexually active too early. I decided I wasn't ready to do something that had even the remotest chance of landing me in the spot my parents found themselves in as teenagers (namely, pregnant with me and frog-marched to the altar). I made it through high school with my virginity intact, and when I later became sexually active, it was a carefully considered decision fortified with highly reliable, properly used birth control. My sole pregnancy was carefully planned, the baby wanted. Storybook. And in that storybook, knowledge is power.

So keep fighting your good fight, Aimee. I hope you can understand why those of us on this side of the fence think your curriculum should be augmented with precise instruction on what to do should the individual's informed conscience lead him or her into sexual activity before marriage.

Road Trip

Been away for a week, the annual trip up to Colorado to visit Mom and the grandparents.

Modest Mouse’s most recent CD is titled This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About. The drive from Tucson to Pagosa Springs (Colorado) is pretty long, but for the most part void of the dead spots, the long stretches of featureless interstate that put you to sleep despite gallons of coffee. Be that as it may, I still had plenty to think about over 11 and a half hours there last Sunday and back yesterday.

Uncharacteristic pea soup fog between Winkelman and Globe, wistful poetry composed in my head:

I liked you better when you drove that beat up old Rodeo
And wore your hair wild and free
Before you married that preacher man
And one of the pushpins on your wall map meant you and me
And a tent and a couple of dogs
In the Galiuros Mountains
A cold night curled up like kittens
And I could almost believe the world was all right after all.

Solid, steady, winter-like rain from St. Johns to I-40:

Driving through Apache lands
A water tank lies on its side
An impromptu pile of dirt keeping it
From rolling down the side of the hill
In a grassland town named for a shell
Hundreds of miles from the sea.

Okay, the poetry buzz ran out round about hour five. The rain lasted, unabated, through to Tohatchi on the Navajo rez north of Gallup. That’s pretty weird for this time of year. Other things I saw this time I’d not seen on the previous many many times I’ve made this drive:

1. Actual non-captive, alive javelinas north of Globe. Unfortunately, I think I also saw them on the return trip, on the same stretch of road, squished. Wasn't me.

2. On the “Watch For Animals” sign outside Show Low, “And Bigfoot” scrawled in Sharpie.

3. Munoz Avenue in Gallup under construction between I-40 and NM491. No, just kidding. I’ve actually never seen it NOT under construction in 12 years of annual to semi-annual trips. Gallup, as always, blows. The sole upside was GasMax, a nice little Navajo-run station selling 86 octane for 2.99, a full 16 cents under the price at the few remaining stations that have not yet succumbed to the decade of construction-induced chaos.

4. Almost all the washes running on the Navajo reservation between Gallup and Shiprock.

In Pagosa Springs news, the march toward Aspen-ization is meeting some local resistance, with a few scattered bumper stickers reading “Keep Pagosa Pagosa” and “Save an elk: Shoot a developer.” The downtown river area has been spruced up a bit with extra large boulders replacing the smaller cobbles that used to line the banks—better for basking in the sun—and a few little boulder pools have been constructed to catch the runoff from the hot springs on the public side of the river. So now us poor folk can enjoy the sensation of being slowly boiled alive in sulfrous water for free, rather than ponying up the 15 bucks for the same experience—albeit with more lobster pots to choose from—on the resort side of the river.

After I typed this I looked at the map of the pay-to-play pools and found that one is, indeed, actually called the Lobster Pot.

The most curious addition to downtown has to be the new bell tower sitting under the new stoplight at the Pagosa and Lewis intersection. It’s a nice little tower. More accurately, it’s a nice little handicapped-accessible unisex bathroom with a belfry. You’d think they might have put the door on the backside of the structure, so people in need of the facilities could enter somewhat discreetly rather than being on full display to cars waiting at the intersection. I don’t know if the locals are in the habit yet of honking when some unfortunate soul goes inside. Or maybe that’s what triggers the bell.

More scenery tomorrow; I know you're all just dying to see.

Anecdotal Evidence

It's the best I can do in response to the Senate criminalizing the act of transporting a minor girl across state lines to obtain an abortion, if said transportation is intended to circumvent the girl's home state laws requiring parental notification or consent. Fortunately for me, I don't have direct experience in this arena, only secondhad accounts from friends and scenarios conjured from What If Land for myself.

