A Rational Animal

, , , All Fucked Up.

Sigh . . . .

It just never fucking ends.  Maybe I’m supposed to drop blogging.  [More likely, I’m supposed to get the hell out of this place.  Either way, someone’s obviously trying to tell me something.]

So this morning, my laptop keyboard goes all clusterfuck.  Doesn’t appear fixable.  Need new laptop. 

Go to bank site to check accounts; discover that my savings has been wiped out in the last hour by a certain government agency that insists I owe them more money from two years ago than I actually do.  [If I were, say, a multibillion-dollar corporation that gave $$ to the GOP, and owed hundreds of billions, they’d let me off with less than a 1% penalty, but nooooo - I’m just a dirty fucking hippie who thinks Dear Leader is a war criminal, so . . . .]

Phone rings a few minutes ago.  It’s my mother, announcing that she’s staying at the nursing home tonight because she thinks my father may not last through the night.  [This leaves me very conflicted for lots of reasons I shouldn’t detail here, at least not at the moment.]

So does this qualify as my three bad things?  For the next year, say?

I was going to do some blogging tonight; not sure I can deal with it after all.  For now, I’m going to go find a wall and bang my head against it for an hour - or ten.  It’ll be just as effective as anything else I could possibly do, obviously. 

I get so fed up with the Dems and their poll-tested and focus-grouped Beltway-insider spinelessness.  While I’m glad to see Harry Reid sticking it to the Rethugs tonight on the Senate floor - and forcing virtually all of the Upper House to earn its collective salary, for a change - if the Dems had had any balls in the first place, there’d be no need for tonight’s display.

On the other hand, it’s hardly worth hiking my blood pressure over the Rethugs:  They sold their collective soul for 30 pieces of fundy silver years ago, and their constant pimping for Bush and his minions simply underscores their essential and toxic combination of fascism and cowardice.

That said, every once in a while, a member of that party occasionally shows both spine and honesty.

I’ve been watching the Senate debate on C-SPAN since it began earlier today.  Most of it has been relatively unremarkable, except for the predictable Rethug pettiness and the equally predictable chickenhawk whoring of Traitor Joe Lieberman.  But now, at 2:50AM EDT, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), has just wrapped up some of the most pointed - and thereby courageous - remarks of the debate thus far.  Unlike her GOP colleagues, like the timid Susan Collins or erstwhile sellout John Warner, Snowe has just stuck it to Bush and the Rethugs, twisted the knife, and openly endorsed the Reed-Levin Amendment.  And she bluntly put the lie to her own party’s favorite canards, including the tired old tropes that Iraq is somehow not currently mired in a civil war, that "more time" is all the surge needs to work, and that somehow Reed-Levin = "precipitous withdrawal." 

[And equally predictably, Mad John McCain has popped up like a demented jack-in-the-box to come unglued once again.  Once of the reasons I’m determined to watch this all night is that I want to witness the moment when his campaign finally implodes into toxic dust as he loses it on the floor of the Senate and either assaults a Dem or causees his own head to explode.]

I wonder how long references to Snowe in the media will continue to sport the "R" tag.  Considering the maladministration’s insistence on complete fealty, my guess is not long.

Oh, and Dems?  More like this from you, mmmkay? 

In a manner of speaking.

I’ve left behind the place that feels like my real home (above image taken there), to return for a few days to the one that other people insist on calling my "home."  It’s a place that’s toxic to my health and sanity.  Unfortunately, I have no choice.

It’s been a rough couple of months.  I spent five or six weeks effectively without any Internet access, owing in part to the technological backwardness of this place.  No, finances weren’t the issue (this time); it was a clusterfuck of tech problems, scheduling, lack of access, and other issues.  But the upshot was no blogging - or virtually anything else, except loss of sanity.

I don’t know; maybe it was for the best.  I’ve also been dealing with issues that would’ve made it hard to write - at least, hard to write anything of any use to anyone.  As longtime readers know, I’ve been battling autoimmune diseases for years now, and they’ve flared - mostly as a result of all the other bullshit in my life.  And as I’ve mentioned before, a lot of my work involves issues of abuse - physical, emotional, sexual - and some of my professional activities over the past few weeks dredged up shit from my own past that left me a bit freaked.  Add to that mix assorted client bullshit, family bullshit, financial bullshit (always with the financial pressures - feh) and I’ve been useless to everyone, especially myself, lately.  And then I return to the blogosphere to find that we’ve lost Jim Capozzola, and I wonder whether there really is any justice in the universe at all.

Of course, I know it’s not that bad.  And, in fact, in the last couple of weeks I’ve begun to feel better psychologically than I have in . . . oh, hell, I don’t know how long.  Yeah, the illness and chronic pain are still there - in fucking spades.  Yeah, the money problems are still there.  Yeah, Jim’s still gone, along with Steve Gilliard, while Chimpy remains to fuck up the world some more.  Yeah, I’m stuck in this hole for 2.5 more days - and I’ll have to return next week.  But - thanks almost entirely to the help and support of one person, and you know who you are - my brain is back.   I’m me again.  And I haven’t felt like that for a long time.

So, apologies to everyone who’s been kind enough - or crazy enough - not only to read this site, but to return periodically while I’ve been on an unintentional hiatus.  I’m afraid to make any promises about consistency for fear of tempting fate, but I do promise to try.  I’m planning on staying up - all night, if I can - to watch the Senate actually do its fucking job for once, and I’ve got a post or two in me yet tonight.

And thank you to one particular person - mostly for being you.  I don’t know whether you realize just what a beautiful thing that is.  I’ll be home - really home - in a few days.