Short Stories, Long Odds

I really, really feel compelled to get hammered and watch the state of the union.

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I saw a poll today. It said

Why do you think John Kerry moved to filibuster Samuel Alito’s confirmation?

The choices were

1. Conviction
2. Politics

So the implication here is that conviction and politics are totally separate. Am I being too nitpicky? Its possible. John Kerry is far from my favorite Democrat these days – just last night I said that if Kerry manages to whip the Senate Democratic caucus, he would claw his way out of being dead to me, but if not, it was over.

So, its pretty much over.

Alan Greenspan is retiring as Chairman of the Fed this week, and everyone who bet that interest rates would always be low and their houses would always gain 10 percent in value per year are about to get an expensive lesson in economics. I may be overstating it a little, but I feel like one of the big things that have been keeping the interior macroeconomic nightmares at bay in this country has been Greenspan’s stranglehold on inflation. I know, he doesn’t do it all himself, he has his henchlings and the finest economic minds in the country to lay it out for him, but good god, he listened. Our national debt is $8 trillion, and most of the $1.5 trillion we’ve borrowed in the last few years has come from China. Things are, uh, gonna get dicey.

I wish I could get excited about Republican problems, but I just can’t, and its because I’m almost entirely convinced that nothing will come of it. My trust is difficult to regain when I’ve had the good sense to withhold it.

I’m going to bed. I’m gonna be funny soon. Maybe I’ll tell you a joke about a statue that comes to life and shits on pigeons.

The work that I’ve done for you is evident. I meant to write a big post to celebrate my new delicious server, design, but instead I updated my iPod.

So, sorry. Here’s a short list of things you can expect in the next week, so that you know I’m still working for you:

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We’ve really done something here.

I went to have a mole excision on Thursday – its a regular occurrence because I had a melanoma in 2000. So a couple of times a year I see my dermatologist and once a year I go to the oncologist.

These are two odd trips – at the dermatologist, rather than getting a beauty peel or some similarly vain treatment, my doctor is fending off attacks from my skin, which is trying to kill me. At the oncologist, I’m merely there to have a blood panel and chem gas done to make sure nothing bad is happening, while everyone else is there trying to not die.

So anyways, I’m always awake for the procedures, and my dermatologist, for the 24 hours or so I’ve been around him, seems like a decent, intelligent, good man. He’s from Puerto Rico, drives a nice car, and dates. The last time I went in he shocked me by dropping the “End Times” bomb on me, so I wasn’t necessarily surprised to find out he’s a Republican.

So dduring my surgery, he tells the nursing staff assisting him that I’m a Democrat, that I’ve in fact worked on campaigns before. They all boo and hiss and laugh. I say something witty, like “Well, your guy is working out great, huh?” They all sort of mumble and continue the cutting.

Towards the end of the procedure, my doctor says “Hey, when you start paying taxes, you’ll become a Republican!”

To which I answer, “I’ve been paying taxes for years.”

And he says “Well. real taxes. When you start making a lot of money.”

And I says, I says to him, “But thanks to Republican legislation and how stacked the cards are against me, I probably never will, despite being a class warrior.”

I don’t have to pick a new dermatologist now, or anything, but damn. You’d think I totally blasted ass in there or something.