Category: blogpost

The Least I Could Do

Yesterday, after buying a cup of tea and nine copies of Real Change, I cried in the grocery store.

It was cold out, below freezing. Snow fell off and on, some of it snow that had fallen the day before, stirred up and blown sideways by wind sharp enough it had teeth. The light was silver tarnished by winter clouds, though the sun’s generous nature would win out later and turn the day if not kind at least kinder. I’d got a good chill in my fingers and hands scraping the windshield — forgot to grab gloves on the way out the door. But by the time I had driven up the hill to the store I was warm all the way through.

Two days previous, I was swimming in an ocean warm as bath-water, jumping waves with my love and watching the sun set at the end of a week and a half in Costa Rica with Dr. Bae.

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Like this, only closer.

We’d been gone since before Christmas, so there was nothing to eat in the house. So I went to the grocery store. I didn’t bother to make a list. We needed, like, everything, all the stuff we usually have around, plus a couple of specific requests from Dr. Bae, which of course I’d remember. I was wearing four layers, wishing I’d put on more. Yeah I’d just come from paradise, where I’d lived in my bathing suit most of a week. But it was cold, man. Crossing the parking lot, I couldn’t wait to get inside.

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This is a pretty serious cold snap for the PNW.

Back when I was a bartender — back when I took most of my pay home in cash, and always had a wad of singles and fives in my pocket — I used to give money to just about every homeless person who asked. I got a buck for opening a beer; it was no big deal to kick down and help somebody out. I figured if they were bad off enough they needed to stand around outside and ask strangers for money, they needed it more than I did.

Since then, I don’t carry cash as much as I used to. Even if I was still a bartender, I probably wouldn’t: nowadays everybody pays with a card. Walking with all your tips is a thing of the past. Even if I do have cash, it’s usually in twenties, stuck away in my wallet just in case. Like yesterday.

I think it was because I was thinking about how cold I was that my eyes didn’t slide past the lady selling Real Change outside Safeway the way they so often do. Real Change is a fine publication, and as a card-carrying bleeding-heart liberal progressive social justice warrior I 100% approve of their undertaking and mission. But I also resent them, because I’ve already got more to read than I could possibly keep up with. So I’m basically buying a piece of recycling (or, depending on where you live, compost).

It’s a real conundrum, negotiating that particular intersectionality. Put simpler: life is complicated.

Except it wasn’t. I was freezing and I looked at the lady standing in the cold and decided I’d buy a paper and get her two dollars closer to wherever she was trying to get to. It seemed the least I could do.

“Can you break a twenty?”

“I don’t know. Let me see.”

She had to take off her gloves to count back the change. She had a hat on, and a jacket I might use as a mid-layer between my long underwear and my outer jackets.
She was shivering, the cold crept into her bones, it looked like. We talked a little while she counted change back. I let her get to sixteen and said I’d just make it easy on both of us and buy two. I asked her if I could get her anything inside: a bite of food or a hot drink. She asked for a hot tea and being a retired bartender I asked how she liked it.

“Just a hot tea with a little sugar in it.” Her hands were shaking so hard she had trouble putting her gloves back on. Continue reading “The Least I Could Do” →

Last Night I Dreamed

That I was very sad, and so I was going to go sit in my car and blast Corey Hart’s Never Surrender and have a singalong and a good cry. But things kept getting in the way, and I never made it. Now the song is (not unpleasantly) stuck in my head, and given it’s New Year’s Eve of this shitshow dumpster fire of a decade, I’ve decided there’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere. Anyway, here’s this ’80s kid’s parting gift to you for the ’10s:

 

The Real Impeachment Question

Is simple. The President of the United States openly and admittedly leveraged his powers of office for personal political gain, jeopardizing the United States’ national security and undermining the free and fair elections that are the foundation of our constitutional republic. The facts are indisputable, and, in fact, no one, not even the President’s most vocal defenders, disputes them.

So the question is simply this: Are we a society in which powerful white men can do whatever the fuck they want with impunity, or are we a society in which the same laws apply to everyone?

It really is that simple.

Impeachment Articles

There are two. One for hijacking US national security and foreign policy for personal political gain. One for the complete stonewall of Congress doing its Constitutionally-mandated duty. Both proven beyond the shadow of doubt, up to and including public confessions of wrongdoing. No Mueller material, no 2016 redux.

Is it the right play? Who the fuck knows? But I get why Pelosi and Nadler and Schiff et al decided to go this route. They’ve got the administration dead to rights on both of them. The Republican defense has involved a lot of squid ink and rhetorical questions about it could be more outlandish, tho, amirite?

I mean, it’s not like this is over. The Senate will have a trial, John Roberts presiding. In any actual court of law, the case would be a slam dunk. That it’s widely expected the Senate will fail to convict on a party-line vote doesn’t change that, much as the irrefutability of the evidence won’t change the party-line voting, probably.

There’s a kind of inevitability to all of it. But it’s also not over til it’s over. Keeping the prosecution focused on obvious and admitted wrongdoing that goes to the heart of our constitutional republic is probably the best of a bunch of bad options. The Republicans want the situation chaotic and complicated, so people throw up their hands and decide the truth can’t be known. But the truth is very simple. Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses, admitted it in public, and has obstructed justice to keep the consequences from coming down on him ever since. That he’s done a million other things that would be impeachable if we lived in the world we all thought we did til the last few years doesn’t matter.

I’d love him to answer for every last one of them. I really would. But why reopen old arguments? It just muddies things.

Keep it simple is a good plan. Will it work? Probably not. But neither would any of the other options. At least this way it’ll free up Bernie and Liz and Cory to get back to running earlier, and who knows? Maybe it’ll wind up the albatross around those Republican Senators’ necks that it would in a just world. Stranger things have happened.