I’ve had three Jeeps before: a ‘92 Black Cherry Cherokee Sport; a ‘98 Dark Green Cherokee Sport; and an ‘01 Patriot Blue Wrangler Sport (my current vehicle). I love them all, but was especially happy with the Cherokees.

Alas, they stopped making them in ‘01 and, while I’d love to have a third one, the newest ones are now four years old and have upwards of 40,000 miles on them, often with no warranties.

So I’ve begun the process of looking into a lease on a new ‘05 something or other and the most likely suspect is a Liberty Renegade or Sport. Now as much as I love the Cherokee and hated Daimler for ending the marque in ‘01 and replacing it with what I originally thought of as a girly car, I have to admit that I took a test-drive of a Liberty Sport on Saturday and it pretty much changed my mind.

I still far and away prefer the Cherokee, but the Liberty isn’t quite as … silly as I thought. It handles beautifully, has a solid ride, is loads more quiet than the soft-top Wrangler I have now (of course) and comes with enough bells and whistles to change my mind.

I also drove the redesigned ‘05 Grand Cherokee and was expecting to be happy with it. I came away disappointed. There wasn’t much wrong with it; it’s just that it’s entirely the wrong Jeep for me. I felt like a hetero dad on his way to the mall to pick up the wife, 3.4 kids and dog. The GC is just huge. It seemed like major overkill.

The one problem I had with it was the visibility. The windows are so narrow, especially at the back, that I was scared I was going to back into something. Obviously, my point of view is skewed by spending the last four years in the Wrangler, with it’s big ol’ windows and short body. But the GC was just … well, I felt like I was in a box. And looking out the front wasn’t much better; two very thick front pillars obstructed my left and right scanning/peripheral vision in an annoying and potentially scary way.

Disappointed with the GC, I didn’t even get it out on the freeway like I did the Liberty. I’m still a bit squeamish about the Liberty’s … okay, sue me if you think I’m being misogynistic and maybe I am … sort of girlie looks. But the way it drives and handles and everything else pretty much made me change my mind, for the most part. I mean, if I can’t have a brand new ‘05 Cherokee, well, maybe this is almost as good.

So, why not another Wrangler? I love my Wrangler. It handles beautifully and it’s easy to park and maneuver and I like the convertibility of the soft top. I like the shorter body. But.

The ride is rough. It did fine when we came to AA from San Francisco, but it was rough. And there was no cargo room (the poor beagle was squashed in there for eight days). And the cargo thing is my biggest objection. Getting groceries is hell, especially in bad weather.

With my arthritic hands, unzipping that window makes my knuckles bleed in the winter. And you get dirty. And there’s not enough room for groceries, which go skittering all over the place. One of the Liberty’s big pluses for me the other day was discovering a row of multiple grocery bag hooks in the cargo space. Woo-hoo!

The Wrangler is a great second car, something to have fun with. I love it and enjoy driving it, but it’s not practical. If I had the money, I’d just pay off the lease and keep it and go get a Liberty or even an ‘01 Cherokee and be very happy. Alas, I’m not in that position; I’m a poor grad student and future teacher.

The other thing: I got pretty ripped off in San Francisco on the Wrangler. I can actually reduce my embarrasingly high lease payment with an ‘05 Liberty. And in spite of the rumors about its low gas mileage (which won’t be a shock to me; the Wrangler is hitting 17 around town), saving money on the payment is the most important deal. I don’t drive long distances.

The Wrangler only has 20,765 miles on it. The lease officially ends in April, but they’re willing to end it early if I’ll get a new one.

Works for me. I’m doing my research and I’m going to a couple of dealers tomorrow to see what we can work out.

FYI: Visit the UM Medical Center Emergency Room on a holiday weekend Saturday night and you should feel lucky that you’re only there a mere eight hours for a relatively minor complaint.

See, this sulfa drug that my doc prescribed for my reactive arthritis caused a nasty reaction. As in high fever, terrible aching and did I mention the silliness, zaniness, loopiness and nonsense rhyming and singing and forgetting and spacing and saying inappropriate things in public?

The ordeal started Thanksgiving night and for me it was mostly a blur. I remember bits and pieces here and there, but reality and fantasy were seriously mixed up for quite awhile. For Frank, it was hellish. Poor guy.

We arrived at the ER at 20:00, didn’t get into the treatment area until almost 01:00 and we got home at 04:00. They took an x-ray of my chest (clear), lots of bloodwork (all normal), urinalysis (no problems) and gave me an IV (which just caused me to have to quickly stagger to the restroom) and then they misdiagnosed me (‘you’re having a viral syndrome’), shot me full of morphine and told me to keep taking the drug to which I was reacting.

The rash started Sunday afternoon and by Monday morning, I was loopy again. I saw my regular doc and he called it correctly, prescribed prednisone and within a few hours, I was back to normal, playing with the dog, grumbling about ignorant fascists in the newspaper and so on.

I still don’t remember a whole lot; it seemed that sometimes I thought something and then realized that I might just have said it out loud. People probably thought I was some crazy drunken homeless man in my pajamas, slippers and blanket wrapped around me. The whole ER scene was bizarre anyway, although I’ve seen worse.

It was quite the surreal and weird and painful and hallucinatory holiday weekend. The best part by far was the morphine.

And so how was your Turkey Day?

First snowfall of the season Wednesday night when I was at work ….. it was nice walking in the semi-sleet/semi-snow combination from Hatcher to the bus stop, though I admit it was equally nice that the bus showed up a few minutes after I got there.

The snow fell steadily the rest of the evening, but it stopped well short of anything major. Still, there was a nice thin blanket of snow on the ground for the beagle to go exploring in Thanskgiving morning. And it was pleasant to see the first white of the season on the ground. I see where it snowed up to 8 inches in parts of Illinois.

Our snow started melting today, and as far as I can tell, the next chance for anything resembling snow is Tuesday night.

