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why don't they leave?
Thursday, March 24 2005
This morning I accidentally slammed poor little Julius' tail in the east deck's kitchen door while I was throwing coffee grounds out into the household midden. The door closes with a little difficulty, but it wouldn't close at all with a striped cat's tail in the way. It was the a loud feline hiss that first alerted me to the nature of the problem. The little guy, usually so full of sass, retreated meekly to the couch for a few hours. He seemed uninjured but he was much less engaged than usual. Later I noticed a swollen spot on his tail about a third of the way in from the tip. By this evening he was completely back to normal and the swelling was gone. It's amazing how quickly a cat can heal.
It snowed nearly six inches during a blizzard yesterday evening, and, being the time of year it is, the snow was of the wet and heavy variety. Still, this morning I managed to shovel out the whole driveway in less than a half hour, mostly because for some reason it wasn't sticking to the shovel. I'd get on these extended jams where I'd be progressing at a rate of a foot per second for the width of the shovel and go for fifteen or twenty feet before my body would cry out for a rest. [I'd be feeling it the next day in my lower back.]
This afternoon Gretchen had arranged a dental appointment for both of us at our new dental office in Stone Ridge, one covered by our cut rate health insurance. A persistent pressure headache, which I've had now for about a week, had me feeling kind of woozy as I was driving both there and back. It's not so much an ache as a pressure, usually seeming to come from my left sinuses or directly behind the bridge of my nose. I never have it when I wake up in the morning, though it usually begins to manifest soon after I get out of bed. It always peaks in intensity just before bed. To make it go away the only solution is to take a hot bath or go to sleep.
Tonight our friend Mary Purdy came up from Manhattan with her boyfriend Brad. We sat around the fire drinking tea and talking about such things as the impossibility of being friends with people who don't share our political beliefs.
Mary told us the story of the time she and a friend and the friend's boyfriend had gone to see the sound effect comic Zeroboy, whose stage act is full of anti-Bush political commentary. Mary had loved the show, and when she rhetorically asked her companions if they'd liked it too, she'd been surprised when the friend's boyfriend had insisted he'd hated it. Mary was incredulous, and asked the guy to explain what he meant. "I think we have very different political views," the boyfriend of the friend said, adding, "This is America and if you don't like the government, leave!" Now Mary had thought this guy was nice, but once he'd said this she never wanted to be in the same room with him ever again.
The friend's boyfriend's attitude reminded me, of all things, of the ongoing situation with Terry Schiavo. The only good thing coming from this story is that, despite the extremist feeding-tube-ramming insanity coming from the President, Congress, and Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, the courts in this country have supported the rule of law and the rights of the husband in this matter (call it the "sanctity of marriage" if you'd prefer). Indeed, something like 80% of the people in this country would want their feeding tube removed were they to have the misfortune of ending up like Terry Schiavo. So why don't we, the majority of the people in this country, tell the Congress and Jeb Bush that if they don't like our court system, if they want to go ramming feeding tubes down the throats of brain dead people, why don't they leave? There's a bumpersticker in there somewhere.
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