Happy Birthday to Nick

Today Nick (aka eehard) is spending his first twenty-four hours being 46 years old.  Go Nick!  There was a time when I used to dread birthdays.  No, no, no, I would think.  Time needs to slow way down!  But now, I’m like, isn’t this cool!  I made it to (pick a number).  So this is cool, Nick.  You made it to 46! 47 will be even cooler!  Nature keeps trying to kill us, and we keep winning!

So yesterday I was trying to find an ecard to say Happy Birthday, which was about the best I could do since I’m still wildly sick.  And they were all stupid.  Too many cartoon characters.  Too many orchids and roses and sappy music.  Too many exclamation points.  Nick is not your sappy music kind of guy. 

Nick is a complex guy.  Mostly guy-like, in the sense that if you want to talk to him during football (basketball, baseball, fill in the blank) season, you should probably find a quiet spot and go do your nails instead.  He’s incredibly smart, but humble about it.  He has a healthy sense of outrage , but somehow manages to be diplomatic anyway.  (I should take lessons.)  And he is funny…omg, is he funny.  You’ll notice, with a few exceptions, that Nick almost never posts anything personal.  But his choices of things to post are revealing, if you’re paying attention.  I have a friend who’s been reading his posts and is offended at times by his choice of material and his language.  I’m like, look behind what he says. 

She says, Do I even know you at all?  And my answer is, if you don’t get why I think Nick is funny and smart, then no, I guess you don’t. 

It’s just the icing on the cake that Nick is tall, dark (ha ha) and handsome.  So there you go, Nick.  This is your personalized ecard.  Happy Birthday!

Losing My Religion

Huge thanks to ee, who taught me how to embed videos.  My personal WordPress support person. 

And now for the topic:  I didn’t have much religion to lose.  Did that a long time ago.  Been there, done that.  And it runs in the family.  Fakesister sent me an email today about a book she’s reading (reading  runs in the family too) called An Incomplete Education:  3,684 Thing You Should Have Learned But Probably Didn’t.  She sent an example: 

 Here is the intro to the section on religion:

Those Old-Time Religions: Divine to some, merely fabulous to others

Have you ever noticed how prophetic revelation seems to give some people a
new lease on life at about the same time others their age are gearing up for
midlife crisis? Buddha, Jesus, and Zoroaster all got the Message when they
were hovering around thirty, a birthday that signals middle age in any
culture where people start begetting as teenagers. True, Muhammad was forty
when he first chatted with the Angel Gabriel, but then Islam as a whole was
a late bloomer. So to those of you who find, after scanning the great faiths
outlined here, that the monotheisms of the West and the polytheisms of the
East all leave you cold; that you can’t really get behind karma, nirvana,
yin and yang, the Holy Trinity, or separate dishware for meat and dairy; and
that you’re as depressed and alienated as ever, our advice is: Stay loose
and keep your eyes fixed on the heavens.

[Personal note: It does seem that those revelations and intimate
conversations with angels are a purely masculine endeavor.]

I’m not sure if that personal note was that of the author, or of Fakesister.

When I was in college, my favorite philosophy professor quoted somebody (who?) saying that it’s hell to lose your religion, without losing the need for it at the same time.  I so get that.  I still have the need, but I just can’t buy any of the snake oil.

More Flirting with Fakename

In my previous post “Reading and Flirting with Fakename”, I mentioned that a guy at work loaned me a book, which I thought might be flirting–but maybe not.  I also mentioned that if you were flirting with me, you needed to bring a Flash Card that says so.  I would also recommend bringing a set of Flash Cards that say “Here’s what I’m saying, but here’s what I really mean”.

Really, my cluelessness stems from the inability to believe that anybody would ever want to flirt with me.  I guess that beats the belief that everybody wants to.  There is a lot more humility in the former than in the latter, and humility, as they say, is a virtue.  The unintended consequence of my attitude is that men have to escalate what they say until it becomes perfectly obvious to me.  Which is just fine with me.  As soon as we get to the point, or more accurately, the sooner I know what the point is, the better I am able to say yes or no.  Or at least continue the dance, once I know we’re dancing. 