The bill's proponents argue the law would prevent girls from being exploited by older boyfriends coercing them into abortions they really don't want. They argue the absence of such a law actually helps child molestors and incestuous fathers because it somehow "destroys the evidence" of a crime, as if compelling a young girl to carry her father's baby to term and then deliver it so it can become Exhibit A in family court isn't a crime itself.

The rest of us in the Reality Based Community worry about girls being disowned, physically abused, emotionally abused, or perhaps killed by angry parents learning that their prized virgin is no longer pure, the sad story of Spring Adams the worst case in point. We wonder why a non-parental relative, say a grandmother or aunt or big sister, should face jail time for making the courageous decision to help a loved one in an impossible position.

But we also understand that it's not just the "at-risk" girls who are threatened by this legislation. Even those of us who were and are fortunate enough to have an open, trusting relationship with our parents may not have felt at liberty to tell our parents about an unplanned pregnancy. I sure as hell couldn't have. Not out of any fear of violence at my father's hands, but at the worse fate--in my teenaged perception--of his disappointment, the shame of knowing I'd let him down, the shame of my parents knowing exactly what I'd done to end up in that state.

Again, a situation that existed for me, luckily, only in my nightmares. I didn't get pregnant in high school. Hell, I didn't even kiss a guy more than twice, if memory serves. College was a slightly different story, with more than a handful of late periods, dread-filled walks to the Osco farther from campus where I'd be less likely to run into a dorm-mate while carrying my EPT to the checkout stand.

Some of my friends got pregnant at one point or another down the line, before they wanted to. One was impregnated by a 22-year-old when she was 14. Her mother took her for the abortion and then dropped her off at the boyfriend's house because she (the mother) couldn't stand to look at my friend any more. Another got knocked up around 16, by a guy roughly the same age. Her mother paid for the abortion but allowed her to come back home.

My own mother got her little surprise midway through her freshman year in college, and, since it was 1967, ended up married to my dad (hi, folks!) a month later. Abortion wasn't an option then, although they stayed married long enough, I learned later, to create another unwanted pregancy. This one came post-Roe v. Wade, though, and was quickly terminated.

Perhaps oddly, I don't have any sense of relief that I was conceived in the dark ages when the only recourse to a missed period in small-town southern Illinois was a hasty wedding. Her parents were furious. They were rather conservative Methodists who never liked my dad, a rowdy Catholic boy with a reputation for getting into fights, stealing beer, and other mayhem. They had planned to send my mother to France to study piano. Instead, my parents got married (in the Catholic church, at my dad's parents' insistence), and stuck it out 8 years before discovering they'd grown up into vastly different people who had no business being married to each other.

Had it happened five years later, I most likely wouldn't be typing this. They most likely would have marched in straightaway for the abortion, considering that they were both in their first year of college, they most likely wouldn't have married, saving them both a world of grief, and they sure as hell wouldn't have told either of their parental units, saving them both years of approbation. Of course, I wouldn't exist, but I also wouldn't have known the difference, so it's a fair cop. I don't breathe a sigh of relief over that any more than I mourn the loss of the embryo-sibling I never had. Quite simply, I understanf that they were faced with difficult situations and made the best choices available to them at the time.

All girls should be able to make that best choice for themselves, with the counsel of their choosing. Ideally it's a trusted adult, but you gotta work with what you have. Involve your parents if you feel that is the safest choice for you, or involve your aunt or your best friend's mom or buy a Greyhound ticket on your own if that is your only safe option. No one can dictate from a distance what that option will be.

Whew, Thank God Marriage is Safe in Washington!

What bothers me isn't so much that the state of Washington ruled their gay-marriage ban constitutional (remember I'm talking about relative levels of high annoyance on the midly pissed off-to-homicidal rage continuum). It's that the 5-4 majority based their opinion on a single point: procreation.

Attorneys for the state and King County [...] said lawmakers had a rational reason for limiting marriage to people of the opposite sex: Only those couples are biologically capable of having children, and keeping them together is generally best for those children.

"The basic decision came down to the fact that the Supreme Court felt that by limiting marriage to opposite sex, they sustained the ability to procreate," said Gary Randall, president of the Faith & Freedom Network in Bellevue. "We consider this a decisive victory that upholds the values of the faith community."

