The one bad thing about collecting costumes is that eventually you have too many to choose from come Hallowe’en.
On the bright side, there is waaaaay too much to do this weekend that requires a costume, so I can go with one, two, or all three.
Photos forthcoming.
Live webcast on right now.
These women speak for me.
We’ve decided we’re simultaneously leaving.
We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren’t aware, that includes Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, New York, and all of the Northeastern states. After this election, we’ll be adding Colorado and New Mexico. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, especially to the people of our new country, Nuevo California.
To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states; we get stem cell research, the best beaches, and the best ski resorts. We get the Statue of Liberty; you get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft; you get WorldCom. We get Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cal Tech, MIT and Columbia; you get Ole’ Miss. We get 85 percent of America’s venture capital and entrepreneurs; you get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue; you get to make the red states pay their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than that of the Christian Coalition, we get a bunch of happy families and you get a bunch of under-educated single moms.
Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, so we will require all of our citizens back from Iraq at once.
If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They apparently have kids they’re willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don’t mind if you don’t televise their kid’s caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq and hope that those Weapons of Mass Destruction turn up for you, but we’re not willing to spend any more of our money in Bush’s Quagmire.
With the Blue States, we will control 80 percent of the country’s fresh water, 90 percent of pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation’s fresh fruit, 97 percent of America’s quality wines (you can serve French wines at your state dinners), 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, and all the Ivy League and Seven Sister schools.
We also get New England, the Great Lakes and Yosemite, thank you very much.
In the Red States, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans and their projected health care costs, 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, 100 percent of tornadoes, 94 percent of hurricanes, 99 percent of Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, and Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bob Jones University, and Clemson.
Additionally, in the Red States, 38 percent actually believe Jonah was swallowed by a whale; 62 percent believe life is sacred unless it involves the death penalty or gun ownership; 44 percent claim that evolution is only a theory; 53 percent insist that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11; and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you have higher moral standards than those of us on the left.
By the way, we’re taking all the good pot, too. You get that dirt weed from Mexico and Kansas ditches.
Peace out,
The Blue States
From a bulletin circulating on MySpace.
It’s just days before the general election and I find myself … hopeful.
This is a strange feeling. I’m certainly not used to it, especially where politics is concerned.
I meant it when I said recently that hope is the bane of humanity; to put that more succinctly, if you maintain low expectations, you won’t ever be disappointed.
This hope of mine has made me wonder: Is this how it felt in the early 60s? Could this be our Camelot? If so, what else will repeat itself? Will Obama end up paying the ultimate price for changing the status quo in Washington?
Will we as a country suffer for our hope?
Hope not.
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
Frank O’Hare, 1954
I love Mad Men.
[ADDENDUM 1/8/09: The entire story of Kauri and Keenu’s suicide pact is now in the Westword and is located here.]
[ADDENDUM 11/5/08: I’ve had time to consider the most recent news about Kauri - that is her suicide pact with her ex-husband and his subsequent arrest - and I’ve posted my thoughts in the Comment section.]
[pictures and addendum added 10/23/08]
Her name was Kauri Tiyme and she was amazing.
Full of life, overflowing with ambition, dedicated to her art, and intelligent beyond words.
The first time we met, we talked physics and philosophy in the first 10 minutes. She was erudite, spiritual but skeptical, and had an awful lot of facial tattoos for a science geek.
I called her a nuclear fakir. She laughed at the term, which prompted a discussion about labels, which led down more and more corridors of conversation.
There was rarely a subject she didn’t know anything about, but when she ran across one, she asked questions and studied it. She understood that learning never stopped, that knowledge evolves with the facts available.
I got my most recent tattoos from her in early August: The archaic alchemical symbol for “purify” on my right shoulder blade, in the center of a lotus already there; and the ancient Sumerian script for Innana (Ishtar) in the center of an ouroboros on the other.
The colors she used are so vibrant, they are nearly 3-dimensional. Everyone who sees them tells me so.
She and I talked of symbology and tattoo colors and relationships and profiling, how love could be terrorism and how karma might need a nudge sometimes. We discussed psychedelics and their influence on our own lives, and we shared our politics and religion without the discussion degenerating into “me vs. you,” which is a rare feat indeed.
I told her my stories and she told me hers. My two-hour appointment stretched to over four, but it bothered neither of us. We had so much in common, I joked that we must have been separated at birth, though she was younger than I.
If you learn nothing else about her, know this: She was not a suicide. That was simply not her way. People as busy and contented as she was have no time to consider such nonsense.
More than that, though, was that she had learned the hard way how to get through it all.
We who are experts at surviving know each other on sight. We do not take our own lives; rather we understand that life, with all it’s pain and stress, is worth more every day, every hour, than death will ever be. We are strong to the point of delusion and we don’t give up easily.
So if the police department, who is currently investigating her death, rules that she took her own life, there will be much noise and haranguing from those who knew her.
Including me, and I really didn’t know her as well as I would have liked.
Her name was Kauri Tiyme and she was amazing.
A once-in-a-lifetime, beautifully amazing.
***
ADDENDUM 10/23/08: Contacts for memorials in both Denver and Breckenridge have been posted in the comments section here. Please feel free to post these details as well as memorial messages, as so many have done for Sophie Lancaster before.
Also, my thanks to CoraChaos for allowing me use of the lovely photos she took of Kauri. It’s true a picture is worth 1,000 words, because looking at these leaves me speechless.
Her name was Kauri Tiyme and she was amazing.
I regained mine sometime today at the spa.
I think I might just be addicted to exfoliating showers and body rubs.
Who wouldn’t?
Why is it even intelligent, sophisticated men can weave their own failings and shortcomings in to a fiction that it’s the woman in their life who is acting immature and/or psycho?
Seriously, dude: Sometimes it IS just you.
All I asked for was a bit more understanding than usual.
All I asked for was time.
All I asked for was a weekend off.
All I asked for was simple.
All I asked for was easily given.
Now all I want is an apology.
Probably won’t get that, either.
I watched the final question and answer period of the last Presidential debate of this campaign from an airport bar. “Double-tall gin and tonic please. No fruit - I get enough fruit in my life.”
I like making bartenders smile, even if I don’t feel much like doing it myself.
***
Gin and a bland, deep-fried, all-American appetizer causes quite a buzz. Dad would be so proud … if he ever leaves the hospital, I just might tell him.
Today is my father’s birthday. He is 67 and has stage four lung cancer.
He’s been sick for months, but never went to the doctor. When it finally got so bad he had no choice but to get help, it was only because the cough was keeping him up at night.
That is, he couldn’t sleep.
I’d be angry at him for not getting regular check-ups - he IS a life-long smoker whose own mother AND his wife of 32 years both died of lung cancer - but he is a marvel of denial.
Deny it, and it doesn’t exist.
Deny it and it didn’t happen.
Deny I love the old bastard and it isn’t true.
Like dysfunctional father, like dysfunctional daughter.
***
I wonder if he was awake enough to catch the debate … ? Does the whole process piss him off as much as it does me? How like him am I, really?
Do I even want to know?
***
He looks so old.
He’s tired, he says. So tired. He can barely breathe, since the largest of the tumors is pressing on his windpipe.
He’s his usual, happy-go-lucky self, in that he’s made up his mind he won’t be leaving the hospital.
I know it’s true, but it’s not something I can share with my siblings. Hope is the bane of all human kind and my family, just like everyone else’s, poisons itself on it regularly.
I know radiation will only prolong the inevitable, but this pragmatism only serves to piss off those around me.
That’s what happens when you care.
Wish I really didn’t.