So Tuesday morning, I was in a meeting with Book Loaner, who for the purposes of this blog we’ll call “Brian”.  The meeting consisted of me and Brian, and ten other men.  That isn’t all that uncommon for me in my business.  Maybe it isn’t that uncommon in business, period.  Brian is giving a presentation to explain his preparations for an upcoming phase of the construction project he’s overseeing.  This is called “keeping everyone in the loop”.  (Side note:  it’s a wonder that anyone in the business world, or anyone in government, ever gets anything done, for having meetings to talk about doing things.  The “loop” is so big that you could hang yourself with it, but God forbid you leave anyone out of it.)  So at the end of his presentation, Brian says, I welcome any suggestions, but understand that I only take instructions from Fakename.  Which is totally untrue, but Whoa.  See ten pairs of eyes turn in my direction.  See Brian grin.  See Fakename get the point.  And also, see Fakename keep a neutral expression, while failing to come up with a witty response until an hour after the meeting is over. 

Fast forward to Thursday morning.  Brian arrives in my office and says that that day he’ll be running some elevations, and can he count on me to be his stick man?  See what I mean about escalation?  With a perfectly straight face I said, “I’m good at that”.  I wish you could have seen his face.  First he blushed to the tips of his hair (and what did Fakename tell you about blushing?)  He grinned again and looked like he was about to respond with something I imagine would have been “I’ll bet you are…”, but before he could embarass himself, I explained that I took a course in surveying in college.  I can use a transit, and I can for damn sure hold a stick.  Which led us into a discussion of why I took a course in surveying, etc.  He should thank me.  I saved him from himself.  And got him back for embarassing me in a meeting. 

But stay tuned.  Since nothing else worked so far, my guess is that his next step will be to ask me out for a drink after work.  Men are in such a bind.  On one hand, they can’t be too forward because it may turn you off.  On the other hand, they can’t be too timid either.  So they throw out floaters, trying to get a feel for whether or not you would be receptive if they actually committed themselves to doing something.  And they say women can’t handle rejection.  Speaking simplistically, my experience is that men will usually never  make an offer unless they know your answer is going to be yes, in advance.  Personified by the high school experience where they always ask your best friend if you like them.  Unfortunately, now we’re grownups and asking the best friend is no longer an option, so men occasionally have to take the plunge and just ask. 

And that’s the purpose of flirting. 

I would bet money on that drink offer.  Will I go?  The odds he will ask are, I think,  60-40.  The odds that I will go are 50-50.  Place your bets now.

From the Heart…Part 2

After having a stress test, I had an echocardiogram, which is nothing more than an ultrasound of the heart.  The cool thing about ultrasounds (to me) is that depending on what position you’re in, you can most of the time see what’s happening on the screen.  Not that you always know what you’re looking at. 

But first, let’s talk about the preparation.  You are asked to undress from the waist up.  If you’re a guy, that’s the end of it.  But I had to put on this paper vest looking thing, which was a one-size fits all item.  That meant, in my case, that three other people could have fit in it with me.  It opens in the front.  Then I was given a towel and instructed to lie down on my left side and use the towel to drape across my front, since the vest was bound to gap open.  I can’t tell you how stupid I thought this was. 

I wanted to say, “Look, I appreciate the effort to protect my modesty, but I don’t have any from the waist up”.  The deal is, I had breast cancer three years ago.  Between the mammograms and the biopsies and the surgeries and the radiation, approximately 1,152 people have seen my breasts.  And think of this:  during radiation, I would have to remove the top half of the gown, get positioned, then they would carefully drape the gown back over the breast that wasn’t being treated.  Speaking of stupid.  I always wanted to say, Isn’t this like closing the barn door after the horse has already escaped? 

It got even stupider during the echo, when in order to position the probe in the proper place, the technician would have to sort of feel around under the towel and push my breast out of the way.  Geez.  I so wanted to say, look, wouldn’t it be a lot easier for you to find where to put the probe if you could see what you’re doing?  Because, right now, sir, you are groping. 

Besides that, the echo itself was cool.  There is something very strange, but fascinating, about watching your own heart beat in real time.  The technician had told me I could ask any questions I wanted, as long as I didn’t ask whether he was seeing anything abnormal since he isn’t allowed to say one way or another.  I could ask all I wanted about anatomy, or what we were seeing on the screen.  I didn’t have any questions until we got to the sniff test.  You think I’m kidding. 

