Obama 2008

Obama won the NC primary. Duh. Unrelated events surrounding his victory:

Last Friday was sunny, but it was the kind of sunny that is so glaring, your eyes never quite adjust to it and you have the sensation of staring through shadows to something up ahead looming dark and ill-defined in the bright white light. I had had enough with school, and boys, and awards - I was burned out and I wanted to rage. So after an exam at noon, Lorelle and I drank a bottle of Protolcolo (some vague white Italian table wine) and ate an entire block of fontina. Down the lane Superchunk and Arcade Fire were playing for Obama awareness, and Lorelle had tickets, so of course we went. I could care less about either band. I’ve listened to them in my time, and whatever, I like free stuff. So, here we go. Superchunk’s performance was unmemorable. The Arcade Fire was excited to be there, impassioned even, but they peppered their performance with nonspecific political statements regarding the impending salvation of humankind by Barack Obama, intended to arouse a self-righteous mania within the crowd. I don’t think they should ever get political, especially considering the infantilizing content of many of their lyrics. Lyrics like, “Us kids know,” and “ Then I’ll dig a tunnel from my window to yours/Yeah, a tunnel from my window to yours,” that speak to a yearning for childhood and a desire to escape back, to reclaim a state in which we were ignorant, unaccountable for our actions, not responsible to society at large.
I really do like Obama. I agree with him on most points. I’m glad that he has a position on net neutrality, and I’m really glad that he’s calling for more service. But, the Cult of Obama is really starting to give me the creeps.

His image is plastered everywhere, his canvassers are way too aggressive, and his campaign is constructing him as a messianic figure - a dangerous undertaking. I’m excited/frightened to see how the rest of the primaries/election goes down.

On Saturday we biked over to Gimghoul, and biked away in terror. On Tuesday I took my last undergrad exam. And now it is Friday again. In the intervening time, I ate multi-ethnic foods and too much desert, paid bills, cleaned the Pleasure Dome, and thought a lot about social justice, which is to say I bought new jeans and thought about how I should not have bought new jeans because capitalism as we know it is predicated upon the exploitation of someone. Dang.

Social Dance

On Wednesday I went with a friend from high school to Loafer’s Beach Club, a venue in Raleigh. I paid $8 to learn Balboa, a dance, in which one takes very small steps, in closed position. It was too close for me, as I found myself swept into the sweaty bosoms of several homely, husky men. I like Loafer’s because it doesn’t seem as though it should exist – it being a relic of pre-9/11 America, a time during which one could appreciate campy décor and old music in earnest. Several of the women had brought deserts to the club – apple cobbler, chocolate chip cookies, and some kind of cake, and it was a pleasure to eat their free food while watching otherwise ordinary, workaday kind of folks dancing so hard. And they knew all the moves. Would I could have joined them! But, they were so serious about style and form, I felt that to join them there on the dance floor, beneath the mirror-ball, beneath the fishing net so artfully strung from the ceiling, as they did six-count basics, underarm passes, throw-outs and so forth, while I capered about in some perverse interpretation of swing… it would have been insulting and degrading to everyone involved.

Sometimes I think that I would like to learn a real dance, a couples dance, so that I and some like-minded individual could trip the light fantastic together, gracefully, like adults, rather than me, drunk, dancing alone in Hell. But then, male leads make me uncomfortable, because the act of physical direction reinforces male dominance, and dancing, as an established mating ritual approximates the sex act. Allowing a man to direct your actions perpetuates male hegemony! And, I don’t like being told what to do. So, I will continue to dance, frenzied, alone in Hell, until a time when we can communicate psychically, and thus lead together. I mean, Valum Votan says the time is coming, so who knows.

Rectal Prolapse

Rectal prolapse (”pink socking”) is what can happen to your cat if he, having ingested a string, has passed part of it, and you decide to expedite the process by pulling the rest out. Do not ever do this. The Wikipedia entry on the subject of rectal prolapse features a picture of a pink knit sock. God bless the democratization of knowledge.

