Troubles here and there

 The past week has been...interesting.

In the "big news" is obviously the conviction in criminal court of a former U.S. president.

Why this is "news" is kind of peculiar, because this particular jamoke has always been and is the most obviously incompetent, corrupt, and criminal individual to ever disgrace American presidential politics, and when you consider that includes people like Warren Harding, James Buchanan, and Franklin Pierce that's a pretty high fucking bar.

Convicting this scumbag of several of his many visible crimes was, as it should have been, as hard as hitting water when falling out of a boat.

No, what's "news" - in the sense of "revealing" - has been the reactions of the Republican Party.

In a sane world this would give the Party of (Cash, Guns, Jesus, and Whiteness) Personal Responsibility the perfect option; dump the dick.

You want a loudmouthed nitwit for President?

Margie Greene is right there!

The GQP could use this as a lockdown "It's not you, it's me!" moment and pivot towards some other loudmouthed but less facially corrupt nitwit. Gaetz, Lee, Tuberville, Boebert...I mean, goddamn, the party's chock full of 'em.

They didn't. They won't, because it's obvious that they can't.

Because, apparently, Trump scratches some sort of weird precognitive itch in Republicans. It always seems to me to be a sort of reflex rather than a thought-out decision. Tubby is the Perfect Own-The-Libs Storm, and that seems to be what gets the bulk of these people going.

Mind you, the overall GOP pyramid hasn't changed.

As they did in the pre-Q Era of the Eighties through the early Teens, the plutocrats at the top are using all this wingnut id to get the New Gilded Age they crave. They give a shit about trans women and abortion; (or, if they do, not enough to interfere with their pursuit of) low taxes and deregulation are their goals.

They're using these shiny objects to harvest the morons' votes.

And right now all the morons want is Moar Trump. So they'll get it.

And if they can turn that into Electoral votes in November so will we.

Good and hard.

So there's that.

While at home...

The divorce machinery grinds forward.

We've engaged a mediator, and part of that process means collecting every scrap of information on our financial lives. Mojo is doing the heavy lifting there as she has throughout our marriage.

And what's increasingly apparent is that we're...not rich.

Right now we're getting by.

But I'm pulling in retirement - Army retirement and Social Security - and contract work here and there. She's got her paycheck which is less than that...

Given how hard she works, and all she does for little Astor Elementary?

That's a shame and a hissing to you, Portland Public Schools.

As a unit we're doing okay.

As individuals?

Things get kinda scary.

So scary that the other night Mojo was up until midnight, sitting alone on the darkened deck, her mind so filled with fear and worry that she couldn't sleep.

It tore me. I'm not where she is; she's still my dear, still my best friend. It's murder seeing her like that.

So I made an offer. A very odd one by modern marriage standards.

Let's put a pin in divorce, I said.

Not call it off. I get it, you're done with me. But...let's give it time. Let's live together, friends, "roommates", business partners, for four years. Until the kids are through college and our expenses drop to the baseline.

Then? We go our ways.

The thing that had occurred to me as I watched her agony was that this was what millions of people did for thousands of years. They needed to stay solvent. They were rich and wanted to be richer, or poor and didn't want to be poorer. Or merchants and wanted business, or nobles and wanted land.

So they made a deal to work and live together.

This was the deal on offer. A deal that would give us breathing space and time. Time for her to find a better-paying job. Time to grow our investment wealth, time and space to better figure out how to find our ways as single people, instead of the current rush to be separate.

Unlike a lot of those people, we aren't strangers.

We were friends, and so far still are.

I think we could make that work.

I also don't think she'll take it.

But I had to make the offer. She IS my friend, my dearest friend, and regardless of everything else, I owe her every effort to help her to the best life she can.

I already miss her.

And, sadly, I'm afraid both that that will not change, and that, soon, it irrevocably will.

About the Troubles...

Got back late yesterday from a week of drilling outside Skagway, Alaska. 

 

VERY weird place; it's like a Gold Rush theme park complete with boatloads of tourists. 

 

I couldn't help thinking how the "gold rush" was awful - guys desperate because the economy sucked, being cheated and fleeced by an army of grifters, and most of them going home broke after a miserable time. 

 

It's like a Disneyland "Great Depression" ride. Who wants that? 

 

Apparently lots of people!

 

Anyway, regarding the troubles.

 

In the 22-plus years we've been married there are times when my Bride sort of...goes away.

 

She retreats within herself, barricades herself behind her tablet reading, doesn't engage. She's not nasty or rude about it, but she withdraws from our marriage more than a bit.

 

The result is that eventually I come to her. Ask her how she's doing. Remind her that it's hard to do things together if we're not, y'know, together. 

 

She always acknowledges what is happening, and slowly re-emerges and we're back together.