He asked me to sniff.  Then demonstrated, as if I didn’t understand what “sniff” meant.  I sniffed.  I had to know why.  It turns out that you have this vein called the IVC (for inferior vena cava), which is the major vein bringing blood back to the heart from the entire lower body.  When you sniff, it’s supposed to contract.  I still have no idea why.  So I don’t know what it means if it doesn’t.  He ran the “tape” back and said, look at this:  here is where you sniffed.  Sure enough, there it was, contracting its little heart out.  “That’s good,” he said.  (Wait!  Were you supposed to tell me that?)  For some reason the picture of it reminded me of high school biology, watching a paramecium or some other one-celled creature devour some other creature.  No relation whatsoever, but I’m just saying that’s what it reminded me of.   

I don’t have the results back from the echo, but considering that my stress test was normal, I think there’s a good chance the echo will be too.  During the whole process, I had plenty of time to reflect on what an amazing organ the heart is.  You may argue that the brain is more important, but you can actually do without parts of your brain.  If your heart doesn’t work, there is no more You. 

From what I recall, the Ancients, not being aware of the brain, thought the heart was the location of the “soul”.  If there is such a thing, I think maybe they had it right all along.

This Comes From the Heart…Part 1

Really.  This past Thursday I had a Cardiolite stress test and an echocardiogram of the heart. 

Cardiolite (picture the little TM within a circle for the trademark symbol here) is a radioactive substance they inject into a vein in your arm.  They give it 15 minutes for it to circulate through your body, then take “pictures” of your heart with a scanner.  I hated that part–the scanner that is.  The scan takes 10 minutes, during which time you can do nothing, other than lie perfectly still doing an imitation of a statue with its left arm over its forehead.  Trust me, 10 minutes is a very long time.  The machine itself is not that scary compared to MRI, CT, and radiation machines.  I spent my first time under it wondering if they could attach a little TV screen angled down into your field of vision. 

Immediately after that scan, you walk a treadmill while hooked up to an EKG machine, until your heart rate escalates to a “target” level (or, if you can’t walk the treadmill, they will raise your heart rate chemically).  Now then, let’s back up for a minute. 

This was Thursday.  On Tuesday I was diagnosed with bronchitis, and given an antibiotic and an inhaler, and I had some doubt about whether this was a good time to do a stress test.  So I called the cardiologist’s office and spoke to the medical assistant who said that if I was still breathing and could still walk then I could do it.  Grrr.  I wanted to say, what if I don’t feel like it?  But she had waved the red cape.  If they thought I could do it, my plan was to do it. 

Thursday morning, I wished I hadn’t tried to be so macho about it.  I hadn’t slept well the night before.  I was feeling not at my best, and was mildly anxious about the stress test since you can die during them.  Then I wasn’t able to clear my brain with coffee because you can’t have caffeine for 24 hours before the test.  I forced myself to eat something at 8:30 A.M., even though the instructions said nothing to eat or drink after 8:00 A.M.  Here was my reasoning:  the instructions said don’t eat or drink anything after 8:00 A.M. if your test begins at noon or 1:00 P.M.  Since my test was at 1:00 P.M. I figured that gave me until 9:00 A.M., technically.  Then I went to work, and worked without even a sip of water for 4 hours. 

We now return to the scene.  The consent form you sign is not encouraging.  It tells you that you can a) have a heart attack during the test (2 chances in 10,000) , b) have a heart attack and die during the test (1 in 10,000).  That tells me that if you do have a heart attack, there is a 50% chance you’ll live.  You agree that if that does happen, you give the doctor complete leeway to give you any drugs and perform any procedures that will save your life (one presumes, so that later you don’t sue them.  Like that won’t happen anyway with some idiots).

I was able to walk the treadmill to the target.  When you reach that target, they inject you again with the Cardiolite.  Then they let you go for an hour, and the happy thing is, you can eat!  Still no caffeine, though.  I went to Famous Dave’s and had what I thought would be quickest–a bowl of chili and a baked potato.  It was the best food I’ve ever eaten, and it wasn’t  that good, if you get my meaning. 

As soon as you get back after that hour, you go under the scanner again.  This time, I counted.  One, two, three, fifty-seven, etc.  I am apparently a slow counter.  I was at 8 1/2 minutes when the timer went off for 10 minutes. 

