O_o

Aaaaaaaand the other dog had to be put down yesterday. Happy fucking birthday, yo.

This summer has been the absolute singularity and event horizon of suck. Stress, strife, sadness piled on sadness. Fall's coming. Let's fucking go.

Dog

We forget from time to time, but this story only ever ends one way. I don't know if I will want to pick it up again later.

Grandma

Crazy. Everything has been crazy since Friday night. My beloved grandma had a stroke, and finally died early Sunday morning. I have been in a daze since then, trying to make travel arrangements back to Illinois (at the end of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, LOLOLOLOLOL) and trying to sort through my feelings while texting with my brother nonstop. The consensus is that we want a time machine set for our childhood, equipped with a giant PAUSE button.

Grandma was a prodigiously talented musician and a gifted teacher who guided generations of students through Every Good Boy Does Fine and everything that flows therefrom. In 1988, the town where she and my equally talented grandpa lived and taught hosted a salute to them, inviting 40 years' worth of students back to sing, dance, and celebrate their touch on their lives.

Want a story? All you had to do was say Grandma, tell me a story and she'd say all right, give me a minute, and after 20 seconds or so of gazing intently at the far wall, would launch into a richly detailed and complex yarn--all from scratch!--populated by some of your favorite children's literature characters plus new ones of her own invention. Twenty minutes later, after hanging on the edge of your seat to find out what would happen, you marveled at the story. And she went back to whatever she was doing without skipping a beat.

Her house is gone now, sold to a younger guy in the small town she stayed in until the end. My childhood is now consigned to the realm of memory, my heart forever living in the yellow house on North Avenue, at the end of the long gravel driveway, where the screen door slapped shut and you walked across the porch and through the Dutch door into the kitchen. If it was winter, the heat blasted you in the face with a wave of coffee and whatever had most recently roasted in the oven, a pie or a cake on the counter, Grandma up to elbows in flour or soapsuds, always delighted to exclaim your name and put down her work to come hug you. If it was summer, the buzzing green floor fan carried the scent of lemons from the pedestal dish on the table to your nostrils, followed by the scent of the old wood in the walls.

Forever, if I want to be back in Grandma's kitchen, I only need to briefly hold a lemon to my nose, close my eyes, and breathe deep. And I am there. But she is gone.

Well now, she would say briskly. Well now, let's get on with it. Forthwith, Mary Elizabeth Collins (January 9, 1918-November 21, 2010).

1920, age 2, wearing the baptismal gown her brother George (left) had worn before her, subsequently worn by her sons, me, my brothers, and my son.




















1922, age 4, Lawrenceville, Illinois.
















Age 10, roughly, with her mother, Maude, and beloved father, George Sr. George was an Irishman who could do a mean jig.





















Age 12, more or less, on a pony whose name was not recorded for posterity.




















On a college trip to St. Louis (middle) with a friend and her beau and future husband, my grandpa Gus.





















Wartime mom with my oldest uncle. He was born while Grandpa was stationed in Blackpool, England, directing the US Army band.





















Flash forward to 1997. Tromping through mayapples while mushrooming in southern Illinois.

















On her 90th birthday.

















The last picture I took with her, July 2008, on her back patio, Olney, Illinois.

America's Pastime Is Ripping My Heart Out

Goddamn baseball. Goddamn Cubs.

The Cubs ended a bad road trip that saw Ted Lilly and Ryan Theriot traded, the bullpen setting a major-league record by giving up 11 straight hits in a 12-run inning, Carlos Gonzalez becoming the fourth player in history to complete a cycle with a walk-off home run and Silva's heart episode Sunday.

Garblarghphawhargle. [/random unintelligible noises] This season can't end soon enough.

Fucking Hell

More cutting-edge oil cleanup tech from BP.



That'll help. Jesus fucking christ.

And Now for Something Not at All Different

Do you need a break from reading about the Gulf of Mexico and weeping? Well, go read this and continue weeping for what we have become. Or maybe for what humanity has always been, what we were supposed to leave behind when George Washington built that city on the hill, but what we have been unable to escape.

Physicians for Human Rights has released a 27-page report which clearly documents what we already know: The Bush Administration tortured detainees. The more startling conclusion is this: The Bush Administration experimented on those detainees in order to refine, define and justify their torture regimen.

Nothing like setting the bar, jumping over it, then defining that bar for everyone else as some sort of standard. Yet that's exactly what they did.