 

About a month ago I noticed that she was doing this again. This time the problem was exacerbated by chores from the big remodel that needed "couple" sorts of inputs; paint colors, decor, that sort of thing. So, again, I sat down on a Friday evening, got her attention, reminded her of what she was doing, and asked for her to re-engage with me. She said she needed to think and she'd reply the next day.

 

Saturday morning she and I went down to the Willamette, where she told me that she had looked into herself and could find no more love. No dearness. No "us" there.

 

I asked her if she was sure.

 

She said she was.

 

I was stunned.

 

Before I left I asked Mojo to take the week to consider whether we had a chance at finding a way back together, either rekindling what we had, or finding something new.

 

Last Saturday I couldn't wait; I called and asked for her decision.

 

It was "no". 

 

So we're done.

 

Tomorrow we go see our financial planner to get the bad news. The best I can hope for, frankly, is be able to find a way to not die homeless. We're looking at having to practically double our expenses without increasing our income unless I can find someone who will hire me full- or at least part-time and right now that's not looking promising.

 

I'd like to rage and scream. I'd like to be mad at how unfair this all seems...but the only thing I can really be frustrated with is that Mojo, like my first wife before her, said nothing to let me know that her love for me was dying (or I was helping to kill it and how).

 

With my...well, soon-to-be-FIRST-ex...at least there were priors to explain why; we had very mismatched responses to stress; I got angry, she'd withdraw, and so she kept everything inside until she was just done and past done.

 

But my Bride KNEW that! 

 

And she knew that - had I known what was happening with The First Mrs. Lawes, had I known with Mojo now - I'd have done whatever I could; pretty much made myself over, made our marriage over, done whatever I could to prevent that death of love.

 

Well...it's  too late. It's done now, and all I'm left with is grief. And the hope that I can, at least, endure that grief under a roof somewhere and not under a bridge.

 

Sorry, I know that's bleak. But right now things look pretty bleak.

Whisper of the axe

 

Well, the news was bad.

My Bride's position will be cut. We just don't know how hard.

Mind you, she was just one of the three out of ten people who got the axe today. She described it as "Body after body goes into the principal's office, shuts the door, comes out sad."

It's worth noting that the heaviest cuts fell on the most junior, lowly-paid staff. Which is pretty infuriating when you think that the body of one Assistant Deputy Superintendant For Paperclip Procurement would probably keep four of those people at work in the trenches where they will be doing some good.

But that's the way outfits like public schools work, and the deal we made.

The real problem now is that we don't know how hard this will hit us.

If she gets knocked back to 0.8 or 0.6FTE? It'll be hard but we can probably make it for another five years until my Social Security kicks in.

But if it's 0.2FTE? Fuck, we're hosed.

So the bottom line is that I may have had the world's shortest retirement.

That sucks. But what can you do? We can't bargain or appeal; the District will do what it will do, and we wil have to suffer what we must.

UPDATE 2/3/22: Well...the bad news is...less bad than we feared.

The Bride's position is being reduced to 0.5FTE. That lets her keep our major medical - which means losing vision and dental; a shoutout to the "best health care system in the world", what, eyes and teeth aren't "heahtcare" you sorry fucks? - and she might have another 0.1-0.25FTE as a "float".

That's bad. But it's not "the worst", it's not the 0.2FTE that would sink us.

So while it's bad we all have the Plague...at least we won't have the Plague AND be living out of our cars.

3 am

Awake, empty-handed, in the darkness with the sound of rain
rattling inside the cheap metal gutters like muffled drum-fire.

The warm, soft smell of your hair pressed close still rich

in the sharp empty chill of the rented room.

 

The sough of the distant highway your night-breathing

rising and falling as though you're traveling faraway.

 

(Years ago I was working on the road, doing the most grinding dirt-nanny work and staying in a cheap motel in Medford, which is kind of the lower GI-tract of Oregon. I awoke in deep night from a dream of home and wife and, just for a moment, thought she was there with me.

She was not.

That was a very long night.)

The Queen of the Little Sea...

 ...is another year older.

How she manages to be so terrific while juggling me and two teenage kids and being Miss Debbie the School Secretary I have no idea. But she does, and does it well.

I loved you then and I love you still.

navigare necesse est; amare est necesse, etiam

Woolgathering

No real agenda today. Slow at work so I'm stealing company time to just idle around this shebeen without any actual purpose other than maundering, so please excuse my disorganization.

One thing I completely failed to post about was that the Bride and I had a very muted (Muted? Nonexistent, more like...) acknowledgment of our twelfth anniversary Monday week; it was back in October of 2002 that we wrested legal sanction out of the State of Oregon for our mutual concupiscence.

