I am a weak, weak person

In years back, I used to get the Wisconsin State Journal delivered to my house. Why? Well, when you are an integral part of a community – striving to achieve utmost familiarity with its schools and governing officials – you want to keep up with local news. But not too long ago there was a headline that was so repulsive and repugnant to my sensibilities that I called the paper and said ENOUGH! I then switched to the afternoon Capital Times, Madison’s “progressive” newspaper.

That was alright so long as there was the stable and static schedule of work -> home -> prepare dinner and read paper -> eat dinner and talk about what’s in the paper. This year is quite different in terms of schedules. No one is reading the paper as I am preparing the dinner. In fact, oftentimes I prepare the dinner at odd hours and in odd ways, seemingly inconsistent with the stability described above.

And so, I have stacks of rolled up Cap Times, never opened, never read.

Why don’t I cancel my subscription????

Here’s why. I sit each late afternoon, working away at my computer and I watch the guy as he drops off the paper. No one else on our block subscribes to it and so I watch him drive right up, get out of his car, walk up to the door (YES! Unlike during the times of the Wis St J, this guy actually brings it to the door!) and place it gingerly in a perfect place there.

At Christmastime, he sends a card telling me about his children and grandchildren. He is retired. He actually lives in the neighborhood and he appears to have many grandchildren. I think that with my Christmas bonus he must be buying a toy for one of them. He seems the type to favor fire engines and Barbie dolls. From that walk up my stairs, I can tell (no, really!) that he is sweet and devoted.

And so I do not cancel the paper because of him. I can imagine his disappointment and his introspective Qs were I to cancel – was it something about me???? All sensitive souls, when hit with a series of blows, wonder if it is about them.

I couldn’t do it. And so I just pick up the stack of unread papers every few days and pass them on to the environmental truck that comes on Wednesdays. Could it be otherwise?

A post that demonstrates my commitment to both sides of the political spectrum

[Or: what did Kerry forget?]

Thanks to my student, who understands the importance of my Polishness. He e-mailed me the link to the website youforgotaboutpoland.com . Out of respect to this Ocean blogger’s Polska pride, do click on and scroll all the way to the bottom – there are a number of interesting ways in which the candidates can give proper deference to the country that gave the US its full support. Sort of. Because Poland is now, in a moment of delayed reaction, pulling out of Iraq. [Yes, one can properly debate whether it was more appropriate to send troops then, or to keep them there now.]

Twenty-fourth street pre-election diary*

24th: which way now? note they both point to the left 

These beetles (peaking yesterday in number – at least I hope they peaked) are evil! Anyone living in Madison knows what I am referring to. They are pernicious bugs that, to the innocent eye look like ladybugs. But they bite. It is the ultimate irony that this friendly orange little thing should in reality be a poseur, out to do you in if you even slightly step in its path.

Yesterday morning I read (and linked to) Rothschild’s comment in the on-line Progressive on the presidential debate. In the evening I encountered him at the Wisconsin Book Festival, introducing one of the novelists. At the Orpheum stage, he made no reference to his earlier debate recap. But a subsequent author who spoke (and read a work in progress – a fantastic short story!), Jeffrey Eugenides (yes, of Middlesex and Virgin Suicides fame) did make a few remarks. He told the audience that he and his wife have just moved to Chicago and have yet to install their TV and so they have been listening to the debates on the radio. He told us “Yes, it is possible to hear on the radio Bush making faces; call it a sort of ‘vocal grimace.’”

I like Kerry’s tie that is on the front cover of the NYT Magazine. Here’s the thing (warning: I am about to brag shamelessly; modesty just went out the window with the last nasty little beetle): I had a reputation once for picking exquisite, extraordinary ties. The pressure to do even better each time was so tremendous that I would often spend hours upon hours on this project. I distinctly recall having once a 24 hour lay-over in Paris and devoting the BETTER PART of that time to a search for the perfect tie. I remember seeing one on a gentleman who was sitting and sipping an aperitif at a sidewalk café and wondering how whorish it would be to engage him in a conversation for a while, eventually offering payment (I mean of a monetary nature!) for the piece of silk loosely tied around his neck. I don’t remember than man’s face. I remember the tie.

Matthew Rothschild wore a tie last night and it struck me as having a strikingly conservative design. It always throws you when there is an inconsistency between the man’s persona and his tie.

Kerry’s tie (in case you don’t have the Magazine in front of you and you may well be without it because for some reason I got several in my NYT packet this morning) has fish swimming in one direction. [To the LEFT, of course -- like the arrows by the 24th street sign -- it’s a very subtle message and some may accuse me of reading too much into it, but I know I’m right. I mean correct.] Thus at the knot, the fish are necessarily pointing downward, toward the left-leaning fish, giving an overall appearance of a synchronized water-ballet of fish—sort of like an opening day performance at the Olympics, where thousands of local children go out and wave their flags and colorful banners en masse.

I mention this because we only have two dozen days before the election. We are down to basics now. A tie tells me a lot about a person. Based on that cover photo alone, Kerry’s got my vote.

