The Revolution Goes On Without Me For the Evening

I skipped out on both things I was planning on doing this evening.  I didn’t go down and help Planned Parenthood piss and moan over the SCOTUS ruling and I didn’t go over to the women from work group.

Instead, I stayed at home and crocheted two feet and I’m going to finish this post and go to bed.

I didn’t go down to the Planned Parenthood thing basically because I just can’t bear it.  I’m pissed that we lost this battle.  Come the fuck on!

How hard is it to say, “This is a very rare procedure used only in the most tragic of circumstances where women end pregnancies they want very much.  As gruesome as this procedure seems, it is very safe for the woman and allows families a body to mourn over.  People who oppose this procedure, though well-meaning, are making the loss of a wanted child even more difficult.”  But we blew it.

Fine.  I can live with that.

It’s harder for me to live with Kennedy’s decision and I am furious and embarrassed for the people of this land who claim to love women who can sit by and just shrug their shoulders while Kennedy recodifies into Supreme Court opinion the idea that women’s minds are too changeable for us to be allowed to make decisions about ourselves.

That’s going to be a fun bit of language for us to have to fight from here on out.

I didn’t go have dinner with the women from work either, just because I’m feeling a little futile today.

I could be wrong.

Most days I feel like we’re so close, that if we can just get everyone to understand and agree that we have the right to decide what happens to our body, we can finish up this battle for equality.

And other days, I hear about a woman who’s my age, with five kids, who can’t afford daycare and so she stays at home while her husband works and he beats her but she won’t leave him because she’s Catholic and she’s scared to death of getting pregnant again, but she can’t control that with any certainty, and I just think there’s so much to be done and the doing of it is overwhelming.

It scares me, but I don’t see any other way but to continue.  Maybe what we’re doing isn’t enough.  Maybe it’s never enough and never going to be enough, but we’ve got to keep doing it anyway.

Just because the alternative is so much worse.

Regular Citizens v. Corporate Citizens

My spies in Memphis tell me that there is no longer news radio on FM during the day.  Okay, I don’t actually have spies (though, wouldn’t it be cool if I did?).  Shannon told me*.

We were talking about this at the progressive thing (the Tennessee Alliance for Progressives All Get Pissed at Mack For Shooting off His Big Mouth meeting or TAPAGPAMFSOHBM, for short), how we own the airwaves, as citizens of the United States, they’re part of our collective** holdings.

And yet, not only don’t we have the ability to access and use the airwaves how we’d like, we can’t count on anyone to provide us with stuff we need–like the news–if it doesn’t fit their profit expectations.  And we can’t count on our public officials to act in our best interests and to protect our public property (see the AT&T debacle).

What options do we have, then?

America, I’m sorry to tell you this, but we must return to Pump Up the Volume.  We must make peace with being a nation of hackers and pirates.  There are worse things.  But, I think, we must stop playing nice with giant corporations that don’t play nice with us.

That is why, I must say, I am deeply tickled to discover that one can can convert one’s iPod into a pirate radio station.

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*Memphibians, you can write here to complain.

**Let us all pause and wait for someone to go check on Exador, who is probably horrified at the idea that he owns anything in common with anyone except his wife.  Is he choking for real or just gasping in outrage?

Car Rides to Creepy Places

I taught the Butcher to drive.  It seemed necessary after going through the process myself of learning to drive from my dad.  For those of you tough guys who think that learning anything from my dad must be a walk in the park, I suggest you borrow a crazed pit bull who is determined to get in the driver’s seat while someone is yelling, “Turn right.  Turn left.  Watch out for that car!  Break!  Break!  Oh my god, you idiot, are you trying to kill us?  We wear seatbelts in this family!” while your mom sits in the back saying, “Now, now, let’s just go ahead and start the car.  It will be better once the car is started.” and see how you fare.

No, if the Butcher was going to learn to be a good driver, he had to learn from anyone other than my dad.  And so, on Sundays, I would come home from work, climb into the passenger’s seat, and off we would go, just driving to be doing something.

I think my biggest disappointment driving around is that it always seems to me, at some point, like some new paradigm is just over the next hill, just around the next corner, and if only you could squint hard enough or look at the right moment, you might see something that would change your whole world.

I just want to go someplace creepy.  I’d rather be spending my afternoon doing that.  Sometimes, I can talk folks into getting in the car with me and going creepy places.  It’s been a long time, though.

Let’s reminisce about spooky stories. Here’s my favorite spooky thing that’s happened to me.

Ha, it’s Day of Disjointedness, I think.  Maybe I need more sleep.

Out of Sorts

One thing I like about the Shill is her ability to distill any pop culture phenomenon down to either its essense or the important lesson we should draw from it.

When we were in college, she would regularly remind me of the bit of wisdom contained in Bull Durham, which I’m going to get wrong, but I’ll try, which goes something like “The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.”

I would be slightly embarrassed for y’all to know how often I reflect on that line and contemplate its truth in order to calm myself down during bad times. No, I don’t fit in here and it does seem like folks ought to be able to see how crazy things are and fix them, but the world was not made for folks like me.

I used to worry that this made me a snob, but, upon rewatching Bull Durham one evening, I came to realize that everyone in that movie is kind of a dork and so it’s really just a matter of knowing what kind of dork you are and figuring out how to get by in the world based on that.

I should be writing.

I’m also a coward.

I think you knew both of those things AND I have to say that neither of those things makes me unique and that pisses me off.

I’m tired, bone tired, of my own nonsense.

I wonder if I could call in, say I’m taking the day off to take a nap and write a book.

I don’t know anything about writing books.

Of course, I didn’t know anything about writing plays, either.

So, there you go.

My soul itches like something’s trying to break through, but I’m late for work, so there you go, as well.