She was utterly whacked from yet another day tangling with The Boy and I was working late and still trying to get my hands on her anniversary gift. I did get it, a couple of days later, and we had a quiet moment last Friday remembering why we then, and still, long(ed) for one another. Along with her soft green scarf and handmade necklace I gave her this:

Mistress of mistresses, mother of memories,
O you my every pleasure, you my every duty!
You shall recall our pleasures and ecstasies,
The warm peace of our hearth, the evening's placid beauty.
Mistress of mistresses, mother of memories!

Legal sanction is all well and good. But there must also be ecstasies.

Did I mention how I so don't have anything to say about politics because my growing conviction that between the idiot "news" media and the idiot 27% (and you have that pin-up of Cheney in your cubicle so you know who you are...) that we've pretty much achieved Peak Stupid, and that whatever I could say would either be superfluous or ignored?

Yep.

I'm not sure which disgusts me more, the whole "To arms, to arms, the Sunni militia is coming!" nonsense, or the headless panic over a blood-borne pathogen that has a total U.S. morbidity of three and mortality of one.

On the former that fat bastard Brecher has been right all along, and on the latter...well, I don't know how to put it better than Pierce, so I won't:

"There evidently is going to be a strong constituency on the committee for some kind of travel ban on the countries in Africa on which the disease is laying waste, even though every expert in the world is saying that this is a terrible idea. (Governor Rick Perry, whose state is ground zero for Ebola in America, apparently believes there already is a travel ban on flights from Europe, to which he has brought the Spectacles Of Wisdom to "burnish his foreign-policy credentials," which is putting a shine on a sneaker, but never mind. This is leadership? Has anyone told Ron Fournier?) There also is going to be a lot of election-year posturing and political bloviation. Fear will be mongered. Distrust will be sown. And the statistics will tell us that, throughout last year, we lost 30 people a day. No, wait. That was due to firearms. My bad."

My pal Lisa over at RAW had a good point about one of the real problems these fucking idiots should be worried about; that after thirty-some years of treating medicine as a commodity the for-profit medical community has internalized the profit-first-"customer"( i.e. patient)-service-whenever rationale of the rest of the "market". Take it away again, Pierce:

"In case you joined American democracy already in progress, this is the way it is going to work. The private, for-profit hospital in Texas completely screws the pooch. (They sent the tubes containing blood from the late Thomas Duncan through the hospital's general delivery system? This is moronic.) The CDC comes in -- admittedly, after it should have, but there are regulations, beloved of our private-sector fetishists, that got in the way -- and the privatizers and anti-government types set up the CDC to take the fall for the hospital.

(The hospital isn't a terrific place to work at the best of times, as a nurse named Patricia Lawson found out to her sorrow.)

In prepared testimony, Daniel Varga, the Chief Clinical Officer for the Texas company that includes Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, apologized to the House committee. "Unfortunately, in our initial treatment of Mr. Duncan, despite our best intentions and a highly skilled medical team, we made mistakes. We did not correctly diagnose his symptoms as those of Ebola. We are deeply sorry," Varga said.

Gee, that's awfully nice of you. Anybody get fired yet?"

As my old pal Struthers would have said, what a fuckin' fucked-up fuckstory.

But are We the People going to act with deliberate care, in light of the best information we can glean from scientific medicine?

Fuck, no, why would we want to do that when we can run around shrieking whatever nonsense Laura Fucking Ingraham, the Tammy Faye Baker of CNN, vomits into her lapel mike?

Gah. I say it's nonsense and I say to hell with it.

Speaking of insanely crazy things, how about this: Iceland - yes, Iceland, famed for herring and...well, herring - defeated the Dutch soccer team - the Oranje, the dreaded Clockwork Orange, World Cup quarterfinalists just half a year ago - 2-nil in Iceland.

Iceland! Sure, the goalscorer plays in Europe but I think the Icelandic keeper is the boxroom guy at the Rekjavik Safeway or something like that. These guys are minnows in the soccer ocean.

This was every underdog story come true. My only regret is that there was no Icelandic announcer to go utterly spastic after the victory: "Queen Juliana! Jan de Hartog! Famke Janssen! Eddie Van Halen! Hans Brinker! We have beaten them all! We have beaten them all!"

Don't get me wrong; I have always been partial to the Oranje ever since the disgrace of Argentina in 1978, when the original Clockwork Orange - Cruyff (who refused to play in the bloodyhanded Argentina of the Dirty War), Neeskens, Rep - was disgracefully robbed of the title. But I love to see these little teams upset the big, rich nations, and in soccer, Holland is very much a have and Iceland very much a have-not.

Except for this once. Wish I'd had the under on THAT bet...

There's a million tales in the naked Facebook; this one is mine.

Back when I was in college, and then later for a while when I was in the service, I had a sort-of-girlfriend.

(BTW, in case you aren't familiar with GFT conventions, people whose likeness I am neither at liberty blue to nor desire to seen blued all over the Internet are always shown from the ankles down, if possible. So this is her, over to the right there, and I should add that whilst I yield to no one in my appreciation for my Bride's attributes my old sort-of-girlfriend still rocks the black slippers...)