(*see “forty-second street pre-election diary” post, September 22, for explanation of post title)

Encountering brilliance

The novelist, Richard Bausch said this last night (at the Wisconsin Book Festival: thank you so much for taking me to it):
So this writer goes up to his cabin in Minnesota to sequester himself, to make some progress on his writing and the first week he’s there, he sees that the plumbing isn’t working. His toilet is completely backed up and overflowing in the way that country cesspools and toilets sometimes get, causing regurgitation and spillage of the contents onto the bathroom floor. And so he is forced to call a plumber to fix this. The plumber, wading virtually ankle-deep through the stuff that is now flowing freely from the toilet, is working diligently to put a stop to it. In the meantime he asks the man in the cabin “so, you’re the guy who’s a writer from Minneapolis?” Yes, the writer fellow answers. The plumber grunts in wonderment and says “I don’t know how you folks can do that kind of work!”

I am glad that writers, bloggers too, have, at the least, the admiration of plumbers.

I spoke to Bausch briefly after the reading, in the nervous way that one does when talking to one’s heroes and gods and of course he could tell by the buckets of sweat that were dripping down my forehead that I was an aspiring, errrr, plumber (or something). And so, like probably for the millions that come to his signing table, shyly, with goose-bumps and some asinine two or three chatty lines that they took forever to think of, he wrote this:

some heroes are priceless

One needs heroes and muses in the forefront, friends and family perhaps, in the background, lots of solitude and lots of peace of mind to move forward with writing projects. After all, even the Minnesota writer first sought to have his cesspool fixed before he could sit down and get started. For me, listening to Bausch read last night was better than calling a local plumber.

The man’s a genius of a writer.

By the light of the moon

Sometimes I wake up on a Saturday morning and think – the last thing I want to do now is go to the Market and buy foods for l’Etoile. It has nothing to do with being tired. One is always tired at 5 in the morning, especially when it is still so dark outside. It’s being weighed down with a week’s worth of issues that cause me sometimes to wonder – why am I doing this? I’d rather be in Paris. Or at least not outside, driving downtown before the city traffic lights are turned back on.

But there is always special compensation in doing something that you do not necessarily feel like doing.

Today, I had a load of good thoughts, too, best articulated in the article by the Progressive’s Matthew Rothschild, reflecting on last night's debate (thank you, neighbor, for the forward). And so, as I pulled up by the Square, I had this internal smile thing going. And, walking around in this different light, I remembered (cautionary note: a cliché is coming, but it’s true) how terrific it is to sometimes do the unusual, the thing that doesn’t automatically seem pleasing or natural. The rewards are tenfold greater than staying glued to your own backyard.

A few photos with the unusual, exotic almost, light of the pre-dusk hours and a few quotes (all in the glow of purple) from Rothschild:

[T]he environment came up and Bush could barely string together a defense, fumbling to come up with an answer about what his Administration has done to improve the environment. Here was his first stab: "Off-road diesel engines, we reached an agreement to reduce pollution from off-road diesel engines by 90 percent.”

In the night light: the sweetness of Ambrosia chocolate inside

Kerry stood his ground and actually has turned the Republicans' smear campaign to his advantage. They have so caricatured him and so lampooned him that when the American people get to see Kerry in person, he comes off surprisingly well. He is smart, knowledgeable, prepared, calm, and forceful.

chocolate and cherry, with the glow of fresh glaze 

"I'm going to spend what it takes to win the war, more than just $120 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan." When Bush used the word "just" before the figure $120 billion, I saw the eyebrows of America bobbing, as Bush appeared intent on mortgaging the nation for his crusade.

an eerily correct label 

But then Kerry gave one of the best defenses of abortion rights I've ever heard a Presidential candidate make. He said he voted against the so-called Partial Birth ban because it did not have an exception for the life of the mother. And he said he voted against the parental notification law because it would force a sixteen-year-old girl who is raped by her father to have to get that same father's permission for the abortion.
Bush had no comeback on this and looked fanatical on the subject.

red, white and what's the third? 

The longer George Bush stands on a stage with John Kerry, the better John Kerry looks.
One more debate, and Bush will be toast.

Twenty-fifth street pre-election diary*

25th is looking so nice! 

It is before dawn. I am about to go to do my forager duties for L’E at the Market. Yet all I can think of is last night. True, I spent the evening with a biased group. But oh my! It was wonderful to watch the debate with a group that wanted to see it as it may appear to the undecided, yet couldn’t really make that final leap, because it was just too dishy to see the favorable-toward-the-Democrats outcome! Kerry held on to his momentum. Is there anything else that is important?

Bottom line: we toasted every time a blooper was made by GWB (substantive, grammatical, whatever). I just want to say that I am Polish and therefore I always stock way too much food and too much wine for any social occasion. But tonight, even though guests brought extra bottles, I ran out of wine. [Of course, one could have drained a bottle on the Dred Scott moment alone! Wow! This will have to go down in history as a debate moment-to-be-cherished.]

P.S. You may walk a block every day, back and forth, back and forth, and you may feel that it harbors no one who thinks and lives as you do. Most likely, you will be wrong. I have to admit it because I am SO MUCH IN FAVOR OF PEOPLE ADMITTING THEIR MISTAKES: I was wrong about his little corner of the suburbs. It has people who worry about why, on a bright day, there are no children playing out on the street together, or grown ups exchanging stories from the day. It has people like me.

Let me conclude with a sign that I found perched over the door of a graphics design agency on 25th street.

(*see “forty-second street pre-election diary” post, September 22, for explanation of post)