We're not supposed to overreach in our metaphors, in our stark comparisons, for fear of understating the horrors of the Inquisitors and the Nazis while simultaneously overstating the evils perpetrated by our government, in our name. Because we're not that bad. We can't be that bad and still be us, because Americans don't do those things. Except that they have, and they do, and it's been utterly without hesitation or reflection beyond wondering exactly how much shit they--we--can get away with before the stench becomes so bad that even the most resolutely entrenched-in-denial among us can't look the other way any more.

This is not what my grandfathers fought for in World War II, to borrow a meme that's currently popular among right-wing Arizonans aghast that their forebears sweated and bled to allow Mexican gardeners to prune the oleanders in Scottsdale for three bucks an hour. That aside, this is not why they fought, not why my great-uncle Jim was shot down and killed over Hildesheim, not why my grandfather's friend Virgil took a bullet in the spine at Anzio and came home in a wheelchair. It's also not why my brother left the better part of his spirit in Baghdad and not why his best friend bled out in Kandahar. Unfortunately, his buddy's death and the rest of the deaths and maimings he saw on a daily basis mean torture is simply, to him, justified retribution. The rage and hatred of war left him not giving a rat's ass about torture as long as it happened to the bad guys.

Our leadership is supposed to rise above the blood in the eyes of the guys on the ground. It didn't.

I Stand Corrected

In the last post I waxed concise about being able to write about the human condition due to a fundamental belief that bullshit is not immutable.

I apparently forgot I was living in Arizona.

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.

The project's leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. But the principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.

The "Go on Green" mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley Elementary School, was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation. It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.

"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of [epithet for Blacks] and [epithet for Hispanics]."

Thanks, I guess, to K for the Wonkette tip; the comments there are the only thing keeping my gallows humor over this fucking state alive, which in turn is about the only keeping me sane.

Oh.

My son signed the official papers for his university of choice tonight, fresh out of the shower and smack dab in the middle of Lost, leaving me simultaneously insanely proud and profoundly sad and preemptively lonely.

This is what I raised him to do and who I raised him to be. Independent, inquisitive, confident, eager to go out into the world and give of himself to make it a better place.

Sixteen and a half years ago his father let him go from his hands and he stood there by himself for a moment before taking his first teetering steps toward my waiting arms. Tonight at seventeen and a half he hugged me for a longer moment than usual, playfully punched me in the head, and took his first firm stride toward the rest of forever.

I do not know what I will do without him.

The Saddest Video I Have Ever Seen

Old Yeller and Dumbo--Jesus, seriously, fuck Dumbo--will more reliably make me cry, but this display of an utter lack of humanity, empathy, or compassion saddens me to the very core and makes me feel hollow inside.

As usual with this sort of thing, the comments on Wonkette are the only things keeping me from spiraling into complete heart-and-soul-schmerz. Good job, Teabaggers. Your country thanks you. By which I mean Jesus weeps.

0-32.

The advantage to being a lifelong Cubs fan is an apparently genetic propensity for not getting overly bent out of shape over absurdly long losing streaks. Be that as it may--and despite being rich with metaphors--baseball is not life, and my reaction to Maine voters last night overturning their state's nascent marriage equality law (making such ballot measures voted on by my fellow citizens 0-for-32 now) is about as far from wait 'til next year as you can get. It is more along the lines of if you voted for this latest round of bigotry, fuck you.

That's it. It's not a constructive reaction, nor is it polite, and I am utterly unapologetic. There is so much this morning I find disingenuous about this election, this campaign, this issue every goddamn time it comes up and "the people" slap it down. We patiently point out logical inconsistencies in the usual litany of arguments the anti-equality camp trots out like clockwork, parrying every sacred rite invented by God bleating with the availability of religion-free weddings in a courtroom, every procreation yelp with newlywed senior citizens and young but sterile folks, every marriage is a holy union you faggots can't handle with the high divorce rates among evangelicals, and it doesn't matter. When the organized bigotry industry can draw on the no-limit ATM that is the Mormon-Catholic alliance (second collection, anyone? before we have to sell the church, that is? last one out, shut off the lights, 'k?) and produce TV spot after TV spot hammering the same lies over and over to a population with the collective critical thinking abilities of a turnip on a five-day bender, nothing we do matters. Nothing.

Won't someone think of the children? Seriously? This still works? How does this still work? It works when someone agrees to pimp out his five-year-old to stare into the camera with Puss-n-Boots eyes and say daddy, the teacher told me in kindergarten today I have to marry a man. The children will be taught gay marriage. Oh, the vapors. Kindergarten will turn into Kindergaytown. It will be an all gay all the time curriculum. No reading or math or naptime. Just gay. Gay, gay, gay kindergarten and first grade and third grade. Because that would totally happen.

