Cup of Coffee & a Gourd of Ash

A friend posted a quip at facebook about Mexico giving away free Viagra. The current fascination is the 12.21.12 madness: he has known of it (and in point of fact my son had mentioned the same details somewhile back).

One of those items you idly handle then store for future thought - it, too, idle.

We're all of a certain age here, and a subsequent email took the matter a bit further. If civilization collapsed, resident friend joshed, why should any want to live - go out with a bang, and that's the end of it.

To be sure, some apocalyptic sense of that in WWII...if the world is dying around you, what would you want? Wee bit of creature comfort; some sense of holding close to another in the one embrace that (like a cigarette, after) at least proffers sensation. Those dark eyes of passion...whether they are real or no...

For that moment, they seem to be so. And if the world indeed were collapsing about you, what need of masks...hold close, love.

Hold close...

Novels from that day still fascinate me. (The best of them, yes, Alan Furst.) Perhaps because in the slow cold of days of ash, where success & how much money you have in the bank & how much you can earn have that strange tinny sound of something that can never be music - to have the masks forced from you - to be needing a different mask entirely - a mask that is true (those Resistance masks, so necessary) - to be needing to drink from the cup of truth...

In the third grade, reading Scripture to my great-grandfather for the mercenary hope of that nickle or dime that meant nothing to me, really - it might hold for the moment it was in my hand but then I would forget its existence - lose it...

Thank God.

But I never lost the memory of the verses I read aloud to an aging patriarch I will one day meet again in Heaven. The 23rd Psalm.

His favourite - the first Psalm. Blessed is the man...

And I must imagine, the Apocalypse. Because I have believed since I was a young girl (remember, third grade) that I would see the last days...

But I become pensive.

My mama raised me on astrology, Rosicrucian mysticism, yoga, the antediluvian continents of Mu & Atlantis, Edgar Cayce, the Akashic Records - a whole host of exciting material (science fiction/fantasy stuff) just the ticket for a Young Girl with Much Imagination.

I remember a story I tried to write - by then I was in the eighth grade & living at my dad's - we'd moved to New Orleans. A white, winged horse - seems a herd of them.

A family of white, winged horses...

A home in mountains so high the very air was blue. It was like a Grecian temple - white, marbled floors, open space...columns, not holding up a roof, but open to the sky...

It kept me company for a very long time, though I do not know where the pages I wrote might be, or really, whether I ever wrote them.

I remember white and blue and mountain air, the kind you only could know if you flew on a white horse, earliest morning purity, earliest morning free...

Still keep white & blue about me as I can - a visceral thing: the two colours - always combined - seem essence of all that is needful to me even now, the age of memory now...

(Yes, goodly tales of Pegasus and other Greek myths peopled my childhood, as any good childhood should find amongst its best playmates...

And yes, resident stuff of deep psyche/symbol/myth/archetype in all of it...

Yes, any one who is as sensitive to colour as I am might need winged horses to manage a life...

Winged horses & perhaps those who know best how to ride them...

They are in short supply these days; both horses and riders...)

To be sure, I was a little older than Bambi's Children and the lavishly illustrated German & French faery tale volumes at that juncture - all my mama's from her own childhood - and at a place where the clear vision of dream is usually beginning to leave most chillens - one can posit whether imagination holds creative sorts back or no as you choose but by the time I grew up & married & became a mother myself, I had taught myself to associate creativity with madness.

Irrevocably. Held me back for a number of years and then one day...

Hmm. Will have to return to that thought.

For have wandered, as always, from the point at which I began. First, what I would not give for all the Edgar Cayce books (although I suspect she only had two) - okay, so it'd be nice to have the Abbie Hoffman paperbacks, too, and The Great Speckled Bird underground newspapers, and hey, how about the David Hunt books (which I did possess in great number) - and the letters from an old friend I cannot find no matter how diligently I seek them...

Episcopal child here; some years in my life (both with my mother & later, in my father's home) raised in the Church - and quite frankly, the little girl who loved Bambi's Children & still (as above) remembers her great-grandfather paying her a nickle or a dime to read Scripture to him lives in me far more purely than when that mercenary little girl held the promised change in her hand - the single coin; I knew it was of value because my brothers fussed over it so - but even then disdained to earn it reading Scripture to an old man...

