Do Not Disturb

I've finally settled on what should be engraved on my headstone.

More than anything it's solitude I want.  I've learned in the past few weeks that it is the destination at the end of a causeway -- the road to Galveston -- and music will get me there.  I told someone after the election that now was the time to fall in line with art again.  Advice I've been taking my own damn self.  I own a wonderful record collection.  It's a combination of what I bought in my 20's when not only was I part of an innovative music programming organization at the University of Iowa, but as 20-ish people do letting musicians tell me (and others) who I was.  Then I inherited a friend's classical collection when she retired and then I got older, had a baby and fell into the abyss of dire poverty with seat-of-the-pants moves, and could no longer buy records.  Lastly, my boyfriend-not-yet-husband's hometown room-mate who DJ'd when he wasn't being a neurotic asshole moved out and left his collection behind.  (Which is why I own the music of Joan Jett, Béla Bartók, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Donna Summer.)

In my 30's I couldn't write fiction and listen to music, so I didn't play my records except occasionally, like when I struggled to keep depression at bay.  (I have some vague memory of 2 year old D. exclaiming, "Al Jahbay, Mommy, Al Jahbay!!!"  as she danced to Al Jarreau, who as I write this is sittin' on the dock of the bay.  Now in my 60's always aware that I will not much longer have ears to hear and eyes to see am slowly playing this deliberate and inherited collection before I will it to a friend.  It is the way to peace these days.

It is a paradox that life has gotten simultaneously better and harder.  I've always been a bit of a dreadnik but really, it seems like most personal news are tales of loss, damage, diminution and struggle.  I'm having to call on more skills to cope with it because if I don't I will not have a stomach left by year's end.  Music -- live and recorded -- helps a lot because it takes me back and away and opens me up to commune with a place beyond words and rational thought.  Now playing, Norman Connors' Love From the Sun.

Trigger warning :-}
In January I will be taking 2 classes because I'd been subtly warned that there's a sell-by date to getting my degree and you ain't getting any younger .....  I may be crazy by May.  (Editor's note:  make that crazier) and I doubt I will be posting much although godknows there will be plenty plenty to write about.

I wish us all luck.  And solitude.

Dance with the Revolution What Brung Ya, Part II

From an e-mail reply I sent a friend who, like many others, is passing on much of the ink that's been spilled as she tries to figure out what to do:

It was undeniably grief that I felt by late Tuesday evening, like millions of others.  I have urged friends that I talk to submit to it for the time being, and resist the urge to get into frenzied action.  By yesterday I was able to pick the scab and read blogs (including the excerpt from Rorty’s work) and online news accounts of What Happened, but soon tired.  I don’t know if it’s my age, or my temperament, or the fact that I grew up in an environment where my family and I were a tolerated novelty so have always been an outsider, but for whatever reasons I am not despairing.  Angry, yes.  Disgusted, yes, but not despairing.  In what age and in what nation-state have people not suffered and died unjustly as one regime ends and a new one begins?

I disagree vehemently with Masha Gessen – outrage on the level of what is happening in the streets of our cities cannot and will not be sustained.  White-hot anger is a force that eventually gets spent because it can kill the host.  Unless we are willing to elect radical politicians to the Statehouse and Congress; and unless we as a liberal polity learn to tolerate that our elected leadership will become comfortable, and more conservative, and eventually accede to legislative decisions that stink of betrayal, then we are fooling ourselves.   By the time someone is elected to office they have to be willing to “do the nasty” of politics or they will be ineffective.  And who is willing to be the next Lyndon Baines Johnson, who by all accounts was a son of a bitch’s son of a bitch?

Dance with the Revolution What Brung Ya

This will be (mercifully) brief, because I have lots to do before leaving town on Monday.  A few thoughts:

1.  Trump's election was a revolution.  A set of ever-wobbling cultural and political norms were tossed off the balcony.  The enforced piety and moral probity required of high office-seekers in the USA has been diminished.  It may be forever possible now to have let your freak flag fly and still become President.