I say "sort-of" because I could never quite figure out where I stood with her, or what we were doing. I liked her. We were definitely friends. But we were never lovers, and I'm not sure that we were, either of us, really sure what "love" was, or how to love each other.

I know that I wasn't, and while she was, and is, a very beautiful, dear, sweet, kind, and loving woman I'm glad we didn't end up together back then for, as my first wife found out to our mutual grief, I was not then fit company for any woman of worth.

Still, we seemed to have some sort of very-close-but-not-quite relationship for quite some time that finally, as such relationships often do, drifted away when we were separated by time and space. We never even had a "breakup" in any real sense. Our association just kind of...stopped.

Decades later, while searching a completely different subject, I came across a short video clip of my not-quite-inamorata singing (and she had, and has, a lovely voice) that led me to suspect that she had moved to the Midwest and married. Several years later, motivated by a sort of vague nostalgia and curiosity, I looked her up on the dreaded Facebook and there she was. Using her maiden name, so, apparently, divorced or separated. Living in Missouri, and now an ordained minister in one of the UCC congregations there. We then resumed our friendship in the modern electronic-epistolary form of Facebook.

And from what I've seen as she was then she is still today a very good person; full of love and kindness, the very sorts of things that it seems to me to be very good for a cleric to be given the responsibilities of the job; caring for the sick and the distraught, guiding the afflicted, celebrating with the joyous and comforting the dying. She seems to me to be very likely to be a terrific pastor.

It is when I think of her that it occurs to me that one of the things that sickens me most heartily about many "religions" and those that preach them is the often-outspoken belief that having breasts and a vagina and ovaries somehow makes a person less...spiritual, less fitted for the business of contemplating, or interceding - if it is your nature to want to and try to so intercede - with the Infinite.

"Let your women keep silence in the churches..."

Fucking Paul of Tarsus really has a lot to answer for in my book.

My former-almost-girlfriend is too gentle to do that good work, but give me the Wayback set to 42AD and a good sturdy baulk of dimension lumber, and old Mister Road-to-Damascus would have been getting a solid two-by-four upside the head.

Asshole.

Speaking of soccer and patriarchal religions, I finally got to watch the Portland Pilots-Brigham Young University women's match from last week.

The game was utterly one-sided. BYU is for real; those gals are solid from front to back, and UP is gonna have trouble making the NCAA Finals with this year's young squad.

But my real thought as I was watching the play was that "Cougars" is an utterly lame name for teams from a school named for a scarey Victorian theocrat with high double-digit wives. Cougars? When the heck was the last cougar exterminated from around Provo, anyway, something like 1888? And, besides, you and I both know that cougars are not what Utah and BYU are all about, right?

It's all about the Mormons, baby.

So. The BYU men's teams really need to play as something like the "Patriarchs". "The Mormon Battalion" would be fine, as well as historical. Or how about "The Sword of the Lord"? Can you imagine the headlines in the sports section: "Sword of the Lord slays Pepperdine"? "Sword of the Lord beheads St. Mary's"? "Sword of the Lord eviscerates Bulldogs"?

Fucking stone cold awesome.

Then the women's teams, seeing how the Mormon Church feels about women in churches and all, could play as the "Handmaidens" or maybe the "Helpmeets" or the "Yeah, We're The Ones Being Fucking Silent in the Churches, You Happy Now, Asshole?"

Either that or both should play as the "Jackmormons". Except I think there's already a band named that.

Whatever. But "Cougars"? Sorry. WAY lame.

And while we're on the subject of "White People That Colonized Places" along with "Lame Stuff In General" I note in passing that the annual Columbus Day contretemps reminds me of the thing about the Admiral of the Ocean Sea that drives me more wild than anything else; his math.

Because, you see, in order to sell his expedition to the Spanish Crown he had to make the idea of sailing west to reach Japan, China, and the East Indies plausible. The farrago about the world being flat in 1492? Bullshit. Learned people knew that as early as Eratosthenes a couple of thousand years before Greek (and Arabic) scientists had figured out that 1) the Earth was a globe, and 2) that it was about 20,000 miles around, give or take a Roman mile or three.

But our boy Chris had to know that short of a ginormous expedition that Reconquista Spain didn't have the cash, the naval technology, or the inclination to outfit a fleet to sail across some 7,000 or so miles of open ocean. And he had to know that even if they had that there was no way in Hell that Ferdinand and Isabella were going to equip some sketchy Italian adventurer with that sort of fleet.

So - through a combination of ignorance, wishful thinking, and plain damn stupidity, Columbus came up with a figure of about 16,000 miles for the equatorial circumference of the Earth and a completely ridiculous distance of 3,000 miles to Sumatra. Here's a good little summary of the sort of bone-headed mathematical and navigational errors that the cack-handed spaghetti-bender had to commit to manage that.