And today I got the results.  When they called and left a message on my cell phone, my first reaction was, this can’t be good.  I’m experienced with getting results.  They tell you it will be a week…and they call you within 24 hours…that can’t be good.  But in some cases they are just giving themselves wiggle room.  It probably was just that today the doctor had time to review the test, and the news is:  it was normal. 

Go Heart!  Good job!  Keep up the good work!

Now I Know I’m Sick

For the last three weeks I’ve had this low level upper respiratory thing going on, and I have generally felt awful.  I kept hoping it would go away on its own, but unfortunately it has flared, in the way these things do. 

I was feeling so good about everything….it’s been two years since I got any sort of upper respiratory thing, when usually it’s at least once or twice a year.  I was crediting the flu shot I got this season, which even if it isn’t protecting me against H1N1 has apparently protected me against something or the other.  That and the fact that the people in my office, many of whom have kids, have stayed the hell home when their kids are sick, which I encourage.  Also they are on a Lysol campaign.  We are the largest consumer of Lysol in the Tallahassee area.  Just kidding, but any day now I expect to get a coupon offer from the Lysol people.

Now though, I know I’m really sick and that it’s not going to go away on it’s own and I’m going to have to break down and go to the doctor.  I actually called them last Thursday and asked if they would call in a prescription for me for antibiotics.  The answer was, if you haven’t seen the doctor in the last 30 days, No.  So I said, can I get an appointment?  That answer was, No. So I would have to just walk in and wait.  And they say medical care would be slower if we had universal health care. 

But how do I know that I’m really sick?  Is it that my fever is higher or I feel worse?  Well yes, both those things are true, but really, it’s because of the behavior of my animals. 

Dogs and cats are very sensitive to your moods and physical condition.  With dogs, that isn’t at all surprising.  Dogs have not only been trained to  sniff for drugs…they also can predict seizures and detect cancer.  So even untrained, I believe they have a sort of raw ability to sense changes in you.  And with some exceptions, they get worried, because they put together the part about how you are the source of food.  It’s all self-interest to them.  If you die, where will the food come from? 

So they hover.  Not that they don’t normally hover, but they are hovering more than usual.  The Girl Dog hovers so much that it’s hard for me to walk when wearing sandals or slippers because she steps on the back of them and almost causes me to fall. 

Cats are different.  You will often find, if you have a cat, that it will sit on your chest when you’re sick.  This is just in case you were having trouble smothering to death by yourself.  It never occurs to a cat that your death or incapacitation would result in less food.  Cats are like, I can always eat a lizard.  Well I have news for the cat.  First I have to open the door.  You may think you’re smart, but you still haven’t mastered that part. 

It’s also Murphy’s Law that you get sick on holiday weekends when nothing is open.  So Tuesday–after a 7:30 A.M. meeting followed by a 9:15 A.M. meeting–my plan is to go hang out with the uninsured at the clinic where I can’t get an appointment.  Unless the cat smothers me first.

The Abortion “Debate”

I put debate in quotation marks, because as far as I can see, there isn’t much debate actually going on.  There is conversation of a sort, but it mostly falls into the category of “My way or the highway”.  You would expect me to be for abortion rights without reservation, given that I have no religion and that being for abortion rights is generally considered a liberal position.  Well, you would almost be right.  The part that would be wrong is “without reservation”.

I have tried to have many conversations with myself about the issue, and a surprising thing happens.  My mind just skips ahead to some other subject.  I find it a painful topic to contemplate.  I bring it up now because of two recent developments: one, Obama’s speech at Notre Dame, which was protested by, among others, Norma McCorvey, the “Roe” in Roe v. Wade.  Second, the results of a recent Gallup poll on Americans’ attitudes toward abortion.  Both CNN and the NY Times, in conjunction with CBS, have also done recent polls, and the results of all three are close.  Of course, listening to polls is about as accurate as throwing a bucket of paint on the wall and trying to read meaning into the drip pattern.  I’ve participated in a number of polls and I generally find they aren’t asking the right question, haven’t defined their terms, or don’t give you enough choices–forcing you to choose an answer that doesn’t really reflect your opinion. 

