A Pebble in Palin's Shoe

Not that I want to be anywhere near Palin's feet, but if I had to be, I would like to act as a mild irritant.

So when I first heard Palin’s GOP speech, I thought the chanters were chanting, "Kill, baby, kill," at the VP nominee. Which both reminded me of some horror movie moment and confused me, considering she is so anti-choice and therefore theoretically sooooooooo not an embryo killer, unless you happen to be an embryonic baby polar bear or wolflette, which luckily I am not, or any embryo happening to be conceived in a country she wants to keep bombing. But then I realized that they were chanting, “Drill, baby, drill,” which kinda cleared things up for me, although I am not sure took away the horror genre feeling for me.

Now, I am not even going to bother waxing poetic on the scariness that is Palin and the surrounding US media coverage - I will leave that the brilliance of the The Onion Daily Show Steven Colbert et al (and may I say they their writers/researchers have found their apex with this figure) and besides we've all gotten 7 million blasts about her and this - but I do want to point out that, if Palin gets elected, we will, of course, trip even more quickly into a world in which, at least within the US, Burners are the best prepared people to survive. And that in and of itself should scare everyone in this country I live in.

However, I was excited that I could enact my own little act of resistance, which I did shortly after the horrifying moment in which I realized that people like her... like they like her the way they think GWB is an "affable" guy even though they "don't agree with all his policies" and therefore would somehow continue to vote for his holistically destructive political existence... that kind of like her.

No, I did not donate to some "Pentathol for Palin" cure-for-lying fund (a fantasy fund offered to me from the mind of a Mr. R. Gordon, thanks). Instead I got online and clicked a fatty donation to Planned Parenthood (or you could send it as a memorial donation, which might feel better... I mean the crowd maybe was saying 'kill baby kill,' right?). And then, because I don't have her home addy, I put in some version of the following address:


Failin/McLame Campaign HQ
1235 S. Clark Street
1st Floor
Arlington , VA 22202

And they sent her a nice thank you card on my behalf. Pebbles - 1, Palin - 0.

Today on Freecycle I saw:

"WANTED: Baby YODA costume (0-6 or 6-12mos)"

Maybe I could just lend them my nephew? He seems to be draped in a permanent yoda costume, which apparently also means he looks like my dad.

My Neighbor Will No Longer Be Sending Butter Through The Mail

The word "normal" is not a useful term. I mean it is seriously lacking in a reliable control group. Because my neighbor's "normal" has in the past included seasonally replanting and watering a garden's worth of FAKE indoor and outdoor plants and flowers. And "normal" for the last ten years has included exercising in a velour track suit by walking laps around inside the sealed garage with headphones on that are attached to a cassette player that is NOT on. And taking out her earbuds when she sees you talking to her and saying, "What?" It has included catching her after she'd used her keys to get into one of our apartments and was digging through the bedroom drawers. It has included being married for a total of one day in her 89 years. It has included complete social snarkiness and awkwardness resulting in her being a social pariah in many ways. It has included her rarely having visitors and in even my patient neighbors of our tiny building who have lived with her for forty years only ever meeting or hearing about one relative - her brother, who died five years ago. That's all I'm saying.

So when asked, was she acting "normal" the last time I saw her? It's not an easy question to answer. She had acted even stranger than "usual" the last time I saw her. I knew that much. And she looked even more blue than usual; that much seemed true. And when no one saw her for several days but we could hear her TV on nonstop 24/7 (more unusual) for that time and so we tried to call her, she mumbled incoherently and paranoidly into the phone more bizarrely than usual before hanging up and refusing to answer. And when we tried to get her to come to the door, to get in, to break into the chained, triple locked door, and finally got the fire department and a stranger who says he is her nephew, a current minister and former guard at San Quentin, to kick down the door today to find her, not quite dead, but disintegrating into her easy chair, where she'd been planted apparently for around four days, babbling and distant and unable to understand who we were or what we wanted, surrounded by the crumbs of partially eaten cookies and chocolates which she had apparently been living off for several days, that was definitely unusual, even for her. But that she was carried out, bewildered, on a stretcher and the doctors and "family," what she has of them, tell us she will never come back to her home of forty years? Is that normal? That's all I'm saying. That, and that it is deeply painfully scary to grow old so very alone.

UPDATE (a week later): R.I.P. Ms. M.S.