I never write about or identify my family on my website. They absolutely hate that and have raked me over the coals numerous times, pouring out their venom and anxiety if I so much as dare to mention them on AirBeagle.

So, of course, being the contrarian that I am, I have to post an entry about them after yet another nasty phone call with one them last night, a nameless, sexless sibling.

The conversation, which frequently veered off into the absurd, the freakish, the loud, and the just plain weird, was fairly typical of what’s been happening with them the last few years, particularly after they finally got the message that Frank and I were together.

Their desperation and venom and anxiety (and I can’t quite think of any other words for it) is coming through more and more. A huge list of topics is off-limits for discussion, everything from the usual politics, sex and religion, to work events (the family thinks public schools are demonic and should be closed and don’t want to hear about my teaching) to the dog (dogs are to be kept outside and killed when they become inconvenient usually within a couple of months and usually either by a car, a predator or a blow to the head), to … well, just about you-name-it.

After last night’s extreme unpleasantness, when I found myself saying things I had kept a lid on for 20 years, and even in spite of the sibling stating that they didn’t want to ‘cut things off,’ my conclusion is increasingly that things should be cut off.

At issue, of course, is that one tiny part of myself that enrages them so much, along with my political and religious beliefs. They can’t accept any of this and I can’t be anything or think anything else. I can’t be a different person, a person that they wish I were and that they think they could be proud of. To be so would be to be dishonest and deceitful and I can’t do that anymore.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that they demand total honesty from me, but then go completely off the rails when I am honest. They’ve set up a Catch-22 situation which is guaranteed to hurt themselves and others around them and cause pain and I’ve long wondered or thought that they really must enjoy it, they wallow in it so much.

I was supposed to call them tonight for Thanksgiving. I think I’ll be only accepting calls from now on. For over ten years, I’ve shelled out mega-bucks for phone calls, cards, gifts and travelling to Oklahoma. In that same time, my siblings have been to see me exactly twice and my parents have been to see me probably less than a dozen.

At what point do you stop fooling yourself and realize how one-sided things are? At what point do you stop the dysfunctional insanity? I really think I’ve reached my point. I’ll answer the phone and be polite when they call. And because I have some treasured things still in Oklahoma that I need to pick up, and because the parental’s 50th anniversary is coming up in April, I’ll make one final trip, and then I just have to be done. It’s not healthy for any of us.

None of my friends treat me this way. Families are simply nuts. I wish them much health and happiness and good, long lives. And I also wish they would grow up and get a clue about the world around them.

Lots and lots of dreams lately. Mainly induced by Vicodin, perhaps, or the new Sulfasalazine I’ve been on for just over a week now.

The pain still continues. Yesterday was a pretty good day, but today has been awful. I ache like I’ve got the flu, except it’s all in my joints, and some in my back.

I think the doctor’s theory of reactive arthritis is the most plausible I’ve heard yet, and I hope that the drugs will begin to kick in and let me live a somewhat normal life soon. I also hope to get back to grad school in June.

Other than my joints and the state of the Empire, everything else is fine; I’m very happy at home and with Frank and Bayley and really enjoy working most of the places I’m sent to as a guest teacher. Sometimes I go home hurting, but it’s just something to live with right now. I’m usually home by 16:00 at the latest, so I can take a nap and get some rest.

The shorter days and it being November and today’s snowfall make things depressing, but that’s just my usual yearly cycle. I hate November and always have. Bad things, particularly with family, have always happened in November and it’s my lowest ebb point in the anxiety cycle. But fortunately, we’re already at Thanksgiving and November is almost over. December is usually better.

Other than Jack Ruby’s live TV murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, 24-Nov-04 was a pretty boring day in history:

1926 KVI-AM in Seattle WA begins radio transmissions
1947 John Steinbeck’s novel “The Pearl” published
1947 Un-American Activities Committee finds “Hollywood 10” in contempt because of their refusal to reveal whether they were communists
1954 1st US Presidential airplane christened
1963 1st live murder on TV-Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald
1966 400 die of respiratory failure & heart attack in killer NYC smog
1969 Apollo 12 returns to Earth
1971 Dan “DB” Cooper parachutes from a Northwest AL 727 with $200,000
1989 Communist Party resigns in Czechoslovakia

’[Reinhard] Heydrich reported 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed, 267 synagogues burned (with 177 totally destroyed) and 91 Jews murdered during Kristallnacht. Heydrich then requested new decrees forbidding Jews from having any social contact with Germans by excluding them from public transportation, schools, and hospitals, essentially forcing them into ghettos or out of the country. Goebbels said the Jews would be made to clean out the debris from burned-out synagogues which would then be demolished and turned into parking lots.’

I’m watching Shoah again. Haven’t seen it since it aired on PBS in 1986 or so. Just as shattering as I remember.

From « Shoah Film Handouts »:

‘Henrik Gawkowski (Malkinia) — heard the screams coming from the cars behind his locomotive. It was distressing to him since he knew the people behind him were human, like him. He was paid with liquor, and drank every drop he could get: it was the only way to stand the stench when he got to the camp. … Told of foreign Jews who rode in passenger cars to the camp, and one instance when a foreign Jew left the train to buy something at the bar, and as the train pulled out this man ran to catch up to it.

I’ve been pretty lucky thus far in my largely pedestrian life in Ann Arbor, because I have a vigilant attitude about vehicular traffic, honed over the years as a pedestrian in the notoriously high-traffic Bay Area. I’ve learned how to stay out of the way of vehicles here for the most part, although the layout of the city is about as unfriendly to pedestrian traffic as it gets. (Not enough stoplights, way too many crazy-quilt intersections, way too many wide boulevards without crosswalks, not even a semblance of a grid anywhere outside of the center of town.) The city lavishes money and attention on bicyclists, which is generally for the good, but if you’re a pedestrian, you might as well not exist.

