"i have met the enemy & he is us." - walt kelly

........... strident, ham-fisted, but passionate & pugnacious michael moore called it one wk ahead....... .......... i asked ppl repeatedly for reassurance over past months. they all said, "no way." ppl aren't that stupid or mean, they said. the feeling i had of foreboding, however, was palpable, a bad dream, but real. i knew, i just KNEW. and now it's happened. i've never had much prescience. why'd it have to be now? sh*t & double sh*t.
- many funny memes have appeared in the wake of 11/9; one shows dubya holding up a drink. "congratulations, america," it reads. "and you thought I was an idiot."
- "i survived 8 yrs of ronald reagan," dad philosophized. but reagan was a statesman compared to what now we face.
- the best thing to happen for us was, after two days being heartsick, mournful, & bilious with disgust, we sat down & started howling sad songs & ended up writing a whole lotta music, new stuff, even stuff james said was good enough to add to his new CD. the national bullsh*t turned out to be fertilizer.
- i will miss our handsome, smart, circumspect gentleman of a president & his beautiful family. never has there been a classier commander-in-chief, free of personal scandal, "just a good guy," as james has said, certainly not w/o errors made, but what integrity & resolve barack obama has had. what dignity & friendliness. and what a wonderful smile!
- if i taught high school, day after election i would've worn to school my obama & dr king shirt, a 2008 collectible. however, my job is not to indoctrinate children, tho i guiltily acknowledge some of that's inherent in the uniformity of school structure. my job is to help them gain skills & learn to be kind & to desire to contribute to society... and to insert tiny bits of questioning of authority, cause in my book, that's the decent thing to do. even 6th graders shouldn't be robots!
>>>>>>>>>>>>
we had a mock election in my classroom on election day. they ran a terrific little article about it in our terrific little mountain paper. here are pix of it:

 - i swelled w/pride when i saw the article. we made chicken salad out of chicken sh*t, to quote aunty rita! i'm so grateful i've got that something in me, that family (human) something, that knows what's the right thing to do & actually does it, more & more the older i get.

 - we're vegging today because today is veterans' day & james is the vet, not me, & he wants to veg, so we're doing it. so i woke a little late, made the show poster at top, have done this or that, nothing too worthwhile. our new bed arrived & once he woke up we wrestled the halves out of their pressurized boxes & when the 1st popped open & burst into a full bed, it wasn't nearly as scary as vacuum-sealed biscuit cans. i dread the opening of vacuum-sealed biscuit cans, such a violent moment, tho the result is one of the mannas of earth, so that makes it sort of worthwhile, unless i get a heart attack one of these times while popping open a can...

-another nice thing is, the ancient treadmill we got from mom & dad finally will run for longer than 5 mins. james added grounding mechanisms, so this eve i cautiously jogged for a while, holding the handrails cause i've been so sick (stupid sickening election! stupid weak metabolism! in the old days, i spose i woulda been said to have a "nervous condition").
- as uncle henry would've said, "sometimes peanuts, sometimes shells." time to get off the cyber ride & back onto the terra firma of "reality."
- oh, wait.
- sh*t!