And it works. Every. Goddamn. Time.

Yeah, I think of the little kids. I think of the fact that all those grownup gay folks who want to get married in Maine were little kids themselves once, and they all turned out gay despite not hearing one peep about gays, married or otherwise, when they were in kindergarten. I think about the gay kids who are still killing themselves at a rate that is horrifyingly higher than their straight peers and wonder if hearing gay=normal in elementary school might have created an environment for them where they wouldn't feel so hopeless. Shit, I wonder if I had learned the first thing about lesbians in school that was more extensive and accurate than the single sentence if you're infatuated with another girl it's just a phase that will pass, I might not have spent my entire middle school and high school career feeling like an outsider without knowing why, never quite fitting in, always just different enough from everyone else to not be counted as anyone's best friend. It might not have taken me 31 years to figure out what my deal was, all the while noticing other women similar to myself and thinking wow, she looks a lot like me, I wonder if she catches a lot of shit too. And the perfectly nice guy I was married to for a while as a result would have been spared a world of hurt.

So I think of the children, and I think of the adults they've grown into, and I wonder how otherwise intelligent people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can stand there with a straight face and say marriage is a question that should be left to the states. Because it is never just "left to the states" when a national organization based in another state pulls in piles of money from even other states and buys airtime and flies their mouthpieces from yet other states into the target state to spread as many lies and as much fear as necessary to change laws to their liking and leave their muddy footprints on the lives of people they have never met and will never see, in a state they will likely never set foot in again once their meddling is complete and their crowing is over.

So please, spare me this morning the too-familiar platitudes about how these votes are just getting closer and closer, as if losing by six percentage points instead of sixty makes it a lower-case loss instead of an upper-case LOSS, as if it makes a bit of difference in the real legislative world or in the lives of couples who apparently are supposed to shrug and smile and say well, honey, we're not quite as second-class citizens as we used to be! Maybe next year!

Fuck next year. Bring on the ban-divorce ballot measures, because I will totally vote for that shit to protect sacred marriage and guarantee every child a mother and father at home. Hey, I got mine, so fuck y'all. That's the American way.

More Coherent Response to Come; For Now...

"Today's ruling by the California Supreme Court that some 18,000 homosexual "marriages" are valid, despite the vote of the people to prohibit such legal recognition, has frustrated and disappointed pro-family citizens who voted for true protection of marriage licenses for a man and a woman.

"While it was good that the majority of the justices ruled only man-woman marriages could be performed after Prop. 8 passed, it's wrong and unconstitutional for the judges to permit counterfeit marriages in clear violation of Prop. 8," said Randy Thomasson, president of SaveCalifornia.com, a statewide pro-family organization that has been fighting for natural marriage in California for more than a decade. "An arm and a leg have been cut off the natural institution of marriage in California."

Today's decision means every homosexual couple that wanted a "same-sex marriage" last year, got one. The decision also means some 18,000 counterfeit marriages will be held out as role models to impressionable children. "By allowing these numerous false marriages to stand, the Supreme Court is holding out to impressionable boys and girls the unnatural role model of homosexual 'marriages'" said Thomasson. "This is not what the people of California voted for. They voted to ensure that the only marriage in California is a marriage between a man and a woman."

Fuck. You.

Sigh.

Holy Shit.

Jonathan Mann was on Maddow a couple nights back, singing about Paul Krugman. Where that was delightful, this is horrifying. This is a song actually "written" by the Bush lawyers who decided to twist both language and law to the point that up is down and black is white and waterboarding is an afternoon at the beach, a song whose lyrics were taken without modification from the memoradum explaining how detainees could be tortured without having to call it that. This is where the pick-your-own-adventure moral constructs of the Bush administration have brought us. If Obama does nothing else in his adminstration, it's his absolute moral duty to bring us back.



(Homer found this first)

Boo Hootie Hoo

Oh no! Carla, dear sweet nice cook-with-love Carla took some very bad advice from her sous chef and came in third in the Top Chef finale. We weep. And now annoying smug Hosea walks away with the title and the 100K, and we can't quite decide if this is better or worse than annoying cocky Stefan winning. Ugh. Ugh, ugh. Carla! Hootie! Please! Just trust your gut and quit letting other people make you second-guess yourself!

A lesson for us all, I suppose, where "us all" of course means "me." I totally get Carla wanting to compete without being devious or nasty, wanting to play nice and get along with everyone. And I totally get her innate lack of self-confidence and tendency to let stronger personalities talk her out of her own good ideas in favor of their own shitty ones. Stand up, woman, and let your own merits be enough, because they are considerable.