For instance, just try to figure out how to get across the intersection at State and Stimson without jaywalking or rolling the dice and making a run for it. There are bus stops on both sides of the street, but neither of them is anywhere near a stoplight. The three-way stoplight that’s at the intersection was absolutely not designed with pedestrian traffic in mind; the timing of the lights doesn’t allow time for a pedestrian to cross, and even if it did, no drivers pay attention to the lame excuse for a crosswalk there anyway. To add to the general free-for-all, there are also railroad tracks crossing the intersection diagonally; trains rarely come through, but the presence of the tracks makes the intersection all the more difficult to negotiate in the dark.

Nevertheless, as cautious as I am, I almost got run over as I was walking home tonight. I was bound south on Industrial, not taking my usual route on the relatively quiet east side of the thoroughfare but for whatever reason taking the west side instead. I was passing the Colonial Lanes bowling alley, and I briefly took my eyes off the boulevard because I was busy trying to make sure nobody was roaring out of the parking lot. A northbound car made a left off the boulevard and flew into the lot without stopping. If I hadn’t seen it and I hadn’t instantly frozen in place, I would have been creamed. I suppose I was stupid to walk along that side of the street after dark (even during daylight it’s iffy), although for the life of me I can’t figure out what drivers are thinking when they seem to deliberately ignore pedestrians, and I have the chilling feeling that if I had actually been hit, the car would have sped off without stopping.

Snow today in Joshua Tree National Park, Twentynine Plams, and Yucca Valley … and up to 12 inches of snow in the San Bernardino Mountains …

But it was sunny and mild here today.

It’s supposed to be snowing here by Wednesday, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

There’s a big game this weekend. Oh, yeah, then there’s that insignificant UC Berkeley/Stanford “Big Game”. (Believe me, I’m not about to stick my foot in my mouth on this one.)

Stanford will likely lose, judging from their abysmal record this year, but then again, pigs could fly. Anyway, SFist links to this hilarious interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, judging from his ignorance of all things NCAA, should be mighty glad that he’s not the governor of Michigan or Ohio this weekend.

Q: Who do you think is going to win the Big Game on Saturday?

A: [Pause] What is the Big Game?

Q: Cal-Stanford.

A: Well, your guess is as good as mine. I was wrong with the Red Sox and my wife won that bet, as a matter of fact she was so excited she jumped up and down and broke her foot. So I’m not going to go into, I’m not that good at predicting the victory.

Q: You are the people’s governor, you should say University of California.

A: That is what I wish but it is not what I can predict will happen. I wish that is the direction it goes.

You mean he’s not just this way on the written page?

I took this class because of Prof. Wallace’s reputation as an author. What a mistake! This guy just likes to hear himself talk, and he won’t shut up. He knows how to play the part of a enigmatic “genius” all right …

[Link courtesy Bookslut.]

I can see that Ashbery might stake a claim to being the most influential poet since 1955, though, given how many of his poetic descendants fall over themselves to be even more willfully inscrutable and opaque than Ashbery.

For instance, there’s Not Even Then, a recent volume by Brian Blanchfield (who teaches at Pratt Institute), which is called a “confident debut” in the NYTBR.

One of the poems (“Ferdinand, The Prize”) uses an epigram from Althusser about interpellation, which is a grad student’s idea of perfection.

At the end of the book are “Some Notes,” including:

“Code Orange under Love, Part I” is informed by the discussion in William Eggleston’s How the World Became a Stage of similitude and contagion as concepts integral to medieval “sympathetic magic.” Apparently unrelated, a placard in the Sonora Desert Museum World of Darkness reads “Agitation produces both hailstones and cave pearls.”

And:

“One First Try and Then Another” is informed by the video work of Martin Schwember, which was used in the Ballett Frankfurt’s production Kammer/Kammer, a work its director, William Forsythe, describes as “oriented around the idea of voice, instrumental and literary, that dilates between an immediate, raw desire to articulate and the European tradition of virtuoso.”

And:

“Receipt” fits on a receipt for admission to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Actually, the notes are more poetic than the poems themselves, which I defy anyone outside of Blanchfield himself to make sense of. A sample from “Infraction”:

The body hurries. And then not pants, after all,

is the trouble in the offing, the percent sign

with the little o’s these legs went to wear.

Why have math wrecked by the bed? Is any

aptness outlasting the stereo’s shuffle mode,

planted hours ago, tracking our hideous goodnight?

The NYTBR intones that the Blanchfield poems “appear at first to depict nothing at all,” which is accurate enough, then observes that “they come into focus and portray a life: a young gay man learns to inhabit New York City, seeking out peers and lovers while sifting through information overload.”

I’m sorry, I don’t see that at all, not even remotely, unless the lines “Crotch high, the problem will not, itself a hundredth/the privation of pain, be pressed and hurry out” somehow imply “young gay man learning to inhabit New York City” in some mysterious way beyond my limited powers of comprehension. (Perhaps the attraction of poems like this is that they obscure concrete detail and leave out the explicit stuff, which seems to be the style these days, following in the delicately mincing footsteps of Reginald Shepherd and Mark Doty.)

But then I’ve never been the typical poetry reader. So the publishers of poetry (in this case, the University of California Press at Berkeley) can keep grinding out their pointless runs for a rapidly diminishing audience, while at the same time lamenting that nobody really seems to want to read anything written more recently than 1955, and the questions about poetry’s relevance will keep bouncing inside an increasingly rarefied echo chamber until somebody somewhere finally realizes how solipsistic the world of modern poetry really is and does something about it, maybe (God forbid) even writing some poems that speak to somebody outside of an advanced graduate seminar on postmodern semiotics.

Harold Bloom calls John Ashbery in the upcoming Poetry Issue of the Sunday New York Times Book Review “our major poet since the death of Wallace Stevens in 1955.” I don’t know where that leaves Allen Ginsberg, for example, but it seems a highly dubious claim, especially given inscrutable, maddening lines like these, from a poem called “Silhouette” in As We Know:

In the white mouths

Of your oppressors, however, much

Was seen to provoke. And the way

Though discontinuous, and intermittent, sometimes

Not heard of for years at a time, did,

Nonetheless, move up, although, to his surprise

It was inside the house,

And always getting narrower.