But the coin held in that small hand still means less to me than a living should require it mean.

Maybe that is good. Maybe not.

Might addend Orson Welles and Rosebud and leave it there...return to the subject begun. It is Sunday morning - a quiet day - my cup of coffee and thinking of a gourd of ashes - a cup of ash, poured out...Thursday afternoon, friend afore-mentioned told me about 2012 and as he told it (with that Southern sensibility of Building to the Perfect Crest) - I might summarize his story with that reality that you can take most things nowadays with a - err, a whole cup of salt...

But that one thing stunned. Scared him, he said (the shortened form of Southern sensibility).

The Hopi legends foretell a spiderweb will cover the earth in the last days.

The web, he supplied, though it was of course not needed. I'd already jumped there.

It was the next day before I had a chance to google said matter. My friend'd mentioned the show(s) on the History Channel - and that this is building, not just from ancient legend but from current scientific theories regarding solar flares and magnetic fields and who knows what else.

Pole-flipping is just not my cup of t--. Err. Coffee.

I like a good story - a good frenzy - that sense of tingle & excitement some get from horror films: I always find enough of fiction in this or that & then return to ho hum. I thought this could be my latest fix & there it'd be and...

Didn't quite expect the Extreme Amount of Information out there. That scared the daylights out of me. And then when I began to see that People Who Should Know Better were buying into the frenzy...

I became quite unnerved.

Two things of note there. One, back in the Y2K scare - you see, my thinking tends to be apocalyptic for reasons that are actually rather sober: those of us who are called by the Name of the Redeemer need to keep a particular lens in view: which is to say, when we examine the world about us, we need to keep an eye out for things that portend a particular end.

Something is going to trip the button one day & a countdown will begin.

Can't know beforehand what it might be - can't know how many 'scares' will happen before the real item arrives. That was my understanding of the matter then; it remains so now. Didn't turn out to be Y2K - it was worrisome that it might be until the time that it was not - but even Y2K didn't terrify me quite so much as Friday afternoon when I realized how much 'stuff' is out there on said subject matter at hand...

I told one of my co-workers why. Y2K, I explained, I was the crazy one. Everyone around me scoffed at my concern for possibilities. Now - one of the cornerstones of that time is telling me he is worried?

One thing about group dynamics: some get to be scared, some get to agitate, some have to be cool, calm & collected...

When the dynamics change...well, there went my little bit of security.

Rather droll. You do see I'm...no. You don't. I didn't put any emoticons in so you are quite incapable of seeing whether I am being dry, witty or ironic.

Or terrified.

As it turned out, too much of the 12.21.12 matter is conjecture.

Frenzy. Remember, that kind that is exhilarating because it's really only a movie & when we get bored with it we can turn it off? Friday night I read at length the material proffered. That strange 11.11 item. My son's birthday happens to be November 11 & any who know him would certainly eye that item & sagaciously intone, yup. That boy is chaos personified - the kind that makes chaos something Everyone Should Have in Their Lives, once or twice...

But a great many really Quiet Folk were likewise born on November 11...see, with numbers in particular, only so many of them & you can find all kinds of connections between numbers because of it that seem laid out in stone, pointing in a particular direction, etc.

And yes, the reality remains that a great many of them are, and do.

But not all of them. And merely because some do indeed point out, laid in stone, a particular direction...doesn't necessarily mean we can do with that what we are doing.

But I did promise to return to that thought and it was mere notation of that moment when Chaos Personified startled me out of that notion that creativity = madness and catapulted me back on this Strange Ride of Being a Creative....

But back to the matter at hand. I think the lemming effect has taken over. Or, if you prefer, the sheep effect. All we like sheep...

It's a group dynamic thing again, but played out on a huger scale, which the web makes more possible...and one day, other things will as well.

What am I saying? I suspect - I know that things are going to happen, and they are going to be bad. One of the consequences of being human - of greed - of the sin nature within us (that nature our Redeemer came to give us a fighting chance of overcoming): these things are going to happen because they are the natural consequence of being human.

But how - when - who...that is where we have prophecies to guide us & while I prefer the visions of the Jewish prophets, I am not one to scorn those of other folk. The Hopi's gourd of ashes, for instance...returning (as all things should) to those who brought it upon the earth...

