Jul. 15, 2010
My dopamine is down a pint; I’m having what Dan Carlin calls a Black Dog Day. I’m not sure why. Generally I’m relentlessly cheerful, but today . . . today not so much.
Speaking of Dan Carlin, he of Common Sense and Hardcore History, it’s partially his fault, him and all the other podcast pundits I listen to on an ongoing basis: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, Jack Clark of Blast the Right, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, the New Yorker’s Political Scene, every podcast Slate does except the sports one, (because, as I have long maintained, I don’t do balls); The Nation and Washington Week in Review and PBS Newshour and The Daily Show and The Economist and Bill Maher’s Real Time and Time Magazine, always and for decades, cover to cover.
You get the picture.
I am an idealistic skeptic. I worship heroes and have delusions of grandeur . . . for them, not for me, which explains to Seasoned Readers why I think the sun shines out of Obama’s ass. I also thought it shone out of Martin Luther King’s ass and the collective asses of the Kennedy brothers and, oh, yes, Right Wingers, FDR’s ass as well. Especially FDR’s ass. (I hope that thought is sending you into convulsions. That would make me very happy.) I have been a political junkie from the tender age of seven, when my Dad woke me up on a cold Indiana November night, took me outdoors, pointed to a night sky chock full of stars and announced, “Camelot begins tonight.” He also gave me a juice glass of Coke – to celebrate. My mother never let us have pop, but the night Jack Kennedy was elected. . . . That was a big night.
Of course, it doesn’t help my present slough of despond that I am listening to an audio version of Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World in my car. (The Nazis are just launching their program of racial cleansing. Mother of God, were they evil!) As for my read-read, I’m midway through Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, which is about how the Internet is turning our brains into sparkly yo yos. And it is. I used to get lost in a book for hours. Now I can barely hold out for ten minutes before the urge to multitask overwhelms me and I leap to my feet and dash off to do several things at once, one of which, incidentally, is this blog.
To top it all off, just this past weekend my stunningly beautiful twenty-five year old daughter told me she was worried about getting old, that she was afraid of losing her looks. (I prudently stopped short of confessing that I still fret about my figure and whether I’m “pretty”. Hello! I’m fifty eight years old. The answer is: No.) Then she showed me how, with only a slight bit of manipulation, she could make her under-knee crease resemble either her bum crack or what we used to refer to as her “cluny.”
As my father used to sing whenever anybody whined, “Everybody hates me/ nobody loves me/ I’m some ugly child/ I’m going out to the garden and eat worms.”
Or maybe I’ll just cook supper while I'm unloading the dishwasher and ironing the napkins, all the while listening to Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars on my i-pod. (Speaking of which, move north. Come 2036, it’s us who’ll have all the food!)
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