Well, thank god for that. If anyone but straight people are allowed to marry, the human race's ability to procreate will surely disappear in a wisp of smoke. Because not only will straight married couples suddenly become sterile, but unmarried straight people will stop impregnating each other as well.

I now eagerly await the logical extension of the court's reasoning, which should be to limit marriage in the state of Washington to fertile straight people, and to compel divorce for post-menopausal newlyweds and otherwise sterile, childless couples.

Oh, yeah, the "faith community" can shove its mean-spirited values up its ass, just before kissing mine.

Heat

It's miserable everywhere, from what I hear. It's really freaking miserable in Tucson. The monsoons started out promisingly with a couple of weeks of predictable afternoon storms that left the evenings tolerably cooler and rainwashed fresh. The last couple of weeks have brought the heat and wetness building, building in the air but no crashing thunderous release at the end of the day. The 90+ degree temperatures inside the house make sleeping an interesting challenge, even with the brave little floor fan going nonstop. I snooze, barely, for 15 minutes before grabbing the water bottle on the nightstand and rolling over to give the heat rash an equitable shot at the other side of my body. I am in a state of constant sogginess. I fantasize about laying whole sheets of Otter Pops on the bed and collapsing on them for a minute's cool thrill before they, too, melt into puddles.

Otter Pops are helpful. Here is some useful Spanish for Otters.

Hello.	Hola.
Nice to meet you.	Mucho Gusto.
What is your name?	¿Como te llamas?
My name is...	Me llamo...
I am a saltwater otter.	Soy una nutria de la agua salada.
I am a freshwater otter.	Soy una nutria de agua dulce.
Which way to the water?	¿Dónde está el agua?
Is the water cold today?	¿Es el agua fría hoy?
Those rocks are slippery.	Esas rocas son deslizadizas.
Your musk smells lovely.	Su almizcle huele encantador.
How old is your pup?	¿Cómo vieja es su nutria infantil?
That tickles my whiskers.	Ese cosquillas mis barbas.
This kelp is delicious.	Este quelpo es delicioso.
Goodbye.	Adios.

Mi almizcle no huele encantador, porque yo tango demasiado calor. Pobrecita!

Israel, Howling Wolf, and Stem Cells, Oh Joy

Note the first! In these fractious times, the US Congress finally put aside their squabbling yesterday and came together long enough to... issue a resolution affirming Israel's right to defend itself. What the hell, why not? Israel's defending itself has so far resulted in roughly 300 dead Lebanese civilians to roughly 12 dead Israeli civilians and 12 or 13 dead Israeli soldiers. That 1:25 soldier-to-civilian casualty ratio roughly mimics what we have going in Iraq (2500+ US soldiers times 25 equals about 62,500 dead Iraqis, give or take a couple thousand).

So of course the Congress wants to give moral authority to Israel. It fits quite nicely with the rationalizations for Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmoudiya. You know, the "everyone else is doing it" defense. Why the Democrats jumped on board is beyond me, but I'm near the point of giving up trying to understand.

Note the second! Did anyone else notice the little blip that wasn't? The breathless announcement that

One or more Iranians witnessed North Korea's recent missile tests, deepening U.S. concerns about growing ties between two countries with troubling nuclear capabilities, a top U.S. official said on Thursday.

My own reaction was something along the lines of... how do you say... "Yeah, right, whatever." Funny how lying your way into a war makes people wary of each subsequent attempt to fire up a new war.

What else... ah, yes, note the third! The stem-cell veto. The Snowflake kids. The fetishizing of the fetus marches on relentlessly, with W making it crystal clear that the potential life represented by 400,000 microscopic clumps of cells languishing in liquid nitrogen outweighs the actualized lives of hundreds of thousands of functioning, thinking, feeling children and adults who are suffering from any number of syndromes and ailments that might one day be alleviated through stem-cell therapy.