Whether that means the country whose scientists designed it or the one whose leaders dropped it onto Japan...

Don't know yet, do we. But as for me, if only saving pennies could be the ticket out of America (for me, for those I know & love) in 2012...I was thinking about it, you see. Europe, the UK, Africa, Russia, India, Pakistan, Korea, the Middle East. As the Teacher said, in that day, where can you go? Cry out to the mountains, but how can they hide you?

Well. Australia. Or deep in the interior of South America...

But I am dreaming. It is Sunday morning. The last of my coffee is cold. Just that teensiest of half-drop left. Cold like a gourd of ashes...

Cold like Sunday morning when you have had years now to know that only in Heaven will there be blue & white & open air & things that are pure and have wings like white horses...

But I will leave the rest of it to you & google...and if I've wandered as always & quite forgotten threads I promised...if they now wait unknit and bare...well.

You should really be used to that by now, no?

Out in the Blogosphere

'Garret' only has one 't.' I cannot begin to tell you how disappointed I am. It looks rather naked there, don't you think - two 'r' letters, fat & happy - and nair but the one 't' to accompany them. Like a fiddler, perhaps, in the rain.

A fiddler needs the sun to manage properly, out there on the street corner somewhere, cap patiently on the sidewalk beside him waiting coins. Put him out there in the rain & the effect of it all is lost. The pathos of it all, watercolour running in the rain, as a songster once noted...

Which is to say. The watercolour wasn't exactly a work of art. If it were, it wouldn't have been out on the street corner anyway...

Oh me. I don't even have the benefit of a typo: the poor word is firmly & completely misspelled in my mind (and you should hear the way I pronounce things, trouncing all over them as if they belonged to me & I could wrest them into whatever shape I chose; I have even been known to completely delete a word from my small cache of spoken vocabulary purely on the reality that the true pronunciation was not at all what I'd assumed & didn't feel like what a word should for me to use it).

And now I must not only correct it in those places I tromp about, free ranging, but in my sidebar as well.

What brought all this on. Well, I do keep a tracker on my columns here - a fairly necessary item in a world where you don't have people purchasing your work to let you know anyone is reading it - and back on 30 October, a reader from somewhere in Florida (I will be delicate & not mention the city) googled the quote by Thoreau I keep for good company on my sidebar here at passeres.

I'm now up to six separate visitors with the same quote (which I'd thought misspelled & google didn't help since they politely note, "did you mean...garrett...") and imagine the paper must be due.

The assignment appears to be either to 'explain' or 'paraphrase' the quote - and, in good form, the students all type in the entire quote (properly spelled); the daughter of the woman for whom I am the fictional representative is working on her doctorate (and in addition to teaching fellowships has experience as a middle school teacher & summers of teaching/assisting at a well-known program for gifted students): I've heard along the way of students and their proclivity for - err, borrowing the work of others without letting the other(s) know.

I do hope the instructor who assigned the good Thoreau googles his/her assignments before grading.

Nonetheless, although passeres pops up as the second hit each time the good man is googled, the students won't even get the benefit of research or commentary on my part for a literature assignment. I know one reader - I have to imagine it was a young man; somehow I could just picture the frustration & couldn't see a young woman being quite so concerned about it: he even went so far as to cache the results, certain google had misled him - the item does not appear in my posts, but only in my sidebar and you can read every word in the post google proffers twenty times, but you will never find the quote therein.

Each time google put passeres up save one, it was to a different page at passeres. I found that amusing as well, peering into their small world in my imagination. Three blind men & the elephant sort of amusing.

Not as if anyone would be in class saying, oh, did you see that blog?

Nothing remarkable 'pon which to comment at passeres.

N'est ce pas? She said ruefully (because after all, too many seem to take my wailing seriously). [Err, that is. It is, to be sure, serious; if it were not, I wouldn't be me.

But it is Extremely Nerve-wracking for Said Many to worry about wee bird.

