ballerium selecta pletzturra (jeenge)

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Oh, and it’s October again. The first two days of the month were cool and rainy and awesome. Then the heat made a slight return, but after this week it’s supposed to go away forever.

FOREVER.

Sometimes is feel a little guilty about lusting for winter so fervently. It’s horrible for homeless people. Hell, for most of human history, winter was a yearly test of survival. If you had a bad harvest that year or had been displaced by war or flood or fire, then you faced the very real chance of 3-4 months of scrabbling for food and trying to wrap your extremities in enough hide so that they didn’t turn black and fall off…

…while now, we get to sit around and wish for pretty snow so we can drink hot cocoa and watch bad Christmas movies.

Face it, life rocks a little too much.

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Oh, things at my job are getting tense. There’s a mass exodus of supervisors and desk people. They’re all transferring to Manheim — not the old Manheim that broke my spirit last week, but the new Manheim which is bustling and far away. The reason is because they’re upping the qualifications for being a supervisor while keeping the pay the same. So… no one wants the job now, so they’re making it much harder to get.

Super.

We’re losing Huff, the cool young dreadlocked pothead supervisor. It truly is the end of an era.

Ugh, they called me today and asked ME to transfer to New Manheim. It’s more money, but i probably couldn’t spend the whole shift working on drawings and that’s a dealbreaker. And Naffziger described the place as a fucking clusterfuck. So… yeah, i’m staying where i’m at. I’m having way too good of a time there with Muna and Dahir. It’s like old times.

Muna moved into a new apartment with her aunt. This is great because when i drive her home — pretty much every day now — it’s just off the highway, and not ten miles back in the lush suburbs.

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I was starting to like Naffziger, but now we hear that he’s trying to hit on Dahir’s sister, the shy one. She works at a post alone, and apparently he was over there tonight asking her to go to the gym and saying how much he loves to eat pussy, you know. See, that’s the kind of thing you say to an old country broad, not some shy Muslim girl half your age.

Goddamnit, Naffziger, knock it off. If we know, then Dahir is going to know. What if he kills you?

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Nutrition is confusing. There are all these Atkins-Paleo people who urge you to put extra butter on your three breakfast steaks while warning you that a half-cup serving of white rice contains as much sugar as a cubic meter of cotton candy…

…and then there’s this guy on the radio saying all that is bunk, and if it weren’t, asians would be the fattest people on the planet. So have some noodles and cereal and avoid the buttered steaks, fat-ass. I don’t know who to trust.

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That first presidential debate was sickening. Both Romney and Obama just stood there for an hour and said “you’re going to be bad for taxes/Medicare/the deficit/education/jobs” and “no, YOU’RE going to be bad for taxes/Medicare/the deficit/education/jobs!” Obama lost because it’s just a dance competition and he refused to shuck and jive. And Romney won because he lied more than usual and in a more aggressive and telegenic manner. Although the glow of his win seems to be fading as people look back and notice, hey, he actually did lie a lot even for a politcian.

Strangely, the people who are really calling Romney out on his horseshit are the hardcore Teabaggers. Every time, a politician will promise lower taxes, higher revenue, more benefits, fewer costs, great taste, less filling, and twelve albums of your choice for only a penny with no further obligation to buy anything else ever again. Teabaggers are some of the stupidest people on the planet, but even they realize that this is all empty patter. They don’t want to hear the usual crap, and for that i applaud them. They want to hear a different form of crap — that the apocalypse is nigh, and that poor people will have to starve in the streets and all public schools will have to be shut down for the Republic to survive.

I’m still voting for Obama, of course.

And i wish you would, too.

The one thing i hear all the time these days is this quasi-libertarian bitchery where people say “dude, i can’t vote for a Democrat. Both parties suck! I ain’t gonna get fooled again. Obama, Romney, it don’t matter ‘coz whoever wins, the government will still be in bed with the corporations, and America will still be a foolish warlike nation, and i’ll still have to go to work every day, so why should i bother?”

Sadly, yes. Voting for Obama won’t solve those problems. Pushing a button once every four years isn’t enough to do it. Those problems will only be solved when you and millions of other Americans radically alter your lives and form a movement like Occupy Wall Street but ten times larger and more fierce. It will involve people throwing firebombs into windows and being shot to death until their bodies block the entrances, but there’s no other choice because things have gotten so bad. It’s probably in the future but we’re not quite here yet.

Until then, vote. You won’t get everything. But you might get the repeal of DADT. You might get healthcare reform, and the elimination of lifetime caps and a ban on discrimination against preexisting conditions. You might get no war with Iran. You might get two more liberal Supreme Court Justices. You might get to throw up a middle finger and piss off every racist redneck and psychotic evangelical in the country. For taking 20 minutes out of your day every four years to push a button, that’s a pretty damned good return on your investment.

But… maybe you still don’t feel the passion.

Maybe you don’t have the same tingle in your spine that you did four years ago, when it all seemed exciting and new.

I know exactly what you mean. I don’t think anyone is as excited for the DVD release of The Dark Knight Rises as they were for the release of The Dark Knight, but we still have see this through to the end. Bane just isn’t as cool as the Joker, we have to accept that and move on. And the twist about the secret revenge child is a little out of nowhere, but it helps when you realize that Batman nearly gets shanked to death in a City Hall that looks a lot like the place where he almost shot Joe Chill in the first movie. I guess if you think about it, Bruce is that person’s Joe Chill. Karma? It’s not perfect, but it kinda brings things full circle?

Wait, we were talking about Obama.

Yeah, vote for him, too.

Seriously, some analysts claim that the only reason we’re not currently at war with Iran is because Obama is the first president in a generation to push back against Israel and not blindly sanction anything they do. Republicans bitch about it all the time — what, the president wants to act as if Palestinians are people, too? I knewed he was a Mooslim!

Have… have i convinced anyone to vote yet?

Even one?

TWO SUPREME COURT JUSTICES. You have to realize how important that is.

Vote.

Come on.

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