So many dots to connect. The primacy of the fetus. The increasing power of ideologue pharmacists to deny not only emergency contraception but routine birth control as well. The increasing influence of religious fundamentalists who wish to outlaw birth control even for married couples. The federal guidelines encouraging all post-pubescent women to consider themselves pre-pregnant and frame their personal healthcare in terms of preparing for gestation. The fashion pages gushing that pregnancy is the new chic. And now the official White House policy of encouraging adoption of throwaway extra 5-day-old embryos (142 Snowflake kids so far! 399,858 to go!) and forbidding the use of any to develop treatments for diseases that are guaranteed to cause profound suffering, degradation, and ultimately early loss of life for thousands of existing people every year.

W doesn't want "innocent life" destroyed for stem-cell research. You know, this adherence to the concept of Original Sin jumping onto babies as soon as they flop out of the birth canal and automatically disqualifying them for consideration by the GOP is getting old. Is my co-worker's 11-year-old daughter, freshly diagnosed with diabetes, not an innocent life? She's been out for 11 years, going on 12, and dreams about boys, but methinks she hasn't gotten around nearly enough to have lost the "innocent" tag. She got whacked hard with the diabetes stick thanks to genes that shut down her pancreas, not through any fault of her own. My ex-sister-in-law's mother is struggling with early onset Alzheimer's. She's a church-going, God-fearing Baptist farmer's wife who with her husband raised up four friendly, polite, caring kids in rural North Carolina, the sweetest and most generous soul I've ever met. Am I to believe that her life is outweighed on the cosmic scales by a handful of blastocytes that have never seen the light of day, much less had a single coherent thought or faced hard choices and moral dilemmas and still come down on the side of goodness?

W on the World Stage

W is representin' quite well at the G8 summit. Well, he's representin' for the uncouth frat boy/embarassing drunk uncle at Thanksgiving dinner demographic, anyway.

While talking to Tony Blair, he said "shit" around his mouthful of buttered roll into an open mike. That one's not so bad in my book, really. It speaks volumes about the man that it's about the level of decorum we've come to expect. At least he didn't get Blair with the old "see food!" thing. That would have been worse.

The gaffe that sealed it for me, though, was his fly-by shoulder massage on Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany. This has been a peeve of mine forever. You're sitting at the table, or at a desk in the library, whatever, and a friend comes up behind you and squeezes the life out of your trapezius muscles. After peeling you (all right, me) off the ceiling, the friend huffily says, "I was just giving you a neck massage." Okay, here's the deal: all the cumulative stress of the past almost-39 years marches straight to the traps and establishes residency. They are rock hard, and as much as I'd like to credit all those reps of upright rows for that, it's a pathology and it fucking hurts when somebody digs their thumbs into them ("digs" here meaning "touches").

Ahem.

Given that, I think W is lucky that Merkel only flung her hands shoulder-high in a startle reflex, rather than burying her butter knife between his eyes.

It is, however, still pretty damn funny reading about it on the Bild.de website. "Bush: Liebes-Attacke auf Merkel!" If you read German, take a look. The fotogalerie captions are priceless.

Later today at G8: W calls the hotel staff to ask if the mini-bar is running.

Lakota Clinic Update

Got a letter over the weekend from Emily Bull Bear, one of the founders of Sacred Choices Clinic on the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Reservation. For those who didn't catch it the first time around, Cecilia Fire Thunder, president of the Oglala tribe, responded to South Dakota's proposed abortion ban by vowing to establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on tribal land, where draconian state laws would not be able to impede a woman's ability to seek either contraception or pregnancy termination. This issue is particularly salient on the reservation, where women are subjected to rape and other sexual abuse at rates four to five times higher than their white counterparts in South Dakota. The original check I wrote was returned by the tribe, fallout from Fire Thunder's impeachment, initiated by council members opposing her stance on abortion. However, alternate funding outside the purview of the tribal government is now possible. The text of the letter follows:

Thank you for your most recent generous contribution toward the creation of a Planned Parenthood style center on the Pine Ridge Reservation. A group of women have since then applied for non-profit corporation along with establishing a bank account. These women are from the same community as the President and each day receive more calls from women across the reservation who want to be part of this endeavor.

The Pine Ridge Reservation is 150 x 50 miles covering 2.7 million acres of land. There are nine district governments across our land and the community of Medicine Root has been selected to be the site for this project. The women all agree that along with reproductive services, the wellness model of mind, heart, body and spirit will be provided. This includes therapeutic services both western and Lakota methods for women who have been raped, sexually traumatized or abused at anytime in their life cycle.