But for the sake of the discussion, the Gallup poll asked this question:  Do you believe abortion should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal under all circumstances?  22% said always legal, 23% said always illegal, 53% said legal under certain cirumstances.  And that is the heart of the problem, isn’t it?  What circumstances?  If there is any debate going on, it’s between the people in the 53% as to what the circumstances should be.  You most often hear rape, incest, and situations where giving birth would be harmful to the health of or even fatal to the mother.  The 23 percenters say that rape and incest are despicable, but it isn’t the child’s fault.  Why kill it for the actions of others?  As for the life of the mother argument, they say that doesn’t even rate a discussion.  That isn’t our place to decide.  It’s in the hands of God. 

The issue that stops my heart is the question of whether abortion is murder or not, which leads to the question When does life begin?  I’ve always held to the belief that until a fetus can survive on its own outside the womb, it is not a viable being, so you can’t “murder” it.   But as a recent article I read pointed out, medical technology has advanced to the point where fetuses can be kept alive outside the womb at earlier and earlier stages.  So what if ten years from now, a fetus can be kept alive at 3 months instead of 5? What then?  Of course there is a limiting factor there.  It does take a certain amount of time for fetuses to develop structures like brains, hearts, and lungs which are arguably important for independent survival. 

Now for Ms. McCorvey.  I feel very sorry for her.  I get that she regrets her decision.  But I find it weird that she now would deny others an option that she herself has already taken. 

In a sense, I’m no closer today to answering the question in my own mind about when life begins.  I’m fortunate that I’ve never had to make the decision about whether or not to have an abortion, but of course I know women who have.  More of them have opted for abortion than not.  I cannot give any serious weight to the “circumstances” under which abortion should be legal.  Is “not being wanted” not reason enough?  Better yet, today’s NY Times op-ed by Nicholas Kristof concerns malnutrition in Africa, which was the tipping point for me.  If I knew that my baby would be likely to starve, and that I would have to watch it starve and suffer for two years, what would I do?  Answer:  I would prevent that through abortion.  Before it became a conscious being, capable of suffering. 

And if I were the father of a fetus that was likely to kill the woman I loved in childbirth, I would have no hesitation.  We could maybe have other children, or maybe not.  But to take the chance of sacrificing a person I love for a being I’ve never even met?  That makes about as much sense to me as the extremist environmental people who commit suicide in order to rid the world of overpopulation. 

I’ve been speaking of the personal struggle to decide whether abortion is a “moral” choice or not, but the question of whether it should be legal or not is a completely different matter.  Even if I had concluded that abortion was “murder”, I reluctantly conclude that I could do it.  But whether or not it should be legal is not something that is up to us to decide.  The results of repealing Roe v. Wade are too terrible to contemplate, but beyond that, we are a nation which respects individual freedom.  Which means we have to respect the choices of others even when we disagree.  Count me among the 22% “always legal”.  Nobody is a good enough judge of whether your circumstances count or not.

Closing Guantanamo

Normally I don’t do this, but I’m about to copy today’s Gail Collins column from the NY Times here.  I’ve done this before–once I copied a post from Andy Borowitz, and another time from Dave Barry of the Miami Herald, where I more or less begged them not to prosecute me for giving them more publicity.  Today Collins ‘ op-ed concerns the closing of the Guantanamo prison.  I was about to post my own thoughts on it, but some days, people just say it better than you ever could.  Okay.  Gail Collins always says it better than I ever could. 

The opposition to closing Guantanamo is a wholly manufactured issue.  The Republicans are using it to scream that Obama is soft on terrorism.  The Democrats are scared to death to oppose them, for fear of…not getting re-elected.  Congress.  Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. 

I just remembered that I was going to let Gail Collins speak for me.  Yeah.  What she said. 

When Did Cowboys Get Wimpy?

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: May 22, 2009

Out of all the problems we have run into in dealing with the giant hairball that is known as the Bush War on Terror, one of the weirdest is the reaction to President Obama’s plan to close down Guantánamo.

 

In the rank of threats to public safety, putting the Guantánamo inmates in maximum-security prisons in the United States has got to come in way behind, say, making it easy for customers to purchase firearms at gun shows.

But to hear the howls coming from Congress, you’d think the Obama administration was planning to house the prisoners in suburban preschools. “Terrorists. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you,” warned a Republican Web video, which mixed pictures of accused terrorists with road signs in states where the G.O.P. predicted they might be sent. In another production, the occasionally loyal opposition resurrected the infamous “Daisy” countdown ad to show a little girl picking petals off a flower while the president prepares to close Gitmo.