Tough old bird here, as I mentioned to a friend yesterday - one of those who actually exist in the day-to-day of it, which another friend (of that day-to-day variety) tells me is what a friend actually is - day-to-day, in the flesh - not those screen personalities by which facebook & myspace & chatrooms (and resident bird, tough or otherwise, does not go to chatrooms) seem to define as friendship; he quite has a Notion about these things - i.e., a passion - and he is, indeed, quite right about the matter.

Except he is also quite wrong.) In any case, I got the impression the other friend didn't really see how tough said bird actually is.

But I ignored it & continued eating the bowl of homemade potato soup he'd warmed for me - cooked by his own wife's hands - and brought me to eat while I was answering phones at the job yesterday.

Very tough bird, here.

Very, very, very.)]

Not much else to do with it (imagination): it seems to interfere with living the good life of the ant mentioned in other posts.

On which note I move merrily along to a friend I've met here in the blogosphere. I am (for those of you to whom I am at the present moment being introduced) like an overgrown puppy & still prone (as I mention often) to jumping up to lick your face when you're in your Sunday best: I don't mean to, but I am a puppy & can't seem to contain my exuberance; can't help that I can quite stand as tall as you are & put my silly paws on your shoulder - and that tail I keep wagging has knocked everything off the coffee table behind us. My paws are not just oversized & wet but covered in mud & tiny blades of grass - after all, you mowed the lawn last night before going to bed & it rained in the wee hours.

Two major problems there. The one, I tend to jump in when most my age would be more seemly. I hear often that the blogosphere is a place where you meet new friends. All for friendship, here. But I suspect I would do better in that corner of the garret alone with my thoughts; I tend to assume people want to hear my thoughts & then there goes another friend.

Oh well. Leaving out, to be sure, the part about all the anxieties inherent in Being a Writer; in any case, Someone Out There in the Blogosphere deleted a post he'd written & a great many rushed in to say they have experienced that same sense of - well, exuberance? confusion? paranoia? as that which prompted him (out of concern for the opinion of others) to write, post, then erase a post.

Those moments wherein we are all caught in that same lovely place of tossing the masks into the refuse pile and such relief it is, too.

But then we have to dig them out & put them on again and at that point (however pristine they might appear to viewers) we know they are covered in muck.

Inherent in this game I play of fictional and/or hiding is that same impulse. (Umm, the one before that lovely moment of tossing off the mask.) But I find that you really can't hide; something in what it is to be human (for those of us who are called to this game of words & revealing) and there you are again, in the muck of it, paws dirtying someone else's Sunday best & there it all goes.

Back before the new medium, which allows not only instantaneous publishing but also eliminates the buffer of someone else editing you before you are published, a writer had some sort of - umm, place to hide.

The fact of being published (i.e, someone investing actual money in your thoughts) at least meant somebody out there thought what you said had merit.

Even if the whole world turned on you & splat & there goes it. Infamy, ignominy [one of those very few words that survived once I learned how to pronounce it properly] or whatever fate had stored for you (and only you).

Writers tend to pull from that necessity of self-revealing. It is where stories come from.

Shakespeare, for instance. Having read one or two biographies about him in the last few years, I was somewhat stunned to find out just how possible it is that even the Great One pulled from his very own life in the plays & sonnets he created.

Had another friend once I (quite innocently; I am a writer, after all & with writers, at least, one can hope for some sense of 'been there, done that' rueful acceptance of the matter) embarrassed by commenting on something he'd written that I - err, happened to have intimate knowledge of, being as we are friends - and his reaction was quite severe.

I knew I had invaded that buffer writers require so that they can write.

Can reveal.

Hadn't meant to. I backed 'way as best I could & was more careful next time.

Blogging does change the parameters in that buffer. But I come to think that a large part of the whole will be (for each of us) merely learning to create that buffer - and maintain it - regardless of the lacking in the new medium itself. I do know how much praise a writer requires to survive in any medium - those who never know writers save by their work wouldn't necessarily be privy to that - or to the immense bravado that is the necessity (and reality) of being able to self-reveal.

In any case, those of us who are called to that torture will survive or no - will edge out, one small inch at a time, retreat, cursing ourselves for our very brazenness - will eventually figure out no one is reading us anyway (thank you Sitemeter) and will venture out again. (And really, people may indeed be reading us.

But will anyone ever read us quite so closely as we read ourselves?)