2.  Go ahead and grieve, but refrain from engaging in a flurry of activity as if the world will end on January 17, 2017.  Take more time to do the things you love doing, not the things you should do.

3.  Understand that while the person occupying the office (and the attendant departments under their control) can do great harm, the office changes the person.  In ways few of us understand or will imagine.

4.  And lastly, to quote my older brother, "Keep your head down and your pad low."

Ciao, bella.

Painting Ourselves Into A Corner

I am surprised as any that I do other things besides obsess about Donald Trump and the future of a mortally wounded American polity.  But, I do.  I am in school this semester, continuing my brick-by-brick attainment of teaching credentials.  I don't have any doubt that I'll finish; my only concern is that I will obtain my degree posthumously.  There are faster pathways that would make it possible for me to teach math within a couple of years, but I've decided to continue at this pace largely because I love my job and the psychic and practical benefits it provides, and because occasionally I'll take a class that will invite me to do some real scholarship and I don't want to be in any program thats paradigm resembles fast food delivery.  At least those are my current rationalizations.

This semester I'm enrolled in an undergraduate class, School Health, and I spent the first month writhing with impatience because I am "learning" with 19 and 20 year olds.  We have group assignments, y'all, and even with peers that's challenging.  Last week I confessed to the professor that every week I swear it's going to be The Very Last One, I'll Do This On My Own, Thankyouverymuch!  And every week I climb down off my high horse and get to work.  As much as I loath the phrase it is what it is, it's apt in this situation.  I cannot make my classmates any older, wiser, more worldly, or smarter than they are right now.  They don't exist to entertain and interest me.  I've resolved (and pretty much stuck to it) to make as much as I can out of the class and move on.  But I have to admit I miss the days of way-over-my-head math and of Java programming.

A while back I took a great workshop which closed with some questions asked anonymously.  One asked of the facilitator was (and I paraphrase):  Should you as a white woman be teaching students of color history?  My reaction to that is the culmination of my pretty peculiar childhood and education, my parents' values, the nature of intelligence, and my conviction that we do ourselves irreparable psychic harm when we elect to restrict our curiosity.  (I've written about this before in another post -- the phenomena of someone "looking like me" as a requisite for effective teaching and learning.  How much you want to bet I'll write a mega-paper about it in some class before I'm done?)  The question so disturbed me that day I felt I was going to write the instructor immediately.  Didn't, of course.  But I could not let this go unremarked and so last night this is what I told her:

First let me introduce myself.  I was the white-haired African-American woman at the workshop [From Genocide to Generational Continuity: Frames for Understanding and Transforming Education] who you thanked for "getting" what you were explaining as the historical precedents for where we are today in education; we spoke briefly.

Ever since that great workshop I've been intending to write you, and every day more mundane, yet pressing demands have -- or at least I've let them be more pressing -- superseded that.

But, since I won't be able to join you and others at the Salon on the 25th I wanted to get this said.  One of your closing remarks (and 2 1/2 weeks on I can only paraphrase) was about your legitimacy in teaching/facilitating discussions about these matters in the first place.  I wanted to speak directly to that.

Whenever knowledge is balkanized, racialized I think it is a bad thing.  I understand, and have been subject to the white supremacist gaze/POV for my entire 62 years.  I understand, at least superficially, cultural imperialism and I've observed how it plays out in these United States of America, much less in contemporary Africa.  And yet I disagree vehemently with what has become a canonical trope in our discourse, i.e., that certain subjects must be taught by people "who look like me”(the me being disadvantaged students of color).