She helpfully listed her favorite DC haunts in a chat with the Washington Post on Wednesday, so if I'm ever there you will find me lurking on 14th near Adams, hopefully whispering Hootie? every time a tall African-American chef-like woman walks by.

Goddamn Kids

We have been taking a brief hiatus, hopefully no more than a few days. My son's best friend ran away from home Sunday night and has yet to be definitively located, so my focus needs to be someplace other than political and cultural snark for now.

Hug 'em if you got 'em.

In Which We Haz a Sad

I think I retired from soccer tonight. After having worked reasonably hard in the gym for the past few months, dropped some poundage to make my creaky knees happy, and pumped up the cardio fitness... I embarrassed myself pretty well on the field after all that. Knees were stubbornly sore, feet forgot how to be quick, legs decided they didn't want to be fast, former decent touch on the ball apparently took off for Maui sometime last week without telling me. We play in the bottom division and I can't keep up any more. Not even with the girls.

So I am washed up at 41 after 32 years of playing, with about a ten year break there in there to go to grad school and have the kid and stuff. Highlights were a 3rd-place finish in the Indiana State Cup with my women's team when I was in high school (no high school girls' soccer in South Bend back then), a season and a half on the club team at Northwestern (no varsity soccer in the Big Ten except for Indiana and Michigan back then, and the verbal assurance that I could walk on at Notre Dame didn't come with any scholarship money attached), and a co-ed championship in Tucson in 2000 that saw my teammates vote me Player of the Match in the final game. Permanent souvenirs include missing cartilage in both knees and a patch of scar tissue on my left shin that will never go away.

The days of goofy tan lines are over. I am now relegated to 40 Year Old on an Elliptical Machine Land. Ah well.

The Tarnished Lining

Yeah, there was also some stuff that was not so good, stuff that's keeping me from wholeheartedly joining in my officemates' celebration despite our champagne and chocolate donuts.

Arizona passed Proposition 102 pretty resoundingly, 53.5% to 46.5%. Pima County (Tucson) was the sole county rejecting the measure, and that was by fewer than 4,000 votes. Even counties that went for Obama and rejected 2006's attempted constitutional amendment voted for this one. More than 152,000 people in my county and more than a million in my state decided they get to sit in judgment of me and mine. What a great feeling my partner and I woke up to this morning. Thanks, Arizona. The kicker? Prop 102 was pretty much single-handedly resurrected by Tim Bee (R-Tucson), State Senate President, in hopes of energizing conservative voters enough to support his attempt to win Gaby Giffords' US House seat. Bee got his ass handed to him by the popular Giffords, so I sure hope shitting all over gay folks was enough of a consolation prize for him.

Florida probably figured it filled its rationality quota by going to Obama, and so passed its own no-gay-marriage amendment without even breaking a sweat, 62% to 38%.

The news from California is even more disheartening. As of half an hour ago, Proposition 8 (eliminating the current right of same-sex couples to marry) was winning by slightly more than 4% with 96% of the vote counted. As shitty as I felt this morning, I cannot imagine what it would feel like to wake up to the news that your marriage is going to be summarily nullified by the state, courtesy of several million people who you've never met.

And then we have Arkansas, which voted to bar unmarried couples from adopting or serving as foster parents to children, a measure whose supporters freely admit was designed to target gay couples. Enjoy your stays in state homes and lousy foster care, kids! Even if it feels like you're the ones actually being punished, take solace in the knowledge it's really the gays being punished, and your own rewards will come in heaven. Well, unless you grow up to be gay.

So today I'm deeply relieved that John McCain and Sarah Palin have been kept far, far away from the White House and Supreme Court, and gratified by the gains in the House and Senate, but I can't feel the unbridled joy and completely renewed faith in America some of my friends are experiencing. I'm officially a second-class citizen in the state I pay taxes to. There's a lot to be happy about today. Equal protection under the Constitution is not one of those things.

Well, Yes, but, Uh, *sputter*

Sigh. Election Morning looms fewer than 24 hours away. What a lousy time to remember why I've been keeping my yippee lobe on a tight rein rather than doing the handspings I so long to do every time the man speaks. I have been wanting to zip off in a tornado of enthusiasm. Then he drops a steamer like this and I grit my teeth and force myself to recite all the reasons he's better than McCain, just so I can feel a little better.

When an MTV viewer wanted to know what Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama thought of Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment on the 2008 California general-election ballot that would eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry, MTV News brought the question straight to the man himself.