On Friday morning I was awakened by a cool, moist sensation beneath my forearm. I turned on the light to discover a piece of fecal material in my bed. Horror! Meanwhile, the source of this fecal material lounged, hidden in the shadows of my room, with a string hanging out his back end.

At 8 in the AM, I took the awful little man to the vet, where I was informed that if he did not pass the string (a drawstring from a pair of sweat pants, mind you), they would have to cut it out of him, setting me back about $1500. FYI, here is what happens when a cat eats a string: it can become looped around the base of their tongue, causing their intestines to kind of collapse in the manner of an accordion. If it does not happen to become looped around the tongue, the string can still become knotted up in the intestines, causing them to collapse. Fortunately for Bobo, the string had mostly passed, and the vet was able to gently remove it from him. When I picked him up they even gave it to me in a little plastic baggy. Hawt.

PSA: If your cat has ingested a portion of string, do not attempt to remove it yourself, unless you want to spill their rectum out all over your house. And, secure yr stringz, ppl!

March 2008. Ports of the Southeast.

On the train to DC a wall-eyed woman with an infant sat beside me, and the car smelled of public toilets. I drank beer and stared out the window as we passed the fallow fields, the trailer parks, the junkyards, and the mattress-smattered woods of North Carolina and Virginia. Once in College Park, Hunter and I took the train to Silver Spring and ate Burmese food - soft noodles, spicy sauce, and fried tofu. On Saturday we ate bagels and drove to Baltimore, with which I might be in love. The harbor was shrouded in fog as we drove in past the shipyard, over the bridge, over the warehouses. A quest for a clarinet reed ensued, wherein we observed oily boys peddling their wares at the local Guitar Center, and a thin woman at a piano store who, “loved to hear the sound of the piano.” We achieved the reed and spent the next several hours making this. Stayed up rl late and got up too early to eat vegetarian brunch with Ann, who was touring Johns Hopkins. Destroyed by lack of sleep, Hunter and I thought it wise to go to DC and see the newest Smithsonian museum. Shallow exhibits. Rampant glossing. Atrocities relegated to dark corners, while such displays as Spanish weaponry and neat outfits got top billing. I mean, swords and gold? Seriously? Besides which, this is the Museum of the American Indian. Not Native. Not Indigenous Peoples. Indian. Fantastic hot chocolate, though. Went back to College Park and ate tapas and drank coffee and tried to write, unsuccessfully. On Monday the train back was running late, so I ate pineapple in Union Station and stared at passers-by. Truly, I am living the dream.

The train back was slow, finally got home at seven, showered, and hit the road again to make it to the beach by… nearly midnight or around abouts. Mika and I stayed with the Edge at his family’s trailer, which is somewhere between Supply and Shallotte, about forty minutes from Wilmington. This is a land where the water smells of blood, where shirtless young men tackle unleashed chihuahuas, and countless dogs bay in the night. The beach was cold, so we went to a coffee shop, where again I tried to write, unsuccessfully. We went out in Wilmington that night. Charming and scenic downtown Wilmington boasts drunken, confused men who drop pizzas on the sidewalk, and hawt coeds who walk out on both bar-tabs and the older gentlemen to whom those tabs belong. One would think Wilmington would be a better place to carouse, but sadly no. Not on a Tuesday. On our way back to CH the next day Mika and I again stopped in Wilmington and ate avocado sandwiches by the river. This was after being solicited for sex (?) or something by a strange man at a gas station pump. He asked how old we were, and if we knew where he could find a “good time.” Srsly? I do not recommend Wilmington, even if it does look like the way The Decemberists sound: cobblestones, boats, and alleys leading down to the port.
Stayed the night in Chapel Hill, and drove down the next day to Savannah, which is marked by the conspicuous absence of the middle class. It was St. Patrick’s day, so the city was overrun by belligerent frat guys from UGA, and sundry revelers who heckled me from rooftops as I rode past. Savannah, for me, is a permanent hangover, but I love it because you can drink on the street, and it’s flat and pleasant to bike around. Also, the pancakes at J Christopher’s are off the chain.

But now it is April, and I have finished my honors thesis, and my undergraduate career swiftly approaches its termination. I suppose I’ve put it off for long enough - six years. O yes.