Samuel Eliot Morison wrote of Columbus: “His calculation is not logical, but Columbus’s mind was not logical. He knew he could make it, and the figures had to fit.” Morison seems to find that admirable. I find it as moronic as panic over a bunch of raggedy-assed Arab guerrillas or a West African disease.

But maybe that's just me.

Okay. Enough meandering. I'll leave you with a couple of images:

You sleep in public in this house at your peril. This is "Drachma the Merkitty"; the thing on his head is supposed to be one of those seashall-bra things that mermaids are supposed to wear, but it wouldn't fit over his head, so its a crown. Little guy didn't wake up during the whole dress-up process, so he was pranked for hours whilst he slept.

I tried to explain that this was Cruelty to Sleeping Pets, but the small people merely laughed and continued to prank the little possum. He was quite the surprised kitty when he woke up, too.

I should add that our housecats have a long tradition of that kind of thing. When Maxine was a toddler she would announce a cat-sighting with a noise we called her "cat-scream", a loud squawk that was Maxine-speak for "Aha! Strange furry creature unlike anything ever seen in my orphanage, I shall pat you now!" and would precede a round of violent head-slapping that was her version of "petting the cat".

The calico, Lily, was smart enough to grab a hat at the sound, but Nitty (a.k.a Few Kibbles Shy Of A Full Bowl) would hunker down on the principle of "if I make myself REALLY small she can't see me". Which worked about as well as you'd think it would.

And this:

...is a mural from Honolulu. Naiad sporting with vicious aquatic pandas? Wahine frolicking in the surf with hairy racoon-like menehunes?

Your guess is as good as mine - I got nothin'. But I liked the image, so there you are.

I should really finish up my Panama stories. Soon. Promise.

Friday Jukebox: Sometimes It Won't Edition

The dream dies.

I'll never be able to listen to "Muskrat Love" again without weeping.

(Who am I fucking kidding? I cry every time I hear it now and not from sentimental goopiness...)

Let no man put asunder

Although you probably don't know this (and, I'm afraid, could probably care less; of all the posts here my soccer stuff draws fewer views than almost anything else outside of, well, anything. Hell, even my cat stories get more action) a lot has been happening to our Portland Thorns FC professional soccer club, current NWSL title-holders and defending first-season champions.

First, one of our defenders, Nikki Marshall, was waived back in September, right after the Girls in Red brought home the ugly-ass NWSL trophy (that's it over on the left and, yeah, it's pretty fuckin' ugly...except it looks a hell of a lot better sitting in our trophy case here in Portland. Heh).

Nikki is supposedly playing for our rival Seattle Reign but has more or less flat-out dismissed playing in the league next year.

Then Marian Dougherty, her backline partner, retired to take a real job.

The little-spoken fact of the National Women's Soccer League is that there are two types of players; those "allocated" from their national teams and those who can't make an honest living from their sport. Rumor - since the league is extraordinarily close-mouthed about its pay scale - says that the non-allocated players make as little as six or seven thousand a year from their playing gig. That's chump change for a good player but pretty typical of most sports, and in particular the NWSL has chosen to try and avoid paying out anything in order to avoid the solvency issues that crushed the three earlier attempts at forming a women's pro league here.

And today the first head coach - the manager, as they'd call her in Britain - of Thorns FC, Cindy Parlow Cone, has resigned.

And for the worst possible reason; her job was tearing her marriage apart. Her husband, John, resigned as the head of the Timbers' fitness staff today as well. Parlow Cone said: “Coaching the Thorns has been one of the highlights of my career. However, due to the scheduling conflicts created by the job, I realized that despite being a great move for my career, it was less than ideal for the health of my marriage - which is the most important thing in my life."

That's a damn hard road to find yourself on, to make you quit your job.

I've been there; not so much quitting my job to try and save my marriage but in the midst of a failing marriage finding myself in that cold iron place where it feels like the joy, the purpose, and the very reasons for living, have been leached out of your life.

You get up and go through the day but find no hope there. The world, and your place in it, seem very fallow, empty of the prospect of a gentler days to come.

This just reminds me of something I've said, and said here, before; that every day we live is a gift we're given.

Not that we will always want that gift. Sometimes that gift is a poisoned one.

Sometimes it is a horror so frightful that we cannot dare look upon it.

Sometimes it is pure joy. Sometimes it is a-tremble with happiness. Sometimes it is top-gallant delight, a delight so sweet and dear that it pierces our breast, a joy akin to weeping.

And...sometimes it is just...another day.

Another and another in the tripping string between our first breath and our last.

Some days are just a day, no better and no worse.

The part that catches in my throat, though, is how carelessly we assume that there will be another, and that that next day will be alike the last, and the last.