“To bring the worst of the worst terrorists inside the United States would be cause for great danger and regret in the years to come,” snarled Dick Cheney in his “no middle ground” speech. Although really, for the sake of the national mental health, it might be better if we all just ignore the former vice president until he agrees to undergo therapy. Forget I ever mentioned it.

Instead, consider the case of Hardin, Mont., a community of 3,400 people just down the road from the place where Custer made his Last Stand.

Lately, things have not been going any better for Hardin than they did for the general. Unemployment is rife. “You go look at our downtown, there’s many closed businesses … you’ll see drunks laying in the street. It’s not a pretty sight,” the head of the town’s economic development authority told National Public Radio. The town built a $27 million, 464-bed prison under the theory that other parts of the state would pay to have Hardin look after their problem residents. But it’s been empty since it was declared open for business nearly two years ago, and the construction loans are in default.

So, with the town council’s enthusiastic support, Hardin volunteered to take the Guantánamo prisoners.

It’s unlikely that the White House would have accepted the offer, but it was certainly an example of pluck and you’d think everyone would give Hardin three cheers. Instead, Montana’s Democratic senators went ballistic.

“We’re not going to bring Al Qaeda to Big Sky Country — no way, not on my watch,” said Max Baucus.

“If these prisoners need a new place, it’s not going to be anywhere near The Last Best Place,” said Jon Tester.

This shows us two things:

1) Montana has given itself many nicknames.

2) Montanans are more easily frightened than Manhattanites.

Think about it. New Yorkers live in the top terror target in the nation. This week four new would-be terrorists were arrested for plotting to blow up synagogues in the Bronx. On the same day, President Obama announced that the first Guantánamo prisoner to be tried in the United States would be coming to court in Lower Manhattan.

Even though it appears the guys involved in the Bronx case were deeply, deeply inept, this is still not the kind of news package you want to hear. But nobody had a fit over it. “Bottom line is we have had terrorists housed in New York before,” said Senator Charles Schumer.

New Yorkers aren’t the only ones who have learned to calmly resist both international terrorism and national hysteria. The small town of Florence, Colo., has a 490-bed high-security facility known as Supermax, which houses 33 terrorists, including Ramzi Yousef, who led the first World Trade Center bombing; the failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid; and Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The local residents seem fine with it, possibly because they know the prisoners spend 23 hours a day in their cells, which are made of poured concrete and furnished with concrete tables and bunks.

Nobody escapes from maximum-security prisons. But even if they did, who would you rather have on the lam in your neighborhood — a native of Afghanistan whose history suggests an affinity for jihad? Or a resident of your own state whose history suggests an affinity for breaking into people’s houses, tying them up and torturing them?

The nation, as we all know, is divided into crowded states and empty states, and I was always under the impression that folks in the empty places were particularly brave and self-reliant. Those of us who live in the crowded parts have many good qualities, but we are not necessarily all of pioneer stock, given the critical importance we assign to restaurants that deliver at 2 in the morning.

Who knew we were tougher than Montanans?

News From Florida…Political Edition

In my last News From Florida post, I mentioned that Governor Charlie Crist is planning to run for the U.S. Senate, and that you might as well start calling him Senator Charlie.  But there is more news.  First, a little civics lesson on Florida government.  Hey…stop that!  I saw you nodding off!  Don’t make me have to come over there and rap your hand with this ruler.  Plus, I promise I will be very brief.   

The “Executive Branch” basically consists of the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, and the Cabinet.  And in Florida, there are only three Cabinet members–the Secretary of Agriculture, the CFO, and the Attorney General.  There used to be a Secretary of State (does the name Katherine Harris ring a bell?) but that position has been downgraded to a non-Cabinet level position.  Also as opposed to the federal government, where Cabinet members are appointed by the President, and then have to be confirmed by Congress, the Cabinet in Florida is elected.  That’s how Governor Charlie ended up with a Democratic woman as the CFO.  You can wake up now…civics lesson over. 