All of Ashbery’s poems read like this. Way too many commas, way too many subordinate clauses, way too little in the way of meaning. I take nothing away from them but frustration.

I had some time to kill this afternoon, so I did some reading in one of the carrels on the third floor of Hatcher. I turned to look out the window and saw a fascinating display on the radiator below the window. The radiator was one of those old 1960s/1970s models with hundreds of vents, and each of the vents had a sloping slat on which it looked like various students who had used the carrel over the years had scribbled slogans, epithets, and messages.

This wasn’t the usual obscene stuff you see scribbled on bathroom walls, though certainly there was some of that. This was a meticulous collection of pithy and often trenchant comments, most of which were carefully dated, as though adhering to some unspoken tradition. I didn’t copy all of them down, but the ones I did copy were mainly comments about the weather on a given day, along with the occasional complaint about grind courses.

10/7/90 Dreary!

10/22/90 Horny!

10/4/91 Raining

11/17/91 Kinda cold but you can go w/o a jacket & not freeze

3/4/92 55° sunny

4/28/92 Sittin’ at home watchin’ Arsenio Hall

5/5/92 Dismal & muggy

11/2/93 Physics bites!

10/4/95 Cold & rainy

1/30/96 Windy, cold

12/16/96 Snowing

11/11/97 Cloudy & cold

11/17/97 Cold 28°

11/23/97 Frustrated

3/23/00 Perfect

12/17/00 Econ loathes me

2/18/04 Damn this blows!

I went into Ambrosia twice today, once at 11.30 and once at 3.15, and both times it was too packed to find anywhere to sit down inside. I realized that the place has hit its tipping point of popularity, although Ambrosia has always kind of flown under the radar, never winning (or even placing on) any of those ridiculous Best Of polls that college towns are known for. I went in this morning and grabbed my tea to go (this thoroughly obnoxious law student was cursing a blue streak and bragging about a relative being the prosecuting attorney for a county north of here, and that was enough to drive me out), but it was even more packed this afternoon, so I just picked up my tea and sat at one of the outside tables and read some poetry. The weather was cold, but not really chilly by any means; I didn’t have to wear cap or gloves today, and it was actually kind of gloomily nice out there, with the delivery guys wheeling supplies on hand carts past me into the Indian restaurant next door and the cars whipping up and down Maynard as though it were a major thoroughfare and not a side street. Atmosphere: Ann Arbor does not lack in that. It may not be a given person’s kind of atmosphere, but that’s a debate I don’t get into. Other blogs are way better at those debates than I. Anyway, now that Ambrosia’s hit the big time (and their new counter people are getting snootier and sniffier and more Starbucks-ish), I wonder if it’s time to look for a new hangout? I really don’t like the utilitarian Espresso Royale much, I’m sorry to say. It’s almost always packed, and when it’s not, it’s good for a ten-minute sit, but not for lengthy meditation and musing. There are other coffee shops around, I know; I just have to start looking.

Tomorrow is my final registration appointment at the University of Michigan. Hard to believe.

Damn, these 15 months have gone by fast! I am pretty sure what I’m going to take, including the dreaded 502 class that I put off last winter and now have no choice (poetic justice, since the title of the course is Choice and Learning) but to take. I hope my plans work out, and that none of my chosen classes are schedule conflicts, and … the usual stuff. I have been pretty lucky this term. It’s been incredibly busy, but I’ve actually had time to breathe once in a while. I kind of doubt my last term will be that way. Last terms never are.

I was taken to task (well, gently corrected, truth be told) by a couple of natives for the previous dumb-headed post. I humbly apologize (and also to any other Michiganders I may have teed off). Like I said in the comments, I was not trying to be snarky (I was genuinely more curious than anything else), though I can see it having come across that way.

My ditzy Californian naïvete reliably shines through once again. Though I guess I kind of suspected it, I suppose Detroit is not exactly a place you go exploring.

Again, my apologies.

Weather has been creeping toward winter, but (I could be wrong) less steadily than last November. The evenings and nights have been in the low to upper 20s. But the days are still getting up to the high 50s. Today was thoroughly gloomy, overcast and even drizzly at points, but the temps were still in the 50s. I won’t be convinced that winter’s coming until I see the snow start to fall.

This is the opening of Billy Collins’ “The Long Day” in the November issue of Poetry:

In the morning I ate a banana

like a young ape

and worked on a poem called “Nocturne.”

In the afternoon I opened the mail

with a short kitchen knife,

and when dusk began to fall

I took off my clothes,

put on “Sweethearts of the Rodeo”

and soaked in a claw-footed bathtub.

Excuse me for asking, but what makes this a poem? Not much, I imagine, other than the placeholder idea that “Billy Collins is a Poet.” (Therefore, anything he writes must be a poem.) Of course, the acclaim doesn’t hurt, either.

And there is hand-wringing over the fact that the only way a journal like Poetry can stay afloat is with a posthumous deus ex machina gift from a generous donor? Seriously: Why should anyone care about poetry or read it if all it is anymore is self-indulgent crap?

« Our Life in Michigan – Chick Inn and Cold November Playground »

There are some heartbreaking photos here of the October 30 flash flood that destroyed the ground floor of the Hamilton Library at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, wiping out the library’s map collection (numbering over 230,000 rare maps) and its government documents collection. The library’s acquisitions office and the university’s library science program facility were completely obliterated. [Photos link courtesy Library Juice.]

David Foster Wallace wrote a long-winded review of a new Jorge Luis Borges biography in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. And it was filled with – what else? – copious, runny, unnecessary, pretentious footnotes! When was the last time the NYTBR published a book review with friggin’ footnotes in it?

Sometimes I wonder who’s living in more of a state of denial, the right or the left.