In logic, we learn that an inverse is the negation of the conditional statement.  So if for a statement such as, "African-American students are best taught by African-American teachers" the inverse is:  Non AA students are best taught by non AA teachers".  By the extension of the logic, the inference is that non AA students should NOT be taught by AA teachers.  And we could extrapolate from there in terms of what are appropriate subject matters for appropriate instructors -- AA history, French literature, the European Enlightenment, the geo-politics of ancient Mali.  Despite the ravages of cultural imperialism on our collective psyches, the solution is not assignment by tribe/caste/race.  At the very least it means that if I were interested in modern Danish history, I would be discouraged from studying it and writing about it as a scholar because I'm not caucasian.  So why would I enforce a norm that prohibits caucasians from studying and writing about African-American history and sociology?

Would I love more students of color to have role models that look like them?  Hell yeah, which is why I'm pursuing a masters in elementary education.  But, do I think that that alone is sufficient to address the miseducation of public school students of color?  Not by a long long shot.  The situation is so dire, and the need for thinking, committed people is so great that I would rather we commit to the work and struggle together (and mature together) through our differences than banish potential allies because of notions of the primacy of racial phenotypes.

I understand that part of your odyssey is grappling with white privilege.  But having you and other whites step away from this work as an act of atonement accomplishes very little.  Very few of those who pose the question as to your right to teach where you teach and as you teach are doing the work themselves. When they are able and ready to step up to replace you, then and only then should you consider standing down.  But until that day comes (and it never will) do your work.

September Song

For your pleasure.  Sarah Vaughan and Clifford Brown:

Two Self-Dealing Inveterate Dissemblers Walk Into A Presidential Election ....

.... and ask to be our President.  A caretaker incrementalist who is an archetypal example of what becomes of a socially liberal idealist when they gain entrée to the Establishment's sausage-making machine vs. a colossally ignorant, boorish, ADHD-afflicted case study in greed and arrested development.  Those are the choices, folks.

Fuck them.
Fuck Gary Johnson.
Fuck Jill Stein.

I'm voting for Clinton.  It solves nothing but buys time to do the work that needs doing.

Work-In-Progress: excerpt from "Baby Mine"

Roselle was really tired and wanted a seat more than anything or she thought she would die or at least not be able to make it through another day.  The girl with the three babies got the last one.  Two who the mother pretend were twins by dressing them the same but anybody who’d had twins or too much sex before her 6 week postpartum checkup knew that those 2 babies were born 10 months apart and they and the toddler who already had streaks of dried snot forming a parentheses around its open and drooling mouth were staring up at Roselle.  She sighed, no seat, no mercy for her knees and the pain got louder as the bus lurched down the boulevard that she almost bit through her tongue.  But, Roselle made it to the Wexlas Avenue stop and thanked God that the bus stopped right in front of the school.  She lurched her way forward into the employees’ entrance and promptly sat down at her station ignoring that she needed to pee.  The children, all blue legs and white arms, gamboled past her with box cutters, Nintendo PlayStations and sodas in their ballast-like backpacks.  She prayed that the morning would be over fast.  It was the only thing that kept her going on the job except for seeing Mr. Washington, who had begun work at PS 304 the same day she had.  Everybody talked about how fine he was; and the more he ignored them, the more the girls said he was funny.  At break, Roselle didn’t join the argument one way or the other.  It would give away whatever feelings she had, and she was not going to give herself away, not even to herself.  Every Monday Mr. Washington was the topic of the guards’ 15 minute break, and when she was asked to take sides about the man, Roselle sucked her teeth and waved away the question.  Besides, because of how she esd nobody expected her to have much of an opinion about a good-looking man.  He was none of her business.

I'll Stand With You

A reminder of what real courage can cost a person and a family.  Know your history. All of it.

