Swing day

It was so good not to have to work this morning.
I climbed up on the roof and cleaned gutters this morning.

Friends got me moving early on with a walk in the woods.
After that I hardly moved all day.

We were to eat at Greenbush, the old basement Italian place on Regent.
It was too crowded, we couldn’t get a table.

We ate at Nattspil instead. I’d never been there. It’s a cool, homey bar with food.
The food was slow in coming.

We caught the last showing of Vera Drake.
One of us was a doctor who saw this as an ominous and timely movie.*

* The movie is about a backstreet abortionist in post-war London. The acting, combining improvisation and script, is unimpeachable. I’m still shaking.

Now that I’m done guest-posting (for a while), am I a changed blogger?

Yes I am. It was great fun to react to the good, the bad and the ugly too. Like in politics, you can never be as clever pushing your own agenda as you can knocking someone else’s, or defending your choices against the attacks of others. [The blog where I guest-posted invites anonymous as well as registered comments and the commentators are sometimes thoughtful and sometimes, shall we say, quick and dirty in their responses]

Of course, banter without slander is even more fun, but I have yet to figure out how to get that without also getting the gratuitous nastiness that often makes people say and write things that are mean-spirited rather than sumptuously witty.

I do think that blog-versations are just in their infancy. Within a year, we’ll have fashioned more options and formats that fit our great desire to create something out of the mess of thoughts thrashing about inside our skulls. And when these blog-versations come out sounding intelligently funny or sardonic, or even poignant, or pensive, whew! they can be a thrill to read.

Adrift

This is the first Saturday morning at home for me since early April. [For those who are new to Ocean, I occasionally moonlight at the restaurant, L’Etoile, and this past season I did Market shopping for them every Saturday.]

I cannot get myself to look at the news. I’m sure I’ll read something like "Can Bush Deliver a Conservative Supreme Court?" and I’ll wish I were talking to the farmers instead of sitting with a computer perched on my lap.

Maybe I should revisit old allies (that word!) over at the Progressive. Here we go – Molly Ivins has posted her December piece in which she writes:

Of course, I'm devastated by the news John Ashcroft is leaving. Do you think we'll see tits on statues in Washington once more? [referring to Ashcroft’s prudish request to not be photographed by a statue that had a certain degree of nakedness about it]

Unfortunately, Ivins gets graphic in her speculations on what the next years will feel like for Americans. Consider this excerpt:

My friend John Henry Faulk always said the way to break a dog of that habit [of chasing and killing chickens in the yard] is to take one of the chickens the dog has killed and wire the thing around the dog's neck, good and strong. And leave it there until that dead chicken stinks so bad the dog won't be able to stand himself. You leave it on there until the last little bit of flesh rots and falls off, and that dog won't kill chickens again.

The Bush Administration is going to be wired around the neck of the American people for four more years, long enough for the stench to sicken everybody. It should cure the country of electing Republicans.

That’s a tough one to take with your breakfast granola and café au lait.

Maybe I could just go outside and shut the yard down for the winter. Good idea.