Just two examples from today’s Michigan Daily:

One community activist is quoted thusly: “It’s very clear that the real public needs their voice heard. The Democrats do not represent the real people, nor do the Republicans.”

Okay, so who is this “real public” you’re talking about? Are they the “real public” who thought voting last Tuesday was too much of an inconvenience? And if neither major party represents them, why did they not vote? Because neither party represents them? And now they’re feeling disenfranchised? Ever heard of “begging the question”?

A student was quoted in another article as saying, “We as students need to realize that the government always knows more than we do, because we hear things from indirect sources and the media misconstrues things. We need to put faith in our government and intelligence agencies to make informed and proper decisions.”

So, the government is now equivalent to God? Sounds like somebody has some hard learning to do.

So the backlash mounts in intensity: evangelical Christians in Westland (just 20 miles from Ann Arbor, as the crow flies, which says nothing, really, because evangelicals interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle in Concord said the exact same thing, basically, and Concord is 30 miles from downtown San Francisco) interviewed by the Detroit News saying they voted for Bush because he was on God’s side and would prevent all those homos from getting too full of themselves and their disturbed notions of being able to have their relationships validated by the law and being able to visit one another in the hospital; a gay college student’s car spray-painted in Statesboro, GA with slogans like “GOD SAVE YOU”; gay businesses in Denver are shot up with pellet guns; couples from Oregon to Ohio are already fearful of losing their health insurance and any other benefits that they may have had, because, of course, all these amendments were ever about was protecting the sanctity of marriage; overseas in London, a bunch of teenagers are arrested for beating a gay man to death; and in merry Australia, John Howard’s government is going to re-introduce legislation that will ban gay couples from adopting children from overseas.

And meanwhile, we have shows on ABC like “Wife Swap,” in which heterosexual couples exploit matrimony on television for the profit of the networks and for the general exaltation of the sacred institution that is marriage; and rappers have albums at the top of the charts with titles like Thug Matrimony: Married to the Streets.

But we’re the real threat to marriage. Uh-huh.

On that same subject, I think the sudden popularity of old pop standards (as in recent albums by Michael McDonald, Rod Stewart, and even Queen Latifah) is an intriguing cultural happening. Why is it, for instance, that people are ready to accept Rod Stewart as an interpreter of Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hammerstein, but ignore the tried and true interpreters (the Ella Fitzgeralds and the Frank Sinatras)? Norah Jones’s phenomenal success probably has something to do with this trend, but then Norah Jones wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the marketing and promotional muscle of Clive Davis, who just applied his magic touch to Norah in the same way that he applied it to Janis Joplin in the 1960s and to Whitney Houston in the 1980s. I don’t know what to make of it other than it’s a cyclical thing. People get tired of the flavor of the month and they come back to the standards, which are not “tried and true”; they’re timeless and have something to say to all generations.

I recall the out-of-nowhere success of Linda Ronstadt’s What’s New in 1983, which was recorded with the legendary Nelson Riddle and was really more his album than hers. She truly could be considered the pioneer in this musical niche; it’s not as though there were lines of rock and pop singers lining up to belt out George Gershwin tunes before her. Asylum (Ronstadt’s label at that time) did a fantastic PR job with her, because I recall buying that album and loving it at the same time that I’d had mentors try to get me turned on to the classics when I was listening to Human League and Culture Club (as most everybody else who was “busy” was at that time).

I ignored my elders, of course, and hung onto my Prince and Police albums, and considered myself sophisticated because I liked Joe Jackson’s Louis Jordan and Cole Porter imitations. It wouldn’t be until years later that I discovered the classics on my own, which I suppose is probably the way it should be, because there’s no way you’re going to realize how limited and narrow Linda Ronstadt’s interpretations of standards like “I’ve Got a Crush on You” are until you’ve heard Dinah Washington or Sarah Vaughan perform the same numbers. Linda Ronstadt has a beautiful voice for singing rock songs, and maybe canciones, but as far as an interpreter of pop standards, she’s about as credible as Sade would be as a jazz singer (not that Sade, to her everlasting credit, has ever tried to position herself as anything other than who she is).

But at the time, being marketed a second-rate version of the same songs seemed cool and natural to me; I was somehow participating in a trend. Maybe that’s what’s going on with the current wave, too. And as much as I dislike the idea of Rod Stewart butchering “Stardust” (or the idea of Alanis Morissette butchering “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love),” maybe his recordings of those songs will introduce the real thing to new generations. And that can’t be bad, I guess.

Supposed to go down to 22 degrees tonight … I definitely felt walking home tonight the fact that I hadn’t brought gloves or cap with me … it was a quiet, beautiful, starlit night, so still you could almost hear the stillness … winter’s coming.

In news from the h.S.S. today, we see that « the first Taser stun guns will be allowed on airliners »:

‘Stun gun maker Taser International Inc. on Monday said it won U.S. government approval to use its products on some commercial airline flights to protect passengers from potential harm. … Taser, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration approved a “major international airline’s application” to let specially trained personnel use Taser conducted energy weapons on flights to and from the United States. Tom Smith, president of Taser, said in a statement the approval is the first to allow the personnel to use Taser technology on U.S. commercial flights. Taser did not identify the airline or how many orders for its products may have been placed.’

The Orwellian language being employed in news like this is always stunning to me. There’s no reason to use a Taser on board a flight except to zap passengers. How is that protecting ‘passengers from potential harm’? Why, airliners are full of terrorists, of course. If the ‘Let’s Roll!’ people had a Taser on board United 99 11-Sep-01, they might not have impacted into the Pennsylvania dirt.

Or so goes the theory.

The reality, of course, is that there will be major lawsuits, confusion and injuries, and even deaths, from this. Flight attendants won’t hesitate to use the things to zap drunk and disorderlies, people who are upset at being treated like cattle and so on. And what happens if terrorists themselves get hold of them? No word on that one.