Due to the high rates of chronic illness and diseases, the Indian Health Service budget is spent on treatment and overhead for staff and facilities with little left over for education, awareness and prevention.

We are returning the check/money order that you sent and are respectfully asking you to send another check/money order written to Sacred Choices P.O. Box 23, Kyle, South Dakota 57752. In the self addressed stamped envelope enclosed. We can then send you a receipt for your records and ours.

We appreciate your support. Please visit our website at http://sacredchoiceswomensclinic.org or info@sacredchoiceswomensclinic.org.

Again, thank you very much for your support.

Wopila Tanka (a big thank you),

Emily Bull Bear

This is encouraging for a few reasons. It's gratifying to see a group of women come together to actualize the vision initiated by President Fire Thunder, after the apparently successful attempt by the tribal council to not only silence her but remove her from power. I am also pleased to see the holistic approach and wide spectrum of services the clinic is planning on offering. Rather than being "just" an abortion clinic, Sacred Choices will be a full health care facility intended to address sexual assault, overall women's health, and education and prevention.

Hopefully Sacred Choices will succeed in its mission. Hopefully it can become a model for other groups of oppressed or under-represented women to grab the initiative and exercise self-determination in procuring health care that will otherwise be denied or watered down by political pressure. May this be a fresh start and successful endeavor for the women of the Oglala Nation.

note: a PayPal link is up and running on the Sacred Choices website now

Birthday Girl Shout-Out

Happy birthday to the girl dog! She is 10 today. Way back when, I threw her a party for her 4th birthday. We had 14 dogs wearing party hats in the back yard. This year will be a bit more subdued affair, mainly because I forgot about it until just now. Perhaps she will get some extra chicken with her valley fever meds tonight.

Happy birthday, sweet pup. Here's hoping to at least a couple more.

Back to Normal

Way back when in the early '90s, I bought the good old IBM 386 and stopped paying attention to technology for about a month. When I next cruised the aisles of CompUSA, VGA monitors were already obsolete and all the spec sheets talked about local bus video and I had no idea WTF was going on. Fast forward to 2006. Having trouble digesting the intricacies of Plamegate, I spent about a month not reading about the daily Fitz updates and instead applied myself to the new guitar and increasingly complex fantasies about the GF returning from her road trip.

Having had the time, now, to come up for air, I'm seeing a conspicuous and--to me, at least--baffling lack of indictments and, now, the news from Novak that Rove indeed was one of the leakers. I do seem to remember W vowing to fire anyone who was involved in that sorry mess and many of as salivating at the thoughts of Rove heading up a cascade of indictments leading all the way up to Cheney.

Funny how fantasy manages to outstrip reality almost every damn time.

On the Chicago Tribune website, the link to the story was buried well below the fold, below the story about the lady in Lake Forest whose neighbors are trying to get her pet pigs evicted. It's apparently simply not news. Is this because everyone pretty much knew the whole time that Rove was behind it? That Cheney had a heavy hand in it? That it ultimately doesn't matter who did what, who knew what when, because these guys are so far above the law they can do whatever they want, and most of America will yawn and go back to talking about why the AL has been so dominant in the All-Star game for the past decade?

Can someone explain this to me? Does the majority of the population really not hear about this sort of thing, do they hear about it and not understand it enough to form an opinion, do they understand it and think it's right and good that the unitary executive branch behave like an old-school dictator, or do they understand it and simply sigh and resign themselves to yet another session bent over with no Astroglide?

World Cup Final

::sniff:: ::sob:: I'm seriously sad that it's all over. Zidane. WTF? Worse yet, video replay? Seriously, WTF??? A great game marred at the end by Zizou losing his head and the officials opening a right bloody Pandora's box of videotape.

If it's 50 years before I again see a furry Italian player sliding around in old-man whitie-tighties, it will be too soon.

And American announcers seriously need to come up with something different to say on EVERY FREAKING HEADBALL besides "nods it down." I found it quite bothersome after, oh, I don't know, maybe the 90th time it was said, which was about the 30th minute of the very first game. Put Foudy in the booth as color commentator next time. Hell, just let her do all the talking. Marcelo Balboa's pretty to look at, but is beyond grating.

Anyway. Italy are still a bunch of diving bastards. Up Australia!