One other issue inherent in blogging - someone popping up on your doorstep & not even the courtesy of ringing your doorbell (though as those who do peruse my sidebar will note, I proffer an email address for removing at least some of the sting of the whole world observing) but there they are, sitting in your very living room drinking a cup of tea.

I think it is that, in the end, many people would likely prefer only their friends read their blogs [and in point of fact, such is possible. One can have a blog & restrict readership to 'invitation only.'] but we get back to that sense of - err, defining realities in being a writer.

Feel rather badly about that, being one of those uninvited guests (but I am at present merely drinking Lipton, which as all tea-drinkers know, is not really tea) - as noted a few paragraphs back, many do make new friends on the internet, and quite easily.

But I think now perhaps they are a sort that make friends easily anyway and - for all my exuberance (& irresistible charm), I don't seem to have that knack.

Too much of me, is all I can figure. I could have titled this post, Annie Hall...a good friend calls me that & while I would prefer that Annie Hall be known as Wren King...

Well. You get the picture. Annie Hall girl here & as I know several others like me, waif-like & incapable of being orderly or quiet and yes, dippy as can possibly be imagined...

I tend to avoid them, too.

Well, off to correct my spelling of garret and hope the correct spelling does not upend my joyful chortle at the words of Thoreau...I could always ditch the quote: no one is reading my columns anyway & I suspect an awful lot of high school & university students end up for a few minutes peering into my tiny universe & then off they go, looking for something more profitable.

I think some new loss of subtlety will happen on a global level thanks to the blogosphere; after all, when you require emoticons to let you know a person was laughing...I suppose I can hope the professor visited passeres. Maybe he/she will come back. In my own reading, I only regularly hit blots (err, that was a typo) and/or sites that contain newsfeeds anyway.

Don't know that I would read passeres if I weren't the one writing it...

Can hope that misspelled word is not on someone's blackboard & passeres held up as the posterchild of what happens when you...

Well. Never mind. In need of a new set of watercolours here, and a pad of paper that has not wrinkled from the rain.

[Editor's note(s). A silent thank you (& apology) to the blogger mentioned above, into whose living room Wren inadvertently catapulted. She notes that she is leaving you un-linked out of respect for that needful sense of privacy she always seems to trounce, and trounce again, overgrown pup that wee bird remains...]

First Saturday After

On the way to work after voting Tuesday, my free cup of Starbucks consumed (all except the trifle spilled like a streak of breeze blown across my sweater trying to manage that lid with the tiny sip-hole - a souvenir, I would happily point out to everyone to whom I chattered, balance of the day; I'm crazy, I commented ruefully, later, tired of telling about a coffee stain no one could see & leery of such high jinks, even in that magpie effusiveness so cheery & so bold)...

Souvenirs of The Day. Like the newspapers selling on eBay now for such lovely glee. History.

Too much energy, that day. Me, you, all of us. The whole world of us. Change, we roared. We did it, we pranced.

Even those of us on the other side of the magic (I voted McCain & would do so again, even knowing how little it could have mattered) caught up in it. That cup of high-wire - more, that wine goblet filled & overflowing. That overload of high glee...

On the way to work that day - a forty minute walk each way down world-famous Peachtree Street - Atlanta was a festive city. High-wire & high glee & filled with such high-riding joy.

Small parade of white cars - second in line a small truck, pristine in newness & shiny clean – still before that final tally, then - next to the last of the five or six vehicle festal, a white pick-up truck – white, shiny pristineness – and filled with folk, all of them black-skinned against the white body of the truckbed.

A performance art - the historical moment - the joy to be told down through the generations of each - the energy so piercing, so sublime - only victory could contain such sublimity: all of them cheering, cheering - black arms peeking out of white Obama tee-shirts - raised above the festal white purity of that new day coming while the horns bellowed like the very stones that must give voice & the voices answering in such pure laughter & affirmation of being: arms raised in the air in unison and dancing, dancing. Obama.

Those of us on the sidewalks laughed with them. A woman - white, likely visiting from the suburbs - she waited to cross the street to the hospital - her bevy of kids about her, wide-eyed with wonder. She laughed, too.

Muttered something about being a McCain in Obamaland.