Just Checking In

By desire and habit I lead A Very Boring Life. I seldom want to go anywhere, particularly at times like these when it is about 300 degrees Fahrenheit with 1000% humidity and one leg is much larger than the other because it is swollen in all its plantar fasciitis glory. Extreme heat and humidity exacerbate it; as do long periods of sitting, such as on a train to Philly or New York.  So today, here I am with the throbbing log I call my leg and a picture to prove I left the house:

That is a shot of the the Amtrak station in Philly last Sunday morning on my way out of town after having gone to Scribe Video Center's premiere of The Great Migration, a documentary on what I learned is was the first wave (1916 - 1930) of the African-American migration northward.  Some of you may know that when I decided to leave Brooklyn my first choice was Philly, which inexplicably I've always loved.  For the first time since settling in New Haven I wished I had.  There is something about the people there I just like.  Challenged, but not passive or defeated.

Granted, love letters to a city you've only spent a night or two in can be naive, but having followed the outrage du jour here in New Haven I despair of the racial tribalism which so distorts our local politics.  Lately it has been the controversy over Corey Menafee's breaking of a stained-glass window in a Yale dining hall, then no doubt being strong-armed by Yale to resign or be fired, then becoming the darling of left-leaning activists who, again no doubt, pointed out Yale's hypocrisy alluding to years' long under-the-rug-sweeping of a scion's or a prominent WASP's behavior but scarcely admitting to Mr. Menafee's wrongdoing (even if he himself admits it) and then his plight becoming the latest proxy for the rolling race/class, union/administration, town/gown shitshow that always accompanies a power and resource struggle within a closed system.  I've ceased to see these conflicts -- Menafee's job, re-naming Calhoun College, what Master Christakis said  -- as efforts to overturn oppression and class privilege, and come to see them as dominance battles in an institution that needs reform (as all institutions do) and yet, if one remains affiliated with it by remaining a student there bestows -- by intention and design -- incredible advantage in the marketplace.

I grew up in a university town and the lives of people on a 2-year or 4-year clock is very different from those who are permanent residents.  What matters deeply to short-timers (and here I'm mostly talking about students; with those who are seeking tenure there is more to lose) is often obscure to city dwellers, and the long-term consequences of the fight over Yale's soul, whichever side "wins", become the city dwellers' to deal with. For better, and often enough, for worse. 

What Do You Think I've Been Doing?

Watching clips from the RNC convention,
Reading blogs and online zines about El Trump,
Observing conservatives of conscience (and some without) squirm and all I can say is that it's like watching someone trying to thread a rock-salted pretzel through a needle.  Good luck with that, y'all, and
Gardening in the hot hot sun.  (Insert it's-in-her-DNA joke along with a stained-glass window.  I slipped in an inside New Haven reference.  Don't bother to figure it out; my eyes haven't stopped rolling about what passes for political outrage these days in this joint.)

I took a mini-vacation last week, rented an apartment south of Prospect Park, and did speed dating with friends, some of whom I haven't seen for years.  (Shortly after moving here I realized that I like very much to sleep in my own bed, and when I did go to New York for business I persisted in coming home no matter how late it was.  I kept making vague promises to friends about getting together and never keeping them in my rush to get to Grand Central.)  The time I spent there last week was fun, and I'd do it again but perhaps in the fall when it's not so likely I'll be boiled alive.  I don't miss New York, of that I'm certain.  I'm like Goldilocks here -- this is just right.  But Gawd do I miss the street theater.  An example (to which I can't do justice):

I'm standing on the Manhattan-bound platform at the aboveground Parkside station.  Across the way on the Coney Island bound platform is a flock of city kids, summer day campers all wearing the same bright t-shirts, shorts and sneakers.  On my side are 3 young men.  Something about them says tourist, Eastern European variety at that.  (Don't ask me how I know.  If El Trump can recognize Mexican rapists from the Upper East Side, I can spot European tourists five feet to the right of me.)  They are weaving as if, at 11 in the morning in the godforsaken heat, they've been drinking.  The oldest of the 3 is brandishing a camera and wants to take a picture of the middle school blackbirds.  He has the kids' attention, they are happy to pose.  After all he is several train tracks away, waving his camera, not giving them the finger.  So they oblige him, posing as kids do, and he takes the shot.  Then he points one of his younger partners.  "Dis is Justin Timberlake brudder.  Jus-tin Timber-lake brudder!"  Am I the only one on the platform besides Tae Three Stooges who finds this hilariously funny?  The kids don't.  Thankfully our train comes and the kids are spared even more inanity and I get on grateful grateful grateful for the cool air and a seat.  But don't you know 1/3 of this stand-up act sidles over and leans into the young man next to me and asks:  Vat is the name of the building that King Kong climb?  And he is serious, standing there waiting for the answer.  Jeopardy for 100 points!  What is the Empire State Building?  Boy, I really miss all the gratuitous craziness that New York serves on a platter.