Back to politics and the cognitive dissonance of being a liberal dyke in George Bush's America tomorrow.

Monsoon Special

Hum. Blogger is acting odd this morning. Apparently choosing a font is no longer an option; hope this one remains legible upon posting.

Yesterday was the first major daytime soaker of the season, at least in my neighborhood. More than an inch of rain fell in less than an hour, leaving flood marks far enough off the curb to make it look like Country Club Blvd. was under a couple feet of water at some point. My wretched, hateful acacia trees seem happy; their little wells stayed full for quite a while. Unfortunately, the butyl rubber caulking around the front door has completely surrendered, meaning that our ill-designed inward-sloping entryway helpfully directed the rainwater through the wall and into the front hall.

The rug smells... just... lovely.

In bird news, the doves continue to be pigs with wings, hogging all the seed and the peanut butter suet as well. Here is a white-winged dove (Zenaida porcini) chowing down on the fancy birdseed bell while a female house finch waits patiently in the background before toppling into the thorns of the hateful acacia tree in hypoglycemic shock.

No, not really. The dove eventually gave up on trying to peck millet out of the rock-hard bell and left it to the finches.

Finches, triumphant.

The Bee And Me

Getting old sucks in many ways. I am most commonly reminded of this when I venture out to kick the ball around with the boy. When he was a wee tad I was the one who taught him how to play. Now he's totally schooling me when I'm not occupied being spastic all on my own. So last night, at the end of a session that saw me put every penalty I was shooting at the inside of the post directly into his hands in the center of the line instead (goddammit, godDAMMIT!!!), a bee flew up my boxers and stung me on the ass.

More specifically, it stung me within the perimeter of where the bikini line would have been, had I been wearing bikini underwear. Another inch inboard and there would have been a major problem. It's a very difficult spot to grab in public while hopping up and down, trying to dig the bee out, while saying aaaaauuuuuuggggghhhhh fuck fuckfuckFUCK very loudly. The boy was no help whatsoever.

Then I got to walk home from the park with a burning sensation shooting down my leg and laterally into other areas. No chance of digging the stinger out, as I needed both a mirror and unfamiliar contortions to even see the friggin' welt. Which was huge. The burning was eventually replaced with numbing that was troubling but, fortunately, transient. Everything seems to be in working order, with only a residual sensation of a small nail having been driven into the left side of my, uh, area.

Sitting down is interesting today!

De-Hummering the World, One Consumer At A Time

Coffee this morning with an old friend. Former girlfriend. She's shopping for a new car and is going to test-drive a Hummer3 (!) this afternoon. No, I told her. No, no, no. If you ever want to talk to me again, or, more accurately, if you ever want to talk to me and have me actually listen and respond to you in a civil manner, no Hummers. It's sad and pretentious enough to buy one of the big bombers, I said. But the baby one? That says you need to be pretentious, but couldn't swing the freight on the full-size one. The opposing forces of Look-At-Me and Must-Be-Frugal will collide and wipe you out, along with most of the Tucson metro area and possibly Pima and Pinal counties as well.

Not sure if she bought that line of reasoning, but she smiled and nodded vigorously--a smile 'n' nod NOT, I would point out, accompanied by any furtive glances at or slow backing toward the door.

I pushed for a Honda Element. Not holding my breath on that happening.

Big Gay Double Feature

Independence Day night turned out to be pretty mellow. It's generally a marathon night of sleeplessness for no good reason other than the neighborhood bottle rockets make the fuzzy boy dog run up and down the hallway barking his head off. Thankfully (and, amazingly, EXACTLY as I'd hoped), this year it started raining on cue right as the official fireworks were winding down, a steady downpour that lasted into the wee hours. It brought multiple bonuses, including (1) no maniacally barking beagle mix, (2) air cool enough to give the fan the night off, and (3) the deliciousness of falling asleep to raindrops pattering on the roof.

Since I had no plans for company, I walked over to Casa earlier in the evening to pick up some movies. No, I still hadn't gotten around to watching Brokeback Mountain yet, so I grabbed it. Then I picked up Imagine Me & You for some gender and lightness balance. Brokeback. Wow. I forgot whatever shortcomings I'd heard people complain about and was mesmerized. Falling for someone, wanting more than they can give, both people forfeiting their lives as a result... damn. I shed a tear or three. A few parts of the film resonated so deeply with me that I had to hit the pause button, grab an old photo album, and lose myself for a while in pictures and the nearly forgotten emotions they dredged up to the surface. Damn. Just damn. The final scene did me in.