I suppose that top secret procedures will exist to ensure that only a 5’5”, 100-pound, blond flight attendant will be the only person who can access a Taser and use it. Naturally, four or five swarthy Ay-rab terra-ists won’t be able to overpower her and grab it.

Right.

This one should be fun to watch.

I dream as much as the dog. And that’s a lot.

I hate November. With a passion.

I had a hypoglycemic attack yesterday after we got through messing around with the dog at Wines Elementary. Could have been brought on by my spinning around like a crazy person on the tire swing. We had to get an icee and a chocolate ice cream cone to get control of it. I thought I wasn’t gonna make it. Could barely walk.

It’s been warm, but it’s supposed to get very cold tonight. Down to 29. Blast it.

I haven’t had an uninterrupted eight-hour sleep in more nights than I care to remember.

I’m sure a whiney butt today …

I rode the bike to work at the high school on Friday. It was tough getting up over the railroad pass into a fierce cold wind, but I did it. I was whooped and late when I got there, but I did it and felt better.

Now that I’m no longer banned from the bike, it’s time to get back in shape. The shape I was in this summer had disappeared during my forced ban, and it’s going to be tough to get it back since we’re moving into deepest, darkest winter.

But I’m going to push it.

The Bobcat went over 100 miles on the odometer during my commute. I had hoped to be closer to 1000, but oh well. It still performs just smashingly. I totally love this bike.

As seen on « Datalounge », this sums up my feelings today:

‘The speeches are over,
The debates are done;
Looks like the fellow from Texas has won.
Let’s let our differences be a thing of the past,
I’ll hug your elephant,
If you’ll kiss my ass.’

Yesterday I overheard two people waiting in line at Espresso Royale talking about the defeat of Proposal 2. One was saying to the other that he didn’t understand why the religious right felt compelled to discriminate against “those people.”

Well, that’s exactly it. As long as even squishy liberals stand around and talk about gays and lesbians and describe us as “those people,” as though we’re some sort of separate alien caste, discrimination will reign supreme.

I think « this piece by Garry Wills » is one of the best discussions of the state of the Empire I’ve read this week:

‘America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values – critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity. They addressed “a candid world,” as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush’s supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11.

‘The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies. Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein’s Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

‘It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs — as one American general put it, in words that [the Emperor] has not repudiated. [The Emperor] promised in 2000 that he would lead a humble country, be a uniter not a divider, that he would make conservatism compassionate. He did not need to make such false promises this time. He was re-elected precisely by being a divider, pitting the reddest aspects of the red states against the blue nearly half of the nation. In this, he is very far from Ronald Reagan, who was amiably and ecumenically pious. He could address more secular audiences, here and abroad, with real respect.

‘In his victory speech yesterday, [the Emperor] indicated that he would “reach out to the whole nation,” including those who voted for John Kerry. But even if he wanted to be more conciliatory now, the constituency to which he owes his victory is not a yielding one. He must give them what they want on things like judicial appointments. His helpers are also his keepers. The moral zealots will, I predict, give some cause for dismay even to nonfundamentalist Republicans. Jihads are scary things. It is not too early to start yearning back toward the Enlightenment.’

A hearty amen to that, Professor Wills.

A note:

I’m probably going to be one of the few people left who think Bush remains an illegitimate occupier of the White House.

My personal viewpoint is that he wouldn’t have even been in Tuesday’s election had he not stolen the 2000 election thanks to the Imperial Supreme Court.

And he has never acted presidential; a president leads humbly, rejects hubris, rejects imperial pretensions.

He is a usurper and acts like an emperor, not a democratic president.

Therefore, on this website, George W. Bush will still never be referred to as ‘the president,’ nor will he be in my speech or other writing.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. And Dumbya looks like an emperor, walks like an emperor and he certainly quacks like an emperor.

The only concession I will make is that I won’t call him the Boy Emperor anymore. He’s now grown up and doesn’t need his regency anymore. I hereby acknowledge that he’s calling the shots; it’s ALL his mess, his death and destruction and extremism.

This ‘blog was created in August 2001 to document the excesses of an Imperial administration and yell, ‘Tripe!’ whenever he served it up. I had hoped to be able to make it softer and less snarky during a restoration of the presidency under Kerry. Unfortunately, that’s not a luxury that those of us who oppose the imperialization of the White House can afford. We ALL must yell ‘Tripe!’ and yell it loudly for the next four years.

And with that: George II is the first American Emperor. Heil Bush!

So, what to say or think now?

Remarkably, I’ve settled into a mood of sang-froid or c’est la vie rather than despair or depression. I’m shaking my head at the folly of it all, but pretty much resigned to it.

I can see where this is all headed. I’ve known for a very long time. And it concerns me, greatly.

As for the Canada thing, well, when the Canadian government announces that gay American couples can come to Canada and apply for refugee status and their cases will be individually heard, that brings it all home to me.

‘Move to Canada’ isn’t mere hyperbole or angst or ridiculous over-reaction for me. The next four years could see anti-gay hatred appended to the U.S. Constitution. And if history teaches us anything, it’s that the tyranny of the majority can be total and deadly. I’d rather be part of the group allowed to leave for safer havens than part of the group on the train to Auschwitz.

Again, as I’ve said many times before, Godwin’s Law be damned, if you can’t see the parallels to 1930s Germany here, then A.) I pity you; B.) you’re an idiot who knows nothing of history; and C.) bite me.

Face it folks, it’s 1935 all over again. In 11 states, and potentially the entire empire as a whole, the Nuremberg Laws have just been passed.

Short history lesson: Among other things, the Nuremberg Laws were propagated to ‘protect traditional marriage’ from undesirable, filthy Jews. The first law was titled, ‘The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor’ (sound familiar?). Jews were prohibited from marrying Aryans and vice-versa in order to keep marriage sacred. The second Nuremberg law stripped Jews of their citizenship and was based on America’s Jim Crow segregation laws, promulgated after the Great Compromise of 1877 and which were upheld by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.