"I think it's unnecessary," Obama told Sway, in response to a question sent in by Gangstagigz from San Leandro, California. "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that's not what America's about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don't contract them."

Wow. The tea dregs that have been sitting in the bottom of my cup for the past hour are less tepid than that. California Proposition 8 is going to come down the wire, and Arizona and Florida have their own rights-abridging amendments on the ballot, and Obama's statement that such things are... reprehensible? mean-spirited? un-American? Oh, "unnecessary," followed up by two disavowals of marriage equality in quick succession, packs all the wallop of a wet Twinkie. If anything, he just assuaged the consciences of people who will probably vote for him but can't quite overcome the ick factor and want to vote for constitutional discrimination at the same time.

He's not in favor of gay marriage. A hell of a lot of people in this country, even now, 41 years after Loving v. Virginia, are not in favor of the marriage his own parents however briefly entered. His own marriage would have been prohibited under the laws enacted by people who were "not in favor" of interracial unions. But the product and beneficiary of the last generation's fight for marriage equality, who grew up to be a fucking Constitutional scholar, sat there and unhesitatingly piled onto the very same line of thinking that technically kept his parents' marriage and his own marriage illegal in the state of Alabama until just eight years ago, and advocated separate-but-equal status for me.

Almost as maddening as having my entire existence reduced to a sex act is having my desire for equal legal standing for my relationship reduced to the issue of hospital visitation and property inheritance. Yes, those are two very nice things to have. However, that still leaves roughly 1,037 other rights that are federally extended to straight couples missing from my portfolio. Of course politicians who want to weasel out of fully supporting Teh Gay kowtow to ICU visitation. Because as long as they "fight" for our right to bring flowers to each other, they can pat themselves on the back and forget about all the rest.

After Inauguration Day we'll find out who he has actually been pandering to here--the "Christians" who can't stomach the thought of my relationship having the same legal standing as their own, or the gays who have grudgingly accepted hearing their relationships devalued time and again as a political tactic just to get their guy into the White House, because, you know, it works every time.

I would simply like to hear Barack Obama say that my marriage is equivalent to his own, and that all Americans are equally endowed with rights. I do not want to think about how long I will be waiting.

Two Days Later, We Are No Less Befuddled

Comment of the Day

The finest summary of the problem, ever, from commenter Interrobang on PZ Myers' post recounting the repulsive story of an "honor" killing in Iraq:

People don't act this way because they are men.

Half right. They act that way because the culture has told them that because they're men, they're entitled to police what women do with their bodies, and that women aren't really human the way they are, so killing them carries approximately the same moral weight as getting rid of a malfunctioning machine.

This is seriously not an Islam-specific thing. We simply don't hear about the cases that happen every single day where women are tortured, raped, beaten, and killed by men for not conforming to the men's arbitrary standards. In our culture, we don't hide it behind a religious euphemism; we call it "domestic violence," and most people insist that it's a personal problem, rather than the inevitable, cultural result of a society that continually others and dehumanises women, and places men in the role of enforcing women's gender conformity.

When "honour killings" happen in Western society, we shrug our shoulders and call it "child abuse" or wonder what she was doing marrying that abusive loser in the first place, and asking "Why didn't she just leave?" Pointing this up as though it's specifically to do with Islam is misleading and mendacious; Islam simply provides a different sort of cover story to the standard Western narrative(s).

Incidentally, fundamentalist Christians would openly do this -- and claim it was part and parcel of their religion -- if they thought they could get away with it. They've been working hard, actually, to try to change the laws so that they can. (For a really scary time, look up "Christian discipline" and "voluntary slavery.")

I have nothing to add.

National Day of Arrrrgh

The economic chickens haven't quite come home to roost yet, but they're clucking ominously in the distance, so I'm too depressed to crank out an original entry this morning. I see it's the National Day of Prayer, though. Take it away, PZ.

I can scarcely believe my country is officially pandering to such willful stupidity — elevating evangelical kooks to positions of prestige, trumpeting the virtues of sectarian religion, and actually crediting the successes of America to the fact that a subset of deluded, demented fools sit on their asses and beg an invisible man to protect us and help us kill people in foreign countries. What a waste, and what an encouragement of further waste.

On that note, anyone have any opinions about the Toyota Matrix? Anybody want to buy a loved-almost-to-death Toyota pickup with 210,000 miles and five times that many memories on it? The MPG sucks too hard for me to justify keeping it much longer. And since the grief that stirs in my heart is unbearable, I just can't wait to find out what it will feel like when old age catches up with my dog as well.