But she was laughing. All of us part of their moment. Dancers - Atlanta the stage - the sidewalk spectators the audience...

Obama. The whole world dancing. Obama.

So much to say - so much better, perhaps, to not say. It is a good thing that history has been made; a good thing that a man regarded as African-American and his family of wife & daughters (and that puppy-to-be) are to live & laugh & love in the White House.

A good thing to see a man as devoted to 'his girls' as Barack Obama take them to the premier home in America - the one only the very few can ever call home.

And it is a good thing to see hope so vibrant that the very stones cry out...

But a man who commands the attention so fully - so vibrantly - of the entire world will either be the visionary hoped for - the visionary needed - or he will prove to be a man it were better to fear, and greatly. Obama's ability to inspire is a marvel to watch: one cannot help but hope - but wish - a man could be what his followers - and he himself - believe.

But the whole world at a man's feet...

Tuesday evening, I'd slipped into dozing as the performance played out and came into the conversation without the details needed. Charlie Gibson entering the room where someone was on the telephone...the man Gibson visited motioned for Gibson to remain as he finished his conversation.

Then said, Obama has won.

The newscasters listening corrected the day Gibson mentioned. No, they said. That was Friday.

Half-heard tales do little good; was it McCain of whom he spoke? I will remember it so; why else was the story told. Did he know, four days before the end, what end was coming...Some say they knew months ago.

But they speak in terms of victory. I am still leery enough of the future to be wary of such descriptive.

"Duty, honor and country; reform, prosperity and peace." McCain's final interview with Gibson before the election. "I've spent my whole life serving my country as an advocate of reform, and honesty and integrity in government. And I will continue that battle." I thought then his words were enough to matter. Enough to swing the tide.

Change. Something new. Something intoxicating. Well, it's been a long while. Paltry world, anyway, full of average - err, Joes - and to find someone so - vibrant. Obama reminds me, really, of Princess Diana: for all the strength and compassion, a little boy peers around the corner in him, very much wanting to come say hello but as yet hiding.

That place of vulnerability in him.

Same as was in Diana.

Maybe it will work. Probably won't - that Essential Lie that something can: that we can be all that is needed without any dependence on our Maker - the delusion that cometh, if I may. The delusion that is here.

Who needs a Saviour.

Back again to so much that cannot be said. So I will close remembering that small boy and wish it could all play out a different way.

Without the abortion directives.

Without gay rights & that inevitable 'hate crime' backlash that too easily might be riding on the same train.

Without war 'talks' that leave our country door-wide-open.

Without that redistribution of wealth that must remain suspect until we see what is to be made of it...

Without that reality that these two centuries of two Americas may have created two cultures that cannot be melded; can only be either/or...

Without that sense of the desperate vacuum of truth needed - or truth wanted so desperately that anything that sounds like truth will do - anything that has its cadence, its depth, its riveting sense of that silence before the ram's horn is blown for prayer...

But I will remember the small boy. And like America, I will hope. Hope for that small boy & his family & the country & the world...

Final Day

Briefest of notes on this last day before the vote is counted & the results are known. Will America choose (or rather, will the electoral college choose on the basis of each state's popular vote) to continue the status quo - or opt out into unknown waters?

My vote, to be sure, goes with the status quo, but not happily. I suspect, in any case, the status quo is long gone: John McCain does not read as the type who would continue that status; this campaign has shown too clearly the depths of ire and even - if I may - rebellion in the American public.

Had enough.

We want change.

And that against the backdrop - back & front - of the economic collapse...two associates stood at my desk last week (the woman for whom I am fictional play is a receptionist/administrative assistant in the day hours), one of whom is a very successful small businesswoman...

And she was saying how poorly she is doing (construction business) and that she has friends who invite her over for supper.

Well, wee bird said nothing.

But back to change. Question becomes, what sort of change. On this day of resolution, the few thoughts, proffered at random...an old friend has often mentioned that having a President from one party with a Congress holding a majority in the other is a good balance. While that is my hope - I have a difficult time, here in Georgia, with two candidates in particular, and quite frankly want a place on the ballot that proffers "Neither" as a choice and demands new candidates.

Just kidding.