History is repeating itself. First we had a quasi-legal accession to power; then we had our Reichstag Fire (11-Sep); then we had our Enabling Act (the USA PATRIOT Act) and now we have our Nuremberg Laws (Protecting Traditional Marriage amendments). The next step is the second law: stripping us homos of citizenship.

Our fight from here on will be to keep us from sliding further towards 1939. I see us as being 1935 between the two Nuremberg Laws.

Hysterical hyperbole? The only answer I have to that is … ask the Six Million. Read Victor Klemperer’s diaries. And when you know more about history, get back to me.

I have to say that it’s nice to be in Ann Arbor right now. An overwhelming majority here rejected the Gay Hate Amendment and voted against the Emperor. There’s a great deal of depression and sadness here this week.

And it helps to be around high school kids today. They give hope that the next generation is more tolerant of diversity and differences, less tolerant of fascism.

Kids in my second hour western civilization class this morning were talking about who’s gay and who’s bi and why it didn’t matter. Election results were still the topic of conversation. They are in the majority here.

And they take no crap from anyone. Two boys, who spoke as if they were ‘part of the tribe,’ obviously took no guff from anyone. Another boy, big and football-player looking, looked at them during their conversation and one of the boy — smaller, thin, blond and with braces — let him have it.

That’s a huge, wholesale change in the 22 years since I graduated from high school. We gay members of the class of ‘82 NEVER exposed ourselves in conversation like that, much less challenged the straight jocks to mind their own business and shut up. There would have been blood in the hallways.

So in some ways and places, progress has happened and probably won’t retreat, thank god.

There’s some concern about the draft. One 15-year-old in my third hour class said he wasn’t worried about the draft; he plans to join up voluntarily. He also admits to being a Bush supporter. In three years, he’ll be out of the protective cocoon of Ann Arbor adn his family and doing raids on suspected ‘insurgent’ hideouts in Teheran, Damascus or Baghdad.

But that’s just my opinion, and fear talking.

I guess my bottom line is this: American voters deserve what they are going to get in the next four years. The 20th century’s progress will be rolled back. Gone will be social security, corporate regulation, environmental protection, safe-legal-rare abortions and us homos will be put in our place. There will be great death, disease and war in the mideast. A draft of some form is inevitable as thousands of our troops will die. And a major terrorist attack once again on Imperial soil is now inevitable and unavoidable.

And in 2008, I can simply sit back and say, ‘Told ya so. You Bush voters got what you deserved. You CHOSE this path. You must now reap what you have sown.’

Ironically, when the next attack happens, it will be the Kerry voters in a big city which get hit and suffer. And the Bush voters in the countryside will all scream and want to get all patriotic and send blood and groceries and money to the devastated city. I think that city needs to throw their donations back in their fascist faces; Bush voters brought on the attack, they should have to travel to the target area and clean up the mess.

Not that I’ll be gloating or happy about all this. It will be incredibly sad. I hope my family and friends get through it unscathed. But with all seven of my nephews and nieces being of draftable age during the next four years, I have my doubts. And there’s still the imminent special skills draft, which can take people up to age 44 which could even snare me.

To be honest, if the special skills draft happens and I’m targeted, I’m throwing the gay-homo thing right in their fascist faces. Among other things. I will serve my community in the education realm; I won’t serve the nation which holds me in contempt and has abandoned me by supporting its wars and its imperial administration.

And that’s my childish stamp of the foot for today.

Ambrosia was full of students yesterday morning. One was on his cellphone bemoaning the onslaught of “crazy lunatics,” presumably referring to Tuesday’s election results. A table of grad students at the back was having a grand old time. One guy had a shaved head and a turtleneck, another was lanky and wore black socks with faded sneakers, and the third was a woman wearing blocky dotcom-denizen glasses and a funky perm. They could have easily been regulars at any cafe in the Mission or the Haight.

They were commiserating about Tuesday, too, of course, and they were uproariously ridiculing the Timothy LaHaye-Jerry Jenkins Left Behind series. The woman didn’t know about the series and asked what it was. She was incredulous that it existed. None of them could identify the authors; all they knew was the series title. The three of them had a good laugh about the rapture and those nutso fundies without knowing the first thing about them or their belief system or why they’re not just an outlandish joke dreamt up by Comedy Central.

It’s one thing to castigate the right for not knowing anything about the people they attack and for operating solely on the basis of stereotype, but the left has got to face up to the fact that they are just as guilty of this offense, if not more so. Not just the left, but the media as well, which consistently underestimated and dismissed the religious right throughout this election cycle (ever since the beginning of last year, with the Janet Jackson garment malfunction episode and the wave of same-sex marriages in San Francisco, both episodes which inflamed the religious right), just as they have in election cycles since 1980.

That is one lesson of this election. For folks who pride themselves on tolerance, diversity of opinion, and open-mindedness, those grad students seemed pretty narrow-gauge when it came to understanding why Tuesday happened and why the beliefs that shaped Tuesday are on the rise, not on the decline, in this country. You underestimate the power and the influence of the right at your peril.

That table of self-satisfied grad students guffawing about Ann Arbor being wiped off the face of the earth in the end times didn’t get that memo. They’d be incredulous, no doubt, to know that the hair salon owner in Springfield, OH or the construction firm owner in Ely, NV who’s read everything LaHaye’s written have more of a finger on the pulse of the nation right now than those grad students do in their solipsistic, moldy academic strongholds with their well-worn copies of Derrida and Foucault.

For being the only counties in the state where the majority voted against Proposal 2 (60% to 40% against in Washtenaw, 53% to 47% against in Ingham).

