Crocus and Other Things You Can’t Unsee (Fair Warning)

My “To Do” List for the Next Four Days

1. Pay Bills

2. Do taxes

3. Get new car tags

4. Futz around in the garden

5. Go to Lock I

6. Work on Bridgett’s thing

I call it “Impromptu vacation.”

Shoot, I Forgot to Tell Y’all the Best News!

One, I have crocuses blooming in my yard! I have to take pictures. They’re so gorgeous.

Two, the story that I read to y’all the other night? With revisions, it got accepted to this awesome online journal. Woo hoo!

(I’m not sure if this means I’ve revised my feelings on crocuses or not. I still feel like they may just be really expensive, beautiful squirrel food. Of course, if I had some animals that… Oh my god, did I tell you people that we have a mouse in the house? That all three cats at one point last night caught and paraded around and then let go for someone else to catch? Three cats caught it. Three cats let it go. The mouse still lives. IN MY HOUSE. I had to fire the whole lot of them. Ridiculous. But, as you can see, there’s no hope for them actually keeping squirrels away from the crocuses.)

I’m Going to Buy Susan Lynn a Large Gun

We’ll have to get some rules changed down at the state capitol. You may not realize this, but while they’re busy making sure you can carry a gun anywhere you like, they’ve left one large area at the top of the hill on Charlotte off-limits. Which is a shame, because, as I understand it, guns deter nonsense.

And is there anyone who more constantly has more nonsense surrounding her which needs deterring?

Ha, I was going to write a defense of Lynn, just a mild defense, but then I remembered all this stuff and I thought, you know, this really is not my problem. Maybe Lynn and Beavers can take each other out in a giant cloud of tenth-amendment ridiculousness and someone less likely to build a wall around the state can get elected.

Though, in all fairness, folks could use jobs building a giant wall around the state.

So, now I’m torn again, a little bit.

Okay, I will support whichever one of them runs on a platform of building a wall around the whole state.

That will be awesome.

Massive Roundup of Interesting Stuff

1. I am going to this house. Soon. Very soon. I don’t know how soon, soon, but soon.

2. The last two lines of this are so perfect that I about wanted to applaud. You rarely see someone pull that kind of humor off that well. But when they do? It’s beautiful.

3. My town is so cool.

4. This makes me wish I knew where MIR gallery is.

5. If you look closely, you can see my co-worker’s house. Also, I love “courtesy of Chris Wage.” Tickles me so much. Seeing Chris’s name. Not Chris actually. Let’s face it. I’m at the age where being tickled is going to result in me peeing my pants and then throwing up on you. Only a small number of fetishists want that.

6. We’re at the point where the people on our side are not sure whether women have the same right to deny surgery that men do. Scary.

7. I think folks sometimes forget the real-world implications of legislation. This post is pretty important for folks to read. The fact that people are concerned $500 might be too much to charge a person for violating an order of protection is just scary.

8. Mary J. Blige doing Zep?! I just cannot wait.

9. Briley for TNDP chair? Hmm.

10. Oh, come on, Woods! Why don’t you just ask Lynn whether Beavers hates her because she’s beautiful? Or thin? Or because all the boys like her? WTF? You going to go ask Mike Turner if he’s afraid Ty Cobb is cuter than he is?

11. Well, hell, maybe a Kittenwar! for state legislators would be amusing. Still, you don’t ask the contestants.

When the Truth is Blackmail

Good lord. This would be funny if it wasn’t so disturbing. Or maybe the other is true, that it would be disturbing if it wasn’t so funny. There’s an bill mandating that all driver’s license exams be given in English and… well, I’ll let Jeff Woods tell you this part.

When a lobbyist for Volkswagen, which is building a billion-dollar plant in Chattanooga, raised objections, saying it might hurt the state’s economy and make foreign workers feel unwelcome, Shipley and Watson came unhinged.

“That speaks closely to blackmail,” Shipley huffed. “This is a safety bill,” Watson complained.

I have to say, the desire to stick it to foreigners bugs me. But this illustrates what really pisses me off about Tennessee politics. It’s not just the xenophobic assholeness. It’s that they won’t own up to it. Everyone can look straight at what they’re doing and see it for what it is (or, maybe we can’t because we don’t know what’s in their hearts, ha!) and yet, when you speak the truth about what they’re doing, they get all butthurt.

As if it’s rude to openly acknowledge the truth. Like we owe it to these guys to pretend that they’re not doing what they’re doing.

But I love this idea that telling them the truth is almost blackmail. I mean, Shipley, please, I don’t know when the last time you pulled your head out of your ass long enough to look around the state has been, but let me tell you the hard truth–

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Tennessee can’t pay the piper. So, if we want to have music at all, we have to shut up and dance to what they want to play.

If we want Volkswagen and other international companies to come here and bring us the jobs we desperately need, we can’t be flipping them off in public to their faces. I’m a hippie liberal. I hate the military-industrial complex as much as the next person. But people in this state need to eat. They need to work. So, you, as a legislator had better put out the welcome mat.

To pretend like we’re in any position to piss off Volkswagen just shows you have no idea how desperately people in this state need jobs.

When taking a stand might cause Tennesseans jobs, you’ve just got to suck it up and say, “well, for now, fuck taking a stand.”

I don’t know. I really worry that they don’t get how bad it is out here. Or that they do get it, but they’re so bereft of ideas about how to fix it that they’re hoping they can just distract us back into fighting the same old fights.

It’s scary. It really is.