Actually, I'm not. Seems write-in candidates are a notion I hear of here & there; never think of it at the polling place (that magical small box inside the curtain: just me, my conscience, and the future of America...and always, too much & candidates I've never heard of, not having done enough of my homework before voting.)

So whether it is a joke or real, I couldn't really say. What I can say, however, is that unprepared voters were not the idea when America was formed.

But we won't go there.

If a space is actually on the ballot for such, I can assure you neither Saxby Chambliss (a man my grandparents knew & greatly admired) or Jim Martin will get my vote: they may not get it anyway; I may just skip over them, seething. I like the idea of voting to protect that inequality between the two parties - they both, if I may, stink - but it is difficult to vote Democrat at all when they keep dividing things into "Bush Economics" or "Obama..."

If even half of what each in the Chambliss/Martin wars charges the other with doing is true, neither should be able to hold office. Sitting here watching the commercials lined up to Chambliss, Martin then Martin, Chambliss then Chambliss Martin Chambliss Martin ChamblissMartin ChamblissMartin ChamblissMartinChamblissMartin until it was as if they were one commercial, played out over & over & over again and it didn't matter what channel you flipped to (I am exaggerating), the same streak was on...

Somebody in traffic at those TV stations had a little bit of devil in their sense of humor on the matter...

I hear other states have hot campaigns as well.

But back to the Presidential choices. I really do not think McCain will continue Bush Economics.

Or Reagan's little trickle, either.

People are too angry. I suspect that, if McCain gets in, the status quo will indeed be altered, and greatly. Perhaps not so 'greatly' as Obama promises, but as Thomas Sowell's recent column suggests, Obama is a visionary - young, inexperienced, untried.

And so many out there have said so much about Obama that should be of enormous concern: he has indeed changed his story (why say lie?) about certain things along the way - wee bird, here, and at this late stage all I proffer is last day ruminations.

If you didn't do your research along the way...

Too late for it now. Or, as I used to teach my wee birds (a birdism): when I want to know who I am, I ask my enemies...

Because, to be sure, a campaign is going to do what it can to protect its star - if you only read the man's defense of his act, what possibility do you have of a balanced view of him?

I never can quite sit at the table with those who think, umm, sitting at the table & discussing the matter will end war(s). The best & only appropriate defense remains that big stick. Unfortunate, but true. Chatter however you choose about peace & other goodly things. But remember that protecting this nation against those who do not hold your lovely ideals is the first necessity.

But I used to listen to people with similar notions at Agnes Scott. Just war is an excellent concept. If you don't like war, don't initiate it.

But never forget the rest of the world out there may indeed enjoy such initiation. Or, as a great man said long ago, speak softly as you choose, but don't forget that big stick.

Other thoughts. I am a one-issue voter. If I know a candidate's position on abortion, that is the determining factor in whether or no they get my vote. I have read a great deal from conservatives opposed to Obama - much of it veers over into rabidity; into party politics; into us vs. them...but the issues as Obama has laid them out are plain.

It is frightening to watch how Obama captivates those who cheer him on. He becomes like a messiah. Yeah, I know. Not too many messiahs out there: not too many people left in this sad, old world to believe in.

Those of us who know better than believing in a man, perhaps, have it easier.

The degree to which many Americans don't know the basic structure of their government appalls. Reminds me, in point of fact, of the degree to which many Christians don't know their Scripture. If you don't know the frame in which you move, anyone can take you wherever they want you to go.

Socialism as a reality does not frighten me quite so much as it does many here. My German professor taught us how things are done in Germany; they are a socialist democracy, as much of Europe is. I think that the current excess has certainly shown limitations in how - err, excess is handled are in order: that is not a matter of limiting how much the average middle class can earn but rather, restructuring how the very wealthy are taxed.

I don't have a problem with that. Lot of people quote this & that on the matter, but watching how things have played out lately nauseates, even now. Take that government bail-out and hold part of it for bonuses to those players who got us into this mess?

Not on my watch.

But you didn't know this was my watch, did you.

It is. And I am watching, as you should be, eyes wide open...

Well, time to get ready for my day & go see what the lines look like. Starbucks has promised a free cup of coffee to voters - if only I can get it before I get in line...it is a prize greatly longed for, being that coffee has become too expensive for this wee bird to buy....