But it won't; there's nothing to say that today won't be the end of our marriage, or our love, or our hopes, or our life.

Well.

I could talk more about Coach Parlow Cone, and the Thorns, and what this may mean for the club, and Portland soccer, in 2014. But if you wanted to read about that you'd be following my work over at Slide Rule Pass, and this site isn't that site. I will have more to say about the soccer business side of this over there.

Today, here, I just wanted to remember again that every day we live we are a gift of love; that it's not such a bad thing to hold to that happy day and to work for the next as hard as we can.

Because oftimes it is only when the day draws to a close and the sky grows dark, and the cold wind closes around us, that we look back and remember that happy time and look forward with hesitation or fear, knowing that we cannot go back and that going forward gives us no assurance that we will emerge from the cold and the night.

Ewe Made Me Love Ewe...

Jesus Fucking Roosevelt Christ on a Fucking Pogo Stick, what part about fucking consent don't you fucking understand?

When Rand Paul lets his Inner Libertarian out for a walk that little bastard just goes skipping off pretty much anywhere, don't he?

"I think this is the conundrum and gets back to what you were saying in the opening -- whether or not churches should decide this. But it is difficult because if we have no laws on this people take it to one extension further. Does it have to be humans? I'm kind of with you, I see the thousands-of-year tradition of the nucleus of the family unit. I also see that economically, if you just look without any kind of moral periscope and you say, what is it that is the leading cause of poverty in our country? It's having kids without marriage. The stability of the marriage unit is enormous and we should not just say oh we're punting on it, marriage can be anything."

No, dumbfuck.

Look, I've visited this whole business over and over again. My position is - and, by inference, my opinion that the opinion of any sane human should be - if you're adults, then you should be able to form any sort of goddamn domestic union you want.

Yes, that means polygamy.

And polyandry.

Boys and boys? Yep. Girls and girls? Yep. Boys and boys and girls and girls?

Yep.

Boys and sheep?

No.

Why?

Because a sheep - and a child, or a person who is emotionally or mentally a child, or someone who is comatose, or a corpse, or anyfuckingotherthing that cannot fucking understand the meaning of the emotional and physical intimacy of a personal relationship (call it marriage or bunga or whatever the hell else you want to call it) - cannot fucking consent to that intimacy.

And, mind you, this moron is supposed to be the "Thinking Man's Conservative". This silly fucktard is supposed to be among the Best and the Brightest that the GOP has on sale. This is the 1% of the Intellectual Wing of the GOP, for God's sake.

Can you imagine what the hell Sarah "Somewhere In Alaska My Village Is Missing Its Idiot" Palin thinks on this issue?

I mean, fuckadoodledoo; consent. Consent. Consent as in "consenting adults".

Consent.

How fucking hard is that?

Take me, Mandingo!

Back in the day my ex-wife and I belonged to the local rec center gym.

It wasn't such of a muchness, but it had a decent weight room, some stationary bikes, rowing machines and that, a sauna and steam room, and was close enough to our then-apartment to be a pleasant walk on a nice day.

Anyway, one Saturday afternoon we'd walked over to the gym for our workout. I remember it was a pleasant autumn day and the paths through the riverside park were crisp with harvest-colored leaves and a faint smell of distant smoke. We enjoyed a chaste kiss in the foyer and went to our respective lockers to change.

After my workout I showered and stopped off at the sauna to bake out the chill. I spread my towel on a corner spot and leaned back to melt in the heat.

A couple of other guys came and went, each time carefully ignoring each other or exchanging greetings with a studiedly heterosexual grunt or nod.

Until The Black Guy entered.

Now let me be clear; this was Wilmington, Delaware, not Portland, so this guy wasn't the only black guy there that day.

But he was...well, let's just say that in one respect he was THE Black Guy. He was, well, kind like THIS Black Guy.

We all grunted heterosexually. He spread out his towel, sat down, and casually flicked his penis over his thigh like Hercules tossing a stray boulder out of his path.

We all studiously looked at the cedar ceiling. Or pretended to close our eyes and absorb the heat.

But not one of us said a word.

We all sat there for fifteen minutes or so, casually sweating in an ostentatiously heterosexual way and carefully not staring at anyone's inhumanly enormous junk.

Then The Black Guy stood up, picked up his towel, casually swung his enormous tool out of his way, and walked out.

We all just looked at each other for a stunned moment and left the sauna in awed, and somewhat shamed, silence.

On the way home my ex and I chatted about the day, and the weather, and plans for the weekend. And I told her about The Black Guy's penis.

And we went on home to dinner.

Later that evening we were lounging about on the sofa. Lounging became kissing, and kissing became fondling, and pretty soon we were in the middle of some pretty serious conjugal business. And just when the temperature was about as high as it could be short of breaking out the top of the thermometer like in one of those Warner Brothers cartoons, my paramour placed her soft, wet lips against my ear and murmured in the frenzied breathlessness of lust;

"Tell me about The Black Man's penis again..."

