Let's brillig again...

[pseydtonne]

The past week I've been coming home to the smell of wood burning. The first night I was worried a house was on fire in the neighborhood. Then the smell was identical the next night and a couple nights after that. It then dawned on me: oh! Y'all're actually heating your home with a wood stove or a fireplace.

I asked a friend at work if he was noticing the same thing in his neighborhood. Indeed he was. This must be a response to the energy price hikes.

What's strange is how annoying the smell can be. I'm sitting in my modern apartment (one I will soon be leaving -- I gave the landlady my 30-day notice a little early this evening) stuck with a thermostat I can only control with a desk lamp aimed at a sensor and a couple open windows. I think about the actual cost of this excessive heat, even though I do not pay it directly. I think about the schmuck that will one day buy my apartment and have to pay the condo fee for a temperature s/he cannot really control. I think how much I will miss this place but what I really miss is the person that lived with me here or that process of being needed by that person. I smell the wood burning and I think of marshmallows at a camp fire. I feel ill at ease, as if I were being stalked by back-to-nature folks.

Soon I shall be living in a very different apartment. Even though this building is older than the one I am moving into (this was a civic hall of sorts when Melrose was part of Malden), it feels like a very modern place. Everything is square and level. The new place is definitely a house, complete with oil heat and a lowered temperature. The place is so much larger. Since the temperature is uneven, there is none of the sense of being hypnotized against the real weather outside.

I had a very productive day at work. Today's news of Myers giving up pursuit of O'Connor's job worries me a little, which ruined my groove. However, it's strange watching the right wing lose the cohesion that made it formidable. Part of me is happy but part of me worries it'll just make the Color Split of America worse. I'd rather see people get along instead of reveling in the threat of indictments. Once again we may blow a year or two of getting nothing done in the Federal government because of a pursuit of some kind of accounting. 1973 again, 1999 again. I guess we'll just have to accept that life without machine politics strangely means nothing good gets done.

It'll be the smell of wood wafting me to bed, making me wish I had a fireplace. It will also make me think how disconnected I am from my location.

-schlep slump sleep, Dante

Comments

[missfestival.livejournal.com]

Hi,

I do a lot of interest searching on LJ, the one I searched tonight was "writing." I noticed on your info page that you are from Utica.

So am I.

This is signed, "Dante." I only ever met one Dante in my life.

I'll bet you are him.

I went to Lourdes and UFA. We were in drama club together. If it's all right with you, I'm going to add you to my reading list, you're smart and write well. I find that one really has to dig around here to get good smart reading. If you'd rather I didn't add you then I won't. My LJ is nothing but tawdry navel gazing at the moment, but who is to say that can't be fun.

It was neat to bump into you here.

Janet

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Wow! I saw the first name and said "all these years I only know one Janet not in a movie. Dude... no way..."

I am honored that you'd put me on your friends list. I shall reciprocate. I read a little bit of your stack just now and I can see some themes worthy of a good book. More on that later. I feel like a valley girl (Pacoima, not Ilion) but I still gotta say: we should totally catch up.

Oh, and I gotta shave and trip over crap on the floor and get stuck in traffic. More later!

[missfestival.livejournal.com]

Most excellent. Thank you!

[fuzzplugjones.livejournal.com]

Miers withdrawing her nomination was great news. I didn't like her either. I didn't like the attention she brought to the conservatives. As I've unfortunately been forced to see by an English prof with an agenda, the op-ed pages have turned the name-calling knob up to 11. "Christian soldier," one called her, which gave me pause, because you can't even say that Muslim soldiers took out the WTC - which is accurate - because we're supposed to be "tolerant."

She was in a sense a stereotypical conservative... and so she was very easy to pigeonhole. We don't need people like that in our government right now. Unfortunately it's psyops right now. Ideology scares people, whatever it is. To survive now you've gotta have nuance (but not only nuance). We are a people governed by editorial writers, sadly, and journalists (I use that term loosely) who seem to have thrown away the who, what, when, why, and how for "how do I feel about this?" "what nasty names can I call this person to arouse my readers?" It's really sick. I didn't agree with Miers pretty much at all, but the blame can be spread thick and wide here. Christian Soldier? That's offensive. But it's okay to offend Christians. If "regime change starts at home" as I'm so woefully sick of seeing on bumper stickers, then tolerance does too.

So yeah, am I glad she's out of the news? Hell yeah. But if Bush is smart (there you go, I set you up!) he'll bring up some of this intolerance-double-standard stuff for awhile, and maybe the silver lining of this cloud will be that he's made some people look like absolute jackasses. At least that's what I'd do.

[bedfull-o-books.livejournal.com]

I just hope that the next person W picks isn't worse.... Although, how do you judge what's worse, given what an unknown quantity Miers was. A small part of me was, like, "hey, the conservatives hate her. She can't be all that bad...", but then again, I worry about the cronyism and whether her loyalty to W would have trumped her personal take on how the law should be interpreted.

I, too, am sick of the division this country is going through. I am also sick of the fear and the small mindedness, on both sides of the aisle. Then again, we survived 8 years of Reagan, and that was supposed to be "the worst of times", right?

I keep telling myself, "this, too, shall pass."

[tkitch.livejournal.com]

twas brillig and the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe....

[dimers.livejournal.com]

So, like, are you going to want help packing next weekend, or ... ?

Life without machine politics

[sugarvagina.livejournal.com]

I just keep waiting 2008 to arrive. Every time I hear President Bush speak I half expect him to finish with, "Live from New York-it's Saturday night!" It's too funny to be real. Except it is real, which makes it not funny. Not even a little bit.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Dude! Good to read ya! I shan't divulge who you are here unless you want but hey!

[graciana.livejournal.com]

I wish another woman would be there on the Supreme Court. Yet I don't see that happening anytime soon. Alito has a stance of legal analysis similar to Roberts.