If there is anything my mother isn't known for, it's being graceful on her feet. My mother trips and bumbles over the smallest things, sometimes over nothing at all.
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"On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going?
Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past."
— Stanislaw Lem
Dear U.S. Senators,
When you have allowed months of torture and rape to utterly disfigure and destroy someone, the only sensible and humane thing to do is to take that person out somewhere secluded and shoot them in the back of the head.
Since you’ve essentially allowed this healthcare bill to endure the very atrocities I’ve described, it is my sincere hope you will have enough integrity left in you to consign it to the same fate. Executions are seldom easy, but considering the jaw-dropping debauchery to which you’ve relentlessly subjected this bill, such paradoxical mercy is the only way I see for you to even look in the general direction of redemption. Poor old “Healthcare” Bill was once our friend, but now he desperately wails in anguish, pleading for final respite from the blind, relentless assault of Lieberman’s tiny but deceptively powerful political penis.
Our friend wanted to give us a Public Option so that even the poorest Americans could get necessary medical attention. You laughed in his face.
Our friend believed a Single-Payer system was another way we could get healthcare to the less fortunate and was shouted down for that, as well.
Our friend wanted to fix Medicare Part D so that drugs were acquired at a reasonable price and beneficiaries didn’t fall into the infamous, medicine-revoking “Donut Hole”. In response to that one, you simply farted (although, to your credit, you did lift your leg beforehand so the gesture wasn’t lost on anyone).
In short, our friend’s overall goal was to HELP THE AMERICAN POOR. And you had a serious problem with that.
It’s a noble goal – aiding the poor – and one that is right in line with the teachings of every major religion, including the one this country so openly embraces (despite Constitutional insistence it doesn’t). But how did you react to such Christian kindness? You got all coy and then suddenly goal-kicked poor Bill in the nuts by adding a mandate that everyone purchase healthcare from private companies.
So kill it. Kill it until it’s good and dead and literally nothing of it remains. Better to have no healthcare reform at all (for now) than to have a panty-waste bill with ruptured testicles limping through American history as a permanent false testament to how the poor and weak simply don’t deserve access to medical care.
You know what you must do. If it helps, think about it this way: if all of you vote it out, then killing our friend Bill will be more like a firing squad execution than a cold-blooded murder. And isn’t that how you politicos sleep at night – by reframing the untenable things so they can be better blamed on someone else?
Oh, and Mr. President, your recent rhetoric surrounding this bill worries me. You seem to be hedging. I have no doubt you recall making it unequivocally clear when you debated Hilary Clinton last January that you are deadset against an individual mandate, so I'm looking to you to keep your promise to veto this bill if it comes across your desk containing that clause.
Sincerely,
Kirk Starr
Your Employer
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
DG walked up to me and said he needed one of his “silly pretty pixshurs” because he wanted to “hiccup codajoe”.
“Why the sudden decision to hook up Dakota Joe with one of your celebrity pictures?” I asked.
“He sayd I wuz ‘damn’ cute. I am thinkee that is even cuter than Diblet.”
“Yeah, you know, I happen to think you’re the cutest kitteh on the planet.”
“So does codajoe, evindentedly. You gettee teh pixshur for me DG or wut?”
“Sure, but I'm guessing Dakota Joe thinks his own cat is cuter, Deej. And he just goes by DJ now. I don’t even think his name is really Joe.”
“Less talkee, more celery pity pixshur! And also a box to mail it in!”
“I’ll get you an envelope."
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Taking the paper trash out to the recycling bin, a familiar something caught my eye. I didn't need to examine it further; I knew exactly what it was. I went back inside and found DG in the kitchen lounging in a flat of drinking water.
“Say, you ever mail that photo to DJ?”
The Deej blinked. “M-hm.”
“Really? How? You don’t have any stamps. You can’t reach the mailbox.”
“I fond stamps in yur bedroom – dog ones and spacee ones..." He licked his left foreleg for a few moments, then continued, "...then I dressed it and put it with teh rest of teh mails.”
It all came together. “Ha! You put it in the paper recycling, DG! I almost threw it out...”
“Well mail it alreddy wuld you? It wuz sposed to be there a week ago!!!”
*sigh* There’s just no pleasing a cat.
Very sorry for the delay, DJ. It’s on its way now...
As much as I love the instant gratification and privacy provided by my digital camera, the one thing that continues to irritate me about digital photography technology is the insane amount of time that elapses between when the shutter button is depressed and when the shutter finally decides to work its soul-stealing magic.
I’m sure you’ve all been there. You see something you desperately need to preserve in photograph form, so you whip out your digital camera, quickly frame the shot, and depress the button...
...but by the time your camera finally does its little preparation dance and captures the image, the moment you so badly wished to immortalize has passed and all you’re left with is another useless photo of a dirty restroom stall.
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it's raining out, and i'm watching "benji the hunted".
WHY am i doing this to myself...on a saturday afternoon?!
While watching Zach give the cats a good workout by means of a high-power laser pointer, a thought occurred to me:
When used in a particular way, a laser pointer is essentially a virtual tether with which one can literally slam a cat against a wall.
You can also fling a cat down the stairs or even into a hapless victim’s lap as he sits distracted by his game of Super Smash Bros. Fact is, a cat will pretty much go anywhere a glowing red dot goes. They'll even do it in teams!
Whenever all four of us have to be away from the house at the same time, we make sure all the kittehs are closed off downstairs mainly because Dioji is a moody terrier and cannot be trusted. This past Thanksgiving Day was one of those times and Zach was assigned pet segregation detail. He proceeded to do this, believe it or not, by leading them all down in one big group with his laser pointer.
I was hell of impressed.
Alright, I know the title of the post made it sound like some major scientific breakthrough had been discovered. And sure, adding “major” might be too much, but Zachary’s discovery really is quite a breakthrough!
Have you ever tried to herd cats?
