For Later

A lot in this that I want to talk about, but I’m dilly dallying here and I’ve got a home to get to.  But I don’t want to forget.

“Blow Our Minds, Aunt B., Blow Our Minds”

Well, if you insist, nieces and nephews.

1.  Creepy or cool?  I can’t decide.

2.  I have no words.  None.  I want a beer, a bar, and a man that smells like smoke and hard work, and a pickup truck, and this song playing while he convinces me to go for a ride.  You have ten minutes, world, to make that happen.

Everybody’s Talking ‘Bout the Lack of a Lib’rul Agenda in Tennessee

First, Jeff Woods says:

“The sky’s the limit for how crazy they want to be,” says Rep. Henry Fincher, a Democrat from Cookeville, who helpfully offered advice to the Republicans in a Scene interview.

Fincher points out that Democrats lost the legislature—ironically enough for the first time since the Civil War—because white voters thronged to the polls to vote against the black guy running for president, and they happened to vote for all the Republicans on the ballot while they were at it.

Then Pesky Fly says:

Ironically, [Kurita’s] dramatic expulsion was meant to prevent a Republican from becoming Senate speaker. How’d that work out, guys?

And Vibinc says:

This is, perhaps, the single greatest failing of the TNDP in the last election cycle. More than anything else, the TNDP did a crappy job of communicating a plan. I don’t put this responsibility on Communications Director Wade Munday as it was his job to communicate the message, not craft it from the bottom up. I put it on the entire governing apparatus of the TNDP, and the general belief in old school “Trickle Down” politicking.

“Trickle Down” or “Top Down” politicking is just like it sounds; people at the top make decisions, those decisions “trickle down” through the ranks to the people. Just like “Trickle Down Economics”, few at the bottom of the information stream ever get wet. At some point, the information gets soaked up closer to the top and never makes it to the rest of the people.

Elected officials and political parties have used this method for years, and to a certain degree it’s worked. It can work, as long as people never age, have any personal crisis, or organized opposition. The problem with “top down” is that you never build any bench players to step in should the starter have to step out. The people at the top hold all the cards. When that person leaves, he/she leaves a vacuum in their wake, a prime target to be exploited by the opposition, which is exactly what happened.

(The whole post is so brilliant it about brings me to my knees, but that part is especially important to me.)

I think it’s just the day, which has, for reasons completely unassociated with the Democratic party, turned into a little clusterfuck, but I’m feeling a little despondant about the state of the Party and the potential for the Party to pull its head out of its butt.

I have a lot of thoughts.  I keep floundering as I try to pull them together into something meaningful.  But I feel like smart people are giving the Democrats a roadmap for how to turn things around and I feel certain that they aren’t going to listen.

We are going to have to do this without them.

Speaking of True Blood

My internet boyfriend* is talking about it and pointing you to homemade videos incorporating True Blood clips.  Worth it just to revisit Bill’s amazing tub and Eric in it.

Mmmm.  When we have naked man day, can we devote an hour of it to “naked men taking baths?”

*Like a tv boyfriend, not someone I actually know, just someone who’s work I feel great affection for.

Walk Nostalgia

It started yesterday.  My alarm went off at 5:30 like it normally does and Mrs. Wigglebottom got up out of the bed in the other room and came in to see if I was going to get up.  I was not.  I hit “snooze.”  She wandered aimlessly around the house for a few minutes.  I could hear the click of her toenails on the hardwood.

When it went off again at 6, same thing.

Will today, she asks, finally be the day that we get up and walk?

I, too, miss our morning walks and it is so beautiful here at dawn, I feel like we’re missing out.  And yet, we still have four more weeks where we’re supposed to be keeping her crated all the time.

We, of course, did not crate her, because she hasn’t been crated since she was a puppy and I couldn’t see the wisdom in paying that much money to fix the dog’s leg only to turn around and slowly drive her crazy by keeping her confined.

America, she’s so bored and I’m at my wits’ end about what to do about it.  Clearly, she feels okay and any discomfort she feels is outweighed by her desire to get back to moving around and being a dog.

To switch gears, they still haven’t decided if they’re going to operate on my grandma.  Yesterday, it was a definite yes.  Then late last night, her heart doctor got wind of their plans and was basically, “You’re going to risk killing her over a broken bone?  That seems stupid.” and so he’s going to look at the CAT scan himself and give his verdict on whether the severity of the break warrents the risk of putting her through surgery.  It may be that they just immobalize it for a couple of months and then it doesn’t work great ever again.

I just hope that they’re doing a good job of letting my grandma decide.  Yes, she’s old as dirt, but her mind’s good, and, in the end, she’s the only one who can really know what’s right for her.

I was thinking last night about my grandma, who was not a feminist.  I think so often we hear about how feminism ruined it, how everyone was happy and everything was fine until those feminists came along and ruined it.

But my grandma’s life was not fine.  She wanted to be a history teacher and she went down to Illinois State (which, at the time, was the Normal college) to do so and when she got there, they tried to steer her into Home Ec because History was for men.  She tried to argue that there were no men, there being a World War on and all, but it didn’t matter.

So, she gave it a try, hated it, and came home.

Just because she didn’t have words to describe what was happening doesn’t mean that, when I was in college, she didn’t sit at the dining room table one Thanksgiving, crying as she told me about it.  She knew what happened to her was bullshit, but there wasn’t anything she felt like she could do about it.

On another tangent, I’m on this email list and I feel like I made such a complete doofus of myself on it last week, talking about how I was excited to learn that Muddy Waters played in a band in Mississippi that contained a guitar player, a fiddle player, and a mandolin player and how I wanted to hear what that would sound like, blues on a fiddle and a mandolin.  And everyone came back with, basically, “Oh, god you n00b” and I about wanted to die of embarrassment.

But yesterday, over at Boogie Woogie Flu, Ted Barron put up a song with a blues violin!  I could listen to it!  And it is cool.  And so I can return to being a dork in private.