And speaking of gratuitous craziness how about the Republican nominee for President of these United States, eh?  I have spent more time than I care to admit scouring the web for stories about all of it.  (It's avoidance I realize, and I know exactly what I'm avoiding -- death and taxes -- but it's been fun.)  I found this comment in response to a post, "Kirchick's Coup Fantasies"  in The American Conservative by Noah Millman,and it comes as close as anything I've read as a rebuke to those who persist in promulgating false equivalencies when comparing Trump and Clinton -- and yes I mean you, intransient Berners -- and those who rationalize that a vainglorious and vulgar id-iot with narrow executive, and no political experience can govern the world's most powerful nation-state is qualified enough:

demz taters says:

July 22, 2016 at 9:48 pm

The idea that Hillary doesn’t adhere to political norms is a fallacy. She is the consummate American political animal – hawkish, cozy with the monied class, requisite fealty to Israel, and well acquainted with the art of the back room deal – just like EVERY OTHER politician who’s occupied the Oval Office for the past 50 years (including the Bush admin, which did most of its work on RNC servers). She is, in other words, the truly conservative choice. You may not like her policies but she is not a destroyer of institutions or a dangerous rabble-rouser. Life under Hillary will continue pretty much as it has, stable, more or less predictable – and a little more generous for the have-nots. Trump, on the other hand, is a dangerous radical who seeks to destabilize American institutions and replace them with … what? He is short on details other than promising to punish whole classes of people who have been deemed insufficiently “American” in the rightwing media universe; to rewrite treaties, agreements and alliances that have contributed to an unprecedented, sustained era of relative global peace; and to make the world stop “laughing at us” which is a truly an unhinged and paranoid point of view. If you can’t recognize which is a greater threat to American stability, I feel for you because to people who understand both history and human nature, there aren’t enough facepalms in the world to adequately respond to those who think Trump is going to save the Republic.

Regrets? I'd had a few.

Of all the times to resume writing this blog (encouraged by far away friends who use it the way others use Facebook) I did not want to resume in the middle of a national crisis, one that is played out in my own 1200 sf home.  But, this blog was born of national crisis -- the controversy over building a mosque in downtown Manhattan -- and as long as I'm alive, and as long as I can feel outrage, this blog will exist.

Where to begin.

In my day job I sometimes read papers published in peer-reviewed journals that go to great lengths to describe the physics of a bullet as it travels through human tissue.  The speed, the projectile's rotation, calculation of the frictional force, trajectory, and the thermodynamics of heat loss as a device made of brass and gunpowder tears, maims and often kill you.  Usually there are pictures, e.g., Figure 1, let's call it Mortal Wound to Torso, and if I look closely enough (which I never do) what seems at a distance to be the mouth of an angry volcano is more likely what a tunnel gored by a bullet does to someone's body.  (Imagine the violence required to blast through the mountains of western Pennsylvania so that Interstate 76 can take you from Philly to Pittsburgh; that's what a bullet can do.)  If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, one's imagination is worth a 1,000 pictures.  I don't have to see it; I live with it.

In a city that has been dying for half a century.  Where persistent unemployment of young men of color is the enduring norm, not an anomaly.  Where I, who has been through the sluice gates of corrosive institutional racism and should know better am daily conditioned to fear and distrust men who could be my own children.  I repeat:  fear and distrust men who could be my own children.  That's where I live.