Imagine Me & You. Well, what can I say? The reviews said it was predictable, but shee-it, after the Brokeback meatgrinder I was ready for light and a predictable happy ending. It is not a great film by any means, but the matter-of-fact treatment of two women in the romantic leads and the portrayal of lesbians in a decidedly non-stereotypical way that focused on the emotions and individuals involved was so novel as to be near-jaw dropping for me. Nobody fooled around and decided she was straight after all, nobody died, nobody was disowned by their parents. I might buy it just for that. It doesn't hurt that they were easy on the eyes. I mean, Piper Perabo is cute enough, but Lena Headey, ohhhhh my. My oh my.

Thank god I decided to watch them in that order. The second one prompted a few memories of a different nature, to be sure, but the sheer airiness and certainty of the ending soothed the catharsis of the first movie. The Brokeback music is stuck in my head; I'm picking it out on the guitar tonight bit by bit. Powerful experience.

Personal Independence Day

The coming-out process was drawn out over several months and long stretches of interstate. I don't recall exactly when it started in earnest, the precise date in January 2000 when I told the man I was married to that it was over because I was gay... His reaction, understandably, incorporated a very large dose of "You couldn't have figured this out 15 years ago?" Sorry, man. Still. That big one was followed by tentative conversations with friends, inward cringes as I awaited bad reactions that never came, and, fairly quickly, dread was replaced with bemusement as friend after friend said words to the effect of, yeah, I knew that already, so what's your news?

Emboldened, I approached my mom. She was fine with it, not very surprised, pleased I'd figured it out, hopeful it would give me some peace.

Batting a thousand, I figured Dad would be a piece of cake. We'd become quite close during my college years and after, happily transitioning from father-child to a more mature partners-in-crime sort of relationship spiked with random moments of him harrumphingly reasserting his position of fatherly authority. I figured coming out to him would be not much different from him, years before, mustering the courage to tell me that his second marriage had failed. I had clinked my bottle of Moosehead against his and said, "'Here's to ya." (note: that's how he proudly remembers it, so I let the fuzzy reinterpretation of history stand; it makes a better story anyway) I expected a blink or two, a toast to my happiness, and then moving on to whatever the next thing was we wanted to talk about. We were sitting in front of his fireplace. He had just finished telling me that I had been the perfect child for him. I seized the carp and asked if he'd still think that if I came home with a woman next time instead of with a man.

Mmmmmm, major miscalculation there.

Dad wasn't happy. Are you sure? Why are you sure? Are you sure it's not just [the girl]? Don't you think if you found the right man, say someone like me or your uncle, you'd go back to men?

And, of course, the biggest question: How will you decide who mows the lawn?

It was bad.

That was February 2000. I moved on at something of a distance from him, beginning the inexorable separation that continues to this day. Spring came and went; I planted flowers and tomatoes in the yard, played with my son, hung with friends, dallied very long-distance with a woman, endured the occasional phoned-in admonition from Dad that my body was sacred and moving from relationship to relationship was unhealthy. I'm still not sure where that came from, since I hadn't actually had sex with anyone, let alone an actual girlfriend, since my divorce. Maybe it was the Straight Man's Imagination run wild about an unattached lesbian in a city full of women; somehow I don't think my single brothers got the same kinds of calls. Meanwhile, the boy frolicked around on the cusp of eight, getting used to his parents living in houses a few doors down the street from each other.

July 4, 2000, I took him down to Barrio Libre so we could get an up-close view of the fireworks shot from A Mountain (A as in Arizona, for the non-natives). The James Dale Boy Scout thing had just hit the Supreme Court, and the local council had just sent out a particularly nasty mailer to all the Scout families decrying the Homosexual Attack On Scouting... we talked about that a little, and I told him the Scouts didn't think gay people could be leaders or good role models. I asked what he thought about it, and he said he didn't think it was fair just because a guy loved another guy. I took a deep breath and asked what he'd think if he found out I was one of those gay people. He looked at me and asked, "Are you?" Sigh. Yes, I said, I am. He thought about it for a splittest of seconds and then said, "But you're still a good person, right?" Yeah, I said, I try to be. "That's all that matters," he said.

