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huge take home salad
Thursday, July 22 2004
In what has become an occasional Thursday evening ritual, at sundown Gretchen and I went into Uptown Kingston for dinner and entertainment. I was wearing my new "Why Vote, the Rapture is nigh!" teeshirt, which had arrived in the mail earlier today, and was delighted to see people's eyes going down to it reflexively in an effort to parse it. Most people were simply puzzled, but the few people who volunteered comments (later on at BSP's open mike) seemed to get it. Just in case they didn't, I was careful to make the following observation: "If you believe in the Rapture and don't vote, then I'm happy." Just for the record I should point out that I almost never experience strangers voluntarily making comments about my teeshirts. Then again, my teeshirts usually bear such bland messages as "Ocean Beach Upholstery," "Fitness Image/La Jolla, California," or "Harley Davidson Motorcyles/The Spirit Room/Jerome, Arizona." Actually, that last one gets a fair number of comments, always from people who have actually been to Jerome in all its touristy ghostliness.
For dinner we went to Stella's as usual. Again we were there mostly for the delicious salad, although tonight the house Shiraz was unexpectedly delicious. After observing that I've never had a bad shiraz, I wondered aloud what the hell Australia had been good for before it developed a wine industry. Think of all that useless desert, all those eucalyptus trees, all those pouch-bearing mammals, and all those boomerang-chucking natives. Think of how all of that was supplanted by convicts and rabbits. Yet still we had to wait a couple hundred years for the fruition of God's master plan for Australia: Shiraz.
For some reason our dinner conversation focused on erotic impulses and whether or not we should feel guilty about them. I confided to Gretchen that sometimes I experience erotic feelings when reading about torture and execution, but that these feelings leave me with a certain amount of guilt. I said that I wished my subconscious feeling was one of compassion, but instead I was being aroused by appalling brutality. Gretchen told me I shouldn't feel the least bit guilty about such feelings, that there is world of difference between fantasy and reality and that any guilt I felt was the result of society's oppressive and invasive morality. I disagreed, saying that I didn't feel my guilt had been planted by "society." It seemed to grow instead out of pure logic. After all, didn't it make sense that I should feel guilty experiencing erotic feelings reading about the misery of innocents? Gretchen's contention was that erotic feelings aren't logical and that as long as people know how to keep fantasy and reality separate, there's nothing that should be tabboo in the world of fantasy. She went on to cite the writings of Pat Califia, a now-transgendered former bulldyke who once made persuasive arguments against age of consent laws. Gretchen is something of an expert when it comes to lesbian writing.
For the first time ever, I stopped eating my entrée (calamari fra diavolo) well before I was full, choosing to take most of it home with me. We walked around Uptown Kingston after our meal, interrupting our conversation periodically to imitate the sound of a church bell that had announced the arrival of a milepost in time. We looked in windows and tried doors, the sorts of things teenagers do when they're up to no good. Unlike teenagers, though, our motivations were rooted in civic pride and love for our town. We would never do anything to harm Kingston or the humble businesses of its two downtowns.
Eventually we found our way to BSP for another mixed bag of open mike performances. Tonight's show had it all: the house band which played a tight jazz number, a wriggling white woman trying arrhythmically to channel the jazz diva muse, and (as always) an ernest whiteboy armed with an acoustic guitar and an arsenal of appalling lyrics. We had to leave soon after this one guy got up on stage and patronizingly asked the crowd, "How many of you have been down to Manhattan?" A mere 90 miles from Manhattan, it would have made as much sense for him to have asked, "How many of you have ever taken a shower?" We split during the part where he tried to get the crowd to join him in a sing along, something I'd been doing anyway, in mock rapture. (I'd worn the same blissfully-dead expression as the righteous character depicted on my teeshirt.)
Before leaving Uptown, we dropped by Stella's again and convinced the owner to make us a huge take-home container full of trademark salad. When we got home we sat out on the back deck eating it while all five of our critters milled around, occasionally catching and eating moths attracted by the lights.
Like every other political junkie, I pay obsessive attention to the polls tracking the American Presidential election, the one that might have to be put off should "the terrorists" strike again (if, that is, Bush seems destined to lose). Today I noticed something interesting in the data. The presence or absence of Nader has stopped having any effect on the outcome.
From today's USA Today poll via the Daily Kos:
BUSH 45
KERRY 49
...add NADER
BUSH 43
KERRY 47
NADER 5
The Nader effect, which used to be to steal precious percentage points from John Kerry, now seems to be stealing points equally from both sides, something Nader used to implausibly suggest would happen. I suspect this is happening because Nader is coming to be reviled by the American Left as a guy who wants to fix furniture on a sinking Titanic while shamelessly benefitting from repulsive allies. As the idealistic left wises up, the only people remaining to vote for Nader are contrarian libertarian right wingers who would otherwise vote for Bush and liberals who are too dense to understand that politics is about cutting deals and doing what needs to be done to actually get the least evil thing to happen. Ours is a time of national crisis. We stand at the edge of a precipice of a culture of cultivated fear, endless war, and Orwellian fascism. For the sake of the great American democratic experiment, John Kerry must win in November. If you hate democracy and want the terrorists to win, the last vote you'll ever need to cast will be for Bush/Cheney. Or you can vote for Nader, which is the analogous to standing idly by while an old lady (Lady Liberty!) is mugged. Nader doesn't deserve any encouragement, not even in safely blue states.
Okay, so I wrote all that and it turns out I'm wrong and my thesis is wrong; a guy named rimjob at the Daily Kos mis-typed the numbers. Nader is still stealing twice as many points from Kerry as from Bush. But it's possible the phenomenon I described will be in effect by election day.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?040722 feedback
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