And I live with someone who, the mornings after Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed, and 5 Dallas police officers were killed, rushed to tell me that Black Lives Matter is responsible for what happened in Dallas.  (Like most libertarians, he thinks he lives on Dispassionate Reason Street when he lives on Id Lane.)  All of it, all of it -- outside and inside my home -- reminds me of the bitter and very American joke:

Q:  What's scarier than a white man with a gun?
A:  A black man with a gun.

I am in a rage which makes it difficult to write.  As I write it congeals into a pounding headache.  But, the paradox is that if I don't write I will never ever get to the other side.  I used to make fun of crazy people who would offer me their tiny-margined, single-spaced, double-sided screeds, their manifesto detailing the malevolence of the universe and all its actors.  I won't any more.

to be continued ...

Remember to Forget

That phrase came to me a few days ago; what it means I'm not sure other than part of the art of living, and living with another specifically is elective forgetting.  Not all enemies and antagonists must last forever.  In other words, a husband is a man you haven't shivved.  Yet.  (It's a joke, calm down, calm down.  If you don't believe me, call him.  He's sitting by the phone waiting to hear from The One who will make America Great Again.)

I feel I owe Someone Something this morning because GodKnows™ this post won't write itself.  And in that way it resembles almost anything else in my life except the certainly of mortal decay.  Anyway, it is spring and the itch I've felt for weeks to throw my crutches away and walk unaided into the light will now be indulged.  I, like much of the natural world, am molting.  Had to drop the latest math class because I was never going to get more than a C- and an aneurysm in the process.  And now don't yet know how to finish what I started.

Cuthbert, in his manly wisdom, being kind says to me, "Well, now you can focus on something you do well."  Translation:  I.  Told.  You.  So.  (Believe when I tell you that remarks like the above are what pass for compassion in our marriage.)  He's got a point -- a wiser woman than I would have pursued the social sciences, or the arts.  And as excited as I am by them, the many subjects that fall under those classifications are not ones I want to teach.  At least not occupationally.  I wants to teach Math (or Maths as our friends across the pond say).  And I'm not entirely convinced that it is impossible for a woman who hasn't always eaten her spinach (and is now paying for it).

And there is the matter of the job.  I work for a world class university and, at least in the stratum I occupy, because of that I have extraordinary employee benefits.  When you've reached the stage of life where you actually study those Social Security statements that come in the mail, benefits such as retirement savings and health insurance matter.  Perhaps too much but they do.  I've had a glimpse of the ardors of old age, the burden it is on your children, and frankly, I wouldn't blame Daughter No. 1 if she puts a pillow over my head and Daughter No. 2 serves as lookout.  (As long as they don't talk while they're doing it.  I hate to miss a good conversation and my hearing's shit anyway.)  The job itself and the goodies it provides will be hard to abandon.  The running joke in my house is that Cuthbert so loves the University's health facilities that he'll be pushing my wheelchair to the office when I'm 99 years old just so we'll still be covered. And right now, that's as good a life plan as any.

For now.

If You Should Take the Word of Others You've Heard

Of all the lies I've been told by men -- and having married at 42 I've been told plenty  -- the worst one by far is:  Don't worry.  The math courses get easier from here on out.  I heard that one a few years ago when I was drowning in my own blood routinely trying to prove something such as the following:

Prove that the function : N"O defined by f(x) = 2x – 1 is a bijection from N to O.

Oh how they lied.  It is Week 2, class 3 of something called Discrete Mathematics and I am already Toast.  Remember in years past when you'd ask me how the maths (as they say on the Continent) was going and I would answer in one word, emphasis on the second syllable:  Brutal?  And then I'd start flailing, swearing and spitting and my arms would catapult away from my body at 90 miles/hour as I tried to explain what They put me through?  Remember how I didn't return phone calls?  Nor emails?  How you didn't see me for weeks, months on end but come by any time of the day or night and the lamp would be burning in my office?  Every math class after Calc II was like that.  Each semester I swore that I couldn't go on; I must go on.  And by sheer 60 year old dumbfuckery I'd make it through the 2-hour final gratified if the product of all that suffering was a C-.