So now that Charlie is running for the Senate, the CFO and the Attorney General have announced they are running for Governor.  The Secretary of Agriculture had been expected to announce that he too was running for Governor, but there seems to be some pressure on from the Republican Party for him not to run, so as not to split votes away from the Attorney General.  If he doesn’t run, he’ll be out as Ag Sec anyway due to term limits.  And the Lieutenant Governor has announced he’s running for Attorney General.  Are you dizzy yet?

I have a suggestion to make.  It would be a lot easier and cheaper if they would have a big meeting where they drew names of positions out of a hat.  Or they could play musical chairs, which is kind of what they’re doing anyway.

This would be a good time for you, Dear Reader, to announce your candidacy for something.  Personally I would suggest Lieutenant Governor, because the job apparently consists of flying you and your family from Tallahassee all over the state in the state plane, unless you are performing other important functions like speaking to Girl Scouts. 

As for the Governor’s race, I advise you to root for the girl.

Reading and Flirting With Fakename

Maybe.  The reading is for certain;  the flirting part is iffy.  We’ll get to that later. 

One of my favorite authors is James Lee Burke, who has a recurring character named Dave Robichaux, a deputy sheriff in New Iberia, Lousiana, where Burke himself lives although he now spends part of his time in Montana.  The first of the Dave Robichaux books I read is In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead.  How could you not read a book with a title like that?  I’ve read all but one since, and there are 11 of them.  Another of my favorite titles is Last Car to Elysian Fields.  Dave makes occasional forays from New Iberia to New Orleans, and of course, Elysian Fields is a main thoroughfare there, but the title is intended as double entendre.  I traveled Elysian Fields frequently as it was just a couple of blocks from my house and had commercial businesses on it that served our neighborhood.  One of its great attractions was that as you drove toward the Mississippi where it dead ends, you could often see ocean-going vessels in the water, 22 feet higher than where you were on the roadway.  A vivid reminder that you were living below sea level. 

In the books, Dave has a daughter named Alafair, which just so happens to be the name of James Lee Burke’s actual daughter, who is now a writer herself.  I read the first (for me) of her books this week, and even though I’d warned myself not to expect her to be the same as her father, I was still disappointed.  It was, as the critics say, formulaic.  It takes place in New York City but you get no sense of place in the book.  It might as well have been in Cleveland.  James Lee is a master at creating the atmosphere of South Louisiana in which the plot unfolds.  You get the sense of its strangeness and vague danger, and its beauty as well. 

But perhaps I might not have thought so poorly of it if I hadn’t just finished Roscoe by William Kennedy.  Kennedy was the author of Ironweed, for which he won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.  When you read a book by a world class writer followed by a piece of fluff, the fluff looks that much worse.  Not that I have anything against fluff.  The book I read before Roscoe was Plum Spooky by Janet Evanovich, another of my favorite writers. 

And now to Roscoe.  This book was loaned to me by a man I met at work in March.  He’s the Project Manager for a construction company from out of town, and for business reasons too complicated to explain I see him for a few minutes at a time perhaps every other day and sometimes in passing at other times.  He has seen me reading, and yet it surprised me one day when he struck up a conversation about William Kennedy, who he said was his favorite writer.  Nobody, he said, can put together words like Kennedy, and tell a story the way he does. 

The following week, I found Roscoe on my desk when I arrived at work.  Sweet.  It dawned on me that this guy might be flirting with me.  (You were wondering when we would get to that part, right?)  But you can never be sure.  Propositions are sure.  Flirting is ambiguous.  So if there are any potential flirters out there who want to flirt with me, please remember to bring the Flash Card that says “Now Flirting.”

It turns out he was right about Kennedy.  Roscoe was a marvelous book, as I said when I returned it.  I might mention that while the setting is Albany, New York, and the machine politics there in the early days of the 20th century, it is um, very explicit shall we say.  Which caused me to think there might definitely be some flirting involved.  I mean, why would you give a woman a book like that?  So when I returned it, I said, this was great.  Sex and politics in New York State, how much better could it get?  And he blushed!  Hint to flirters, never blush, it’s a dead giveaway. 

But I have to admit it was a great strategy.  If I were interested in him, which I’m not, it would have given me an opening to start something.  If I’m not interested, you can save face and just pretend you were all about sharing your literary preferences.  But for all you other potential flirters out there, here’s a hint:  Go ahead and loan me a book, and let’s see what happens.