Then he sat back on my knee and we went back to watching the stars explode overhead.

Today we're watching the World Cup game with his dad before the boy heads off to hang with his friends. He'll watch the fireworks with them tonight, a confident kid on the cusp of 14 who still tells me "I love you" every night when I tuck him in.

Maybe I'll climb up on the roof tonight to watch a few stars explode, remembering the night six years ago when I had the one coming out that mattered.

Random

Random vignettes from the weekend or almost-weekend.

Thursday night at Sonic (cranberry limeade! highly! recommended!). A little girl maybe 8 or 9 years old is zipping around the patio area with a ball, kinda bouncing it, kicking it, back and forth. "KANSAS!" Apparently her mother, in a minivan. "GET OVER HERE NOW!" "I MEAN IT! I GUESS YOU DON'T WANT ANY DESSERT TONIGHT!"... "KANSAS!" This goes on for a good five minutes solid, the girl completely tuning it out. Round about the fourth time the mom threatens withholding dessert, the girl--apparently having counted to the magic number of empty threats in her head and finding herself hard against the threshold--returns to the minivan. The ensuing screaming match is bloodcurdling enough for me to lean over and squint through the tinted windows to make sure no one's hair is being ripped out by the roots. They eventually leave. I don't notice if dessert is actually delivered before they do.

Saturday morning. A friend comes over for breakfast and World Cup, cooks eggs while I singe the bacon, talks about her ex and potential new guy. It makes me think of the days when I used to stop by a different friend's house for breakfast every morning. Sometimes we'd say screw the eggs and have ice cream instead. That seems like a lifetime ago. The GF doesn't like the former breakfast-mate very much and anyway she married some Baptist guy and moved up to Nuevo Phoenix so it doesn't much matter. Well, actually, she lives somewhere in the vicinity of Oro Valley, but it's all the same to me once you get north of River Road.

Saturday evening, Fourth Avenue. I'm there for a leisurely stroll. Tucson seems to be much more of a Friday night than a Saturday night kind of place. It's fairly deserted at 8:00. I walk from Antigone up to Epic and back, think about stopping in both places but ultimately keep walking. I wanted to walk to clear my head but keep tripping over the voice that asks where the hell everybody is.

Sunday afternoon. The boy was home long enough on Saturday to grab his things and truck over to a friend's house to spend the night. I pick him up and we hit Xoom Juice (Velvet Amazon! Highly! Recommended!) before going home. We play a game and then it's back in the truck for the drive up to his dad's house in, coincidentally, a different part of Nuevo Phoenix. I guess I'm okay with it.

Sunday night, my back yard. The girl dog finds her first palo verde beetle of the season. She is delirious with joy. I retreat to the garden to water the tomatoes and gulp my beer and try to not think about the hideously oversized, extra-crunchy exoskeleton being torn open and consumed one lip-smacking bite at a time. For the briefest second I almost understand George Bush. Better she should eat the fucking things in the yard than find them inside the house.

Now the house is quiet. Maktub, Dave Matthews, and Delbert McClinton on the CD changer, softly, the little floor fan providing a steady background drone. Dogs asleep on the floor. Chores done. I'm waiting. For exactly what, I'm not sure.

Quarterfinal Saturday

Oh, England. Rooney's temper, Becks' bad leg, Sven's questionable substituting, and, oh yeah, a freaking AMAZING performance by the Portugal keeper during the shootout have put them out of the running. Portugal are still a bunch of whining diving bastards.

Oh, Brazil. The only thing missing from Ronaldo's performance was the 3-meter board. He pulled off a couple of beautiful dives, including a late one just outside the area that inexplicably resulted in the hapless bystanding French defender getting booked instead. Brazil showed some flashes, but France put on the best display of Jogo Bonito today. Ronaldo is a diving little git. Zidane and Henry, on the other hand, were pure class and grace. So fluid, so creative, such a joy to watch.

Oh, look. Osama's still around. Oh, look, 66 more dead in Baghdad.

Merci, Zizou, for the couple hours' distraction.