And I can now tell you from hard experience it's damned deadly difficult to perform the Capital Act when you're both rolling around on the floor giggling helplessly.

Rain on Tin

If I ever get over the bodies of women, I am going to think of the rain,
of waiting under the eaves of an old house
at that moment
when it takes a form like fog.
It makes the mountain vanish.
Then the smell of rain, which is the smell of the earth a plow turns up,
only condensed and refined.

Almost fifty years since thunder rolled
and the nerves woke like secret agents under the skin.
Brazil is where I wanted to live.
The border is not far from here.
Lonely and grateful would be my way to end,
and something for the pain please,
a little purity to sand the rough edges,
a slow downpour from the Dark Ages,
a drizzle from the Pleistocene.

As I dream of the rain’s long body,
I will eliminate from mind all the qualities that rain deletes
and then I will be primed to study rain’s power,
the first drops lightly hallowing,
but now and again a great gallop of the horse of rain
or an explosion of orange-green light.
A simple radiance, it requires no discipline.

Before I knew women, I knew the lonely pleasures of rain.
The mist and then the clearing.
I will listen where the lightning thrills the rooster up a willow,
and my whole life flowing
until I have no choice, only the rain,
and I step into it.

~Rodney Jones

It was ten years ago Saturday (so this is our "tin" anniversary, of all things...) that we signed the ketubah and stepped out from under the canopy of marriage into a world of sunshine and rain.

I cannot imagine walking through those sun-showers without you, my dearest love. You are my East and West, my daily work and my Sunday rest.

May we share another decade together; and may the sunlit hours outshine the inevitable storm and dark that await.

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.

~ Sylvia Plath

St. Valentine

"There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is God's finger on man's shoulder."
- Charles Morgan"You don't marry someone you can live with - you marry the person who you cannot live without. The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands."
- Alexandra Penney

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction."
- Saint-Exupery

"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous."
- Ingrid Bergman"To love another person is to see the face of God."
- Les Miserables

"Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time."
- Lawrence Durrell"If you love someone, let them go. If they return to you, it was meant to be. If they don't, hunt them down and kill them slowly."
- Chief

"True love never dies for it is lust that fades away. Love bonds for a lifetime but lust just pushes away."
-Alicia Barnhart

Horseshit, Alicia. Lust and love are fire and fuel, fuel and fire, that joyous bonfire made when Love's strong Arts (of such noble individual parts) makes one fire of four flaming eyes and of two loving hearts. You couldn't be wronger.

It will be ten years ago this October, but I still yearn for you, my love, like I did when we first married; to talk with you, to work beside you, to make love to you, to make a life with you.I love you. Happy Feast of Valentine.

Missy's Annunciation

Kiddos are funny little creatures. Our little one, for example, has become fascinated lately by her parents' anniversary (which was last Wednesday, BTW).

This has manifested itself in several ways, including repeated requests to look at the wedding pictures, conversations about the day, and, most recently, several pictures by the young artist celebrating the wedding and showing her parents in various guises.This was her work from the actual anniversary morning. In case the symbology is hard to understand, I have included an annotated version below. The figure on the left is Mommy, with bridal crown and flower "because it's pretty". You will note that her big brother is present in utero, since an essential part of the story is his presence at the wedding in Mommy's tummy.Daddy is on the left, with his hair standing out like he is licking an electrical outlet. The curlique at my neck is a combination of a bowtie, which she has seen in the pictures, and a ribbon, "because it's pretty".

Overhead Missy herself descends like an angel in a Renaissance painting, complete with widespread dress at the bottom, which I understand is a tutu.At any rate, I thought you'd enjoy this glimpse into the Little Girl's mind. She loved drawing it, and considers it among the finest Western artwork.

I tend to agree.

But I might be biased, mind you.

...and the bronze medal goes to...

...my bride, and I.

It was eight years ago today that we gave in and became a legally recognized domestic partnership in the State of Oregon. Since then there have been Chinese orphans, diverticulitis, cat yack, about a cubic kilometer of filthy diapers, and hard choices about music and where everything goes in the china cabinet.

But through it all, you have ever been my strong arm, my clear voice, my encompassing mind, my open heart. What I am, as good a man, as loving a husband, as giving a father, I owe to you as much or more than to myself.

These have been good years.

In the words we spoke on our wedding day, Donne's words,

"Now, as in Tullia's tomb, one lamp burnt clear,
Unchanged for fifteen hundred year,
May these love-lamps we here enshrine,
In warmth, light, lasting, equal the divine.
Fire ever doth aspire,
And makes all like itself, turns all to fire,
But ends in ashes ; which these cannot do,
For none of these is fuel, but fire too.