But this stuff?  I just sit there with a permanent WTF? expression trying to ignore a hypertension-induced headache.  I'm so dumbfounded I'm going to have to invent new profanity to describe this semester.

So dahlins, do nothing till you hear from me .... and you nev-eh-vah will.  (Fade to black.)

The Quick Brown Fox ...

It has been a long time, my excuse being Java -- all night and half the day.  This is the sweet interregnum between semesters and I am pretending that I have time on my hands.  That would only be true if I didn't have a job a family people that I cared about far and wide.  For reasons that will remain private (but not uncommon) the one thing you'll always see me sportin' these days is a world-class headache.

What was it they said about war?  Stretches of boredom punctuated by moments sheer terror?  It's not quite that extreme, but like Bessie Smith hating to see the ev'ning sun go down, I hate to hear the trill of my cell or landline.  It's always news.  And mostly bad.

So, folks, happy new year and all that.  I found myself underneath Times Square on New Year's Eve.  In all the years of living in NYC I never went to Times Square to watch Waterford crystal made to look like it was going to smash into a million tiny pieces.  (I broke a wedding present once -- a Waterford crystal goblet [and now there are seven] -- and I still wince at the memory.)  In fact, I made it a point to stay as far from all that as I could, including not watching it on TV.  So, the irony of my being there that night, with far too much luggage to get past the barricades, was a bit much.  More than terrorists I was preoccupied with avoiding germs (and no I'm not phobic, but my winter travel often seems to be followed by bouts of sickness).  Wishful thinking that.  I'd just ridden 4 hours on a packed plane, and was making my way via subways and trains back to New Haven on what are probably the most highly-trafficked hours of the year with about a zillion other people, half of whom were tourists breathing with their mouths wide open and ....

... the next day I sounded like the spawn of a bored Greta Garbo and Kermit the Frog.  It didn't get too bad, that is the head cold I was anointed, but I didn't get out of that particular trip unscathed.  Oh. Well.

Another reason I haven't written much is that so much outrages me these days, and it happens so frequently I just can't catch my breath before my head is twirling again in counterpoint to my eyeballs.  Can't keep up.  This blog was born in 2010 of outrage, a response to the xenophobic, racist bullshit over the possible construction of a mosque, the proposed Cordoba House in lower Manhattan.  (cf:  Got Your MY NAME IS HUSSEIN T-shirt?).  Since then there's been a target-rich environment -- what with my introduction to small city politics and what not.  But if you told me I'd be an eyewitness to the complete infiltration of the Republican Party by the ghosts of  the John Birch Society, I'd tell you to get outta my face.  And.  I'd. Be. Wrong.  Or if you told me that journalistic convention dictates  that a 16 year old black male adolescent who is executed on a Chicago street is a "man", but an 21 year old Yale student (who, it goes without saying is white) who backs a truck over another human being is a boy I'd tell you to get outta my face.  And.  I'd. Be. Wrong.  Or that we should not take pause during this thing that passes for a firearms control debate where many argue that "only bad guys would be allowed to have guns" as if being a Bad Guy is immutable, easily classified and/or identified (eugenics, anyone?).  And that if would be rational to discuss instances of gun violence that flow from stupidity and carelessness, opportunity, or extreme fear and anger.  And.  I'd. Be. Wrong.

I was about to say "I could go on" but I can't.  To mine the indignation is to trip the wire of my dormant outrage and it takes too much energy and too much aspirin to come down from all of that.  And it is Saturday, and I am still pretending that life is easy and I have nothing more pressing to do than read a very good book and count my calories.   And.  I'd. Be. Wrong.