From the brink of tasting victory to the abyss of defeat …

Shellshocked. The only word to describe the feeling this morning, not only in my own head, but it feels like everywhere I look. ASquared is not a particularly happy village this morning. The skies are overcast and the chill of oncoming winter is in the air. The conversation on the bus was bitterness about Kerry conceding too soon and ignoring the provisional ballots in neighboring Ohio (though frankly the likelihood of those ballots making a statistical difference was nil or close to it). The campus was practically deserted and people on cell phones were expressing incredulity about the closeness of the results. The GovDocs room was a graveyard, except for one lone student who bent ober his laptop in sleep-deprived despair and mumbled about his feelings of misery to a friend who walked by (the friend was ebullient, so he probably voted for Bush). A worker in the pharmacy at Village Apothecary joked that he should have driven to Ohio to cast his ballot there so he could have affected the total.

Then there’s Proposal 2, which I don’t even want to talk about. How can people be so cruel?

After checking the ‘Immigrating to Canada’ guide, I’m off to bed. It’s looking mighty grim.

Good night, y’all.

I’m tired and very discouraged at the moment. But. I’ve kept this ‘blog for over three years as a documentation of the Boy Emperor’s excesses. But I don’t know if I can continue for four more years.

I’ve slacked off lately only because of my hands. I was just simply trying to get to this night. And now … Imperial citizens just extended the agony. I’m not represented in this country any longer. I don’t see myself in the US anymore. I don’t see myself fitting in in almost any way. I don’t see myself in Canada or anywhere else either, but the alienation with the US is pretty extreme.

The next year could be very interesting.

Crashed. And burned. Ohio looks gone, Iowa is teetering. Four years of fascism and extremism. 11 states completely destroyed their gay and straight unmarried couples and their families. The Freeper gloating will be extreme. Rehnquist will be retiring immediately after he administers the oath of office at the re-coronation and the Supreme Court will begin to fall.

And I’m not kidding here or going off half-cocked or employing hyperbole. I’m seriously trying to figure out how to get across the border to Canada.

All this even as imperial troops pound Iraq, car bombs are going off in Baghdad, our troops are dropping like flies and I may be caught up in a special skills draft before I turn 44.

We need a miracle now.

My mood bounces back a bit when David reminds me that Florida has a million absentee ballots and early votes to count …

TV ‘news’ drives me nuts. I discover that we can pick up the CBC in Windsor with the rabbit ears. We bail on ABC and their ultra-annoying coverage. I can only imagine what the others are like; ABC is about the best of the bunch. And that’s so very sad.

Oh, Canada!

Sinking feeling. 94% of the precincts in Florida are in and there is a 300,000+ lead for the emperor. Kerry is running behind in Ohio as well. If he loses Ohio, it’s pretty much all over.

Not a good night. At this point, my cautious optimism has given way to quiet alarm.

The Boy Emperor announces an unprecedented event: he invites the press into the White House’s intimate setting so he can use the power of the office to address people still voting in open states and beg for their vote.

First, it’s outrageous, typical of him. Second, it’s a sign, to me, that Rove et. al. is a bit nervous about either the electoral vote or the popular vote or perhaps both. As Peter Jennings on ABC said, he may be looking for an overwhelming popular vote mandate, an erasure of the 2000 fraud.

And god help us all if he gets a so-called mandate to stay on the throne. You think this four years was rough? Stay around for Part Deaux. Jeebus.

We’re at 102 for the Emperor and 77 for Kerry. A bit nail-biting, but the evening is VERY young …

And now more states are called. Kerry has 77 EVs and Bush 66. So far, so good.

CNN’s coverage is beyond awful. And I’m NOT tuning in to the Fascist News Network for love or money, until it’s time to see their downfallen, crestfallen faces when Kerry gives his victory speech.

Mood remains cautiously optimistic.

So. Here we go. Are we going to dump the Emperor and his fascist extremist agenda? Is sanity returning to the White House?

Officially, Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia and Georgia have been called for Bush; Vermont for Kerry.

But exit polling looks good.

‘Cautiously optimistic.’

Yeah, baby. I just voted an hour ago. It totally rocked.

Our precinct is at Temple Beth Emreth on Packard. I arrived at 16:00 and got a great parking spot up front; I left at 16:15. 15 minutes from start to finish.

There was no one in the ‘M to Z’ line and I filled out my ‘application to vote’ slip and went to pick up my ballot. My voter card was checked, a bar code was applied to the book and the longest part was waiting behind five people for an open voting table.

The precinct worker told me it had been steady all day and none of them had been able to take a break.

I quickly marked my ballot, making sure that not a single mark was placed next to the name of any fascist party member. There was no wait to put my ballot in the optical reading machine.

The machine counter said my ballot was #869.

Honestly, I was a bit surprised. I was prepared for there to be no parking and to stand in line for an hour or two. While it was nice, it did make it appear that tales of long lines and delays weren’t true.

Still, it was a lovely voting experience in all.

On my way out of the polling place, a young lady asked me if I was a Kerry voter. I asked, ‘And who are you who wants to know?’

She said she was with Move-On.org. I said yeah baby. Apparently, they were checking off a list of Kerry voters who had promised to show up at the polls. There were a bunch of people on her list who had already shown up.

Cool.

Rock the vote. If you haven’t voted, get out there and do it. And if you’re in Michigan, VOTE NO on Prop. 2, the Kill-The-Fag-Families Amendment.

If you did vote no on Prop. 2, Frank and I and others like us thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Hopefully, the long, four-year national nightmare will end later tonight.

A victory speech from President-Elect Kerry would almost be enough to send me to my knees thanking Jeebus and God and all the angels. First exit polls seem to be surprisingly good news.

‘Cautiously optimistic.’ That’s the mood around the AirBeagle household this evening.

Peace, y’all.

Election day is here …

It’s amazing to me, more than anything else, just to hear the conversations around me today. The media likes to portray the American populace as thoughtless, partisan, and angry. I saw just the opposite today. There were thoughtful, reasoned, sober discussions on the bus, at the polling site, everywhere I went. People have been thinking, they’ve been pondering, they’ve been deliberating. It’s impressive.

There were jokes, too, of course. But this ritual is probably the last remnant of what it means to be an American that can’t be spun or marketed or discounted. It’s awe-inspiring and amazing.