This is joy's bonfire, then, where love's strong arts
Make of so noble individual parts
One fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts."Happy Anniversary, love.

Tradition

I am not a particularly nice man.

I'm not a particularly bad man, either, but generally I talk too much, my opinions are often rude, and I am caustic and immediate in my judgements. I am a fairly sloppy dresser, tend to disrespect authority and pretty much everything else, for that matter. I have been, by turns, a bad employee, an angry and difficult husband, a disobedient son and a faithless friend. While I have also been a loving father, a caring and affectionate spouse, a genuine pal, a diligent and responsible wage-earner, a sharply competent professional and a compassionate family member, this just balances the scale against the Bad Stuff.

Put both sides together and I'm about right on the mean for human attributes. Half devil, half angel, fully human, I guess.

But.

What I do own; what I have a complete lock, 100% pure-D monopoly on, is what you'd call "survivability". I'm just hardwired for survival. Something in me just doesn't want to die. You can kill me as easily as any other human, but my mind and body won't work with you on that.

I'm the guy, if I were in one of those 1980's made-for-TV movies, you know where the airliner goes down in the Andes and the wretched survivors, after spending endless, grueling days freezing, starving and dying of thirst finally feed off the corpses of the victims and, eventually, each other, gets hauled up to the rescue helicopter as the credits roll, burping gently?

I'm that guy.

I'm the guy who rolls past the four-car fatal accident with a glance and a grimace. Whose reaction to the explosion that destroys the office block around him is to ensure that he gets his expense receipts out of the drawer ahead of the fire. Who walks into the barracks room where the privates are watching "Faces of Death XIV: Too Gruesome For Anyone!" munching a burrito and exclaims amid the retching "Hey! I didn't know my old buddy and my girlfriend knew HOW to work a videocam!"

That's me.

Note: this is NOT a good thing.

For one thing, it makes it difficult for me to be truly human and truly empathetic. I am not good with the sick and the grieving, and I have an unpleasantly distant reaction to hurt and loss, more a longing sort of mild regret than truly tearing grief. I'm missing something very essential, some emotional accessibility that my system just doesn't have.

It works, in terms that it makes me a very emotionally and physically durable person. But there is something very...needed, missing in me to obtain this, and I am the poorer, the less...human...for it.

My beloved Mojo is, if anything, the exact opposite. When she gets hurt, or sick, she collapses. Grief and anger and worry tear at her.She has been depressive, clinically depressive, and has suffered through torments after the loss of our first child, and after the disruption of our first adoption, that I can literally not imagine.She also tends to "break down": she neglects herself, and her body takes its revenge by shutting down. If I were in the middle of a massive emotional crisis, my mind and body would force me to stop and eat, take a drink, nap. Mojo will push herself beyond that point and, finally, collapse.

Six years ago today we enjoyed a wonderful, joyous, splendid day.

The wedding we crafted and celebrated together, complete with our own vows, music, the celebrant of our choice, a reception at our beloved Overlook House catered by our favorite taqueria - we still mourn that they didn't feel okay with doing it out of the taco truck; we wanted a picture of Mojo in her wedding dress lined up with the other guests at the curb - and a honeymoon at one of our most secretive B&Bs.

It was, for lack of a better word, magical, full of the love we feel for each other with all of our friends around us.

Poor Mojo was so wired and so excited she literally forgot to eat ALL DAY.

Okay, I think she had two bites of wedding cake. Three. Tops.

So as we were leaving the B&B to get dinner that night her blood sugar crashed and so did she. We ended up eating at the first place we could get to, a NW Portland Cantonese greasy stick, nearly got our car towed away, and Mojo slept for the next ten hours straight. Ah, youth! Ah, romance!Ah, real life. It's SO not like a Hugh Grant romcom.

Fortunately, Mojo hates La Grant.

So I should have guessed that when my love said she had a headache last evening it wasn't just a figure of speech. We had spent a long, busy day, she'd been socializing and sipping wine and mommying and not eating or hydrating right. She didn't take her medication on time. So the poor girl crashed into a hideous migraine; we spent all morning at the doctor's office and she's knocked out in bed upstairs as I type this, a victim of our anniversary tradition of Mojolicious' distress.

I'm sorry, lovey, that you feel so poorly, and that I am so distressingly chipper. I hope you feel better soon.

But on this day of iron and chocolate, I will whisper into your sleeping ear:

Now, as in Tullia's tomb, one lamp burnt clear,
Unchanged for fifteen hundred year,
May these love-lamps we here enshrine,
In warmth, light, lasting, equal the divine.
Fire ever doth aspire,
And makes all like itself, turns all to fire,
But ends in ashes ; which these cannot do,
For none of these is fuel, but fire too.
This is joy's bonfire, then, where love's strong arts
Make of so noble individual parts
One fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts.Happy Anniversary, my love.