It was time for my driver's license to be renewed, so I did it the modern way: on the internet. Or at least, I tried to. Instead I received a letter from the State of Florida, very politely apologizing for having misplaced my photo, and asking me to "expeditiously" beat a path to the nearest Licensing Bureau and get a new one.

This concerned me, because, through some fluke of the universe, I have, or had, the world's best driver's license photo. It looked like me. It was, at the same time, a flattering picture of me. I have on make up. I have on a smile. I do not look like I just wandered in from some half-way house for the criminally insane.

Nevertheless, when the State asks one to make one's way in an "expeditious" manner to the license bureau on pain of losing your license if you don't, you go.

I made an appointment, thereby saving myself the agony of a three-hour wait. I took care with my makeup this morning, and dressed in a solid color with a simple neckline. I drove to the licensing office, and found the only open spot in the lot. There was still time on the meter. Things were going quite well, I thought. Then I got into the office. On my way in, I had to pass the line that, at 9 A.M. was already out the door, and past someone in the line who reeked of piss and beer.

There was only one person in the line for appointments. When she finished, I presented my letter from the State to the woman at the counter, and she looked at me and said: "I'm on break now. The man will take care of you." So I turned to the gentleman she indicated, and started again. "I have an appointment. I have a letter. I have my old license." "Right. Confirmed. Go stand in that line." So I did.

And stood, and waited, and stood, and waited. And finally got to talk to the next clerk. She couldn't get it. I have a license that needs to be renewed, but the computer is telling her that it's a duplicate. At no cost to me. Fine. Take the freaking photo and let's go. After much deliberation, and with two other people getting to put in their opinions, I was finally sent to the end of the room, to the photo guy.

First photo: He tells me to take off my glasses, without noticing that my license says I actually need to have them on to drive. I take them off. He shoots. I look scary, and he says: your hair is sticking up. I say: it always sticks up. It's curly. Let's take another one.

Second photo: I start to position myself to minimize my flaws maximize my better features, and as I do, the two women standing in the next line over start to shriek like magpies and point at me and carry on about how I'm "posing" for the photo. The guy snaps the shutter as I turn and stare daggers at the women. He refuses to let me see it and tells me we're going for three.

Third photo: I look at the camera, I think about attempting to smile and he says, there. This one is better. I look, and there on the computer screen is the vilest photo of me since my employee badge photo. It is in extreme close-up. I see the San Andreas Fault where I normally see crows feet. Although my forehead is powdered, it looks like a giant shining beacon of grease. I have jowls like Deputy Dawg, a feature not found on my face in real life. In fact, my new driver's license photo looks a lot like Michael Jackson's mug shot.

I don't know whether to cry or call a plastic surgeon.

There's a story in the paper this morning about the various groups that are planning to sue the Miami police over civil rights violations during the FTAA.

I'd like to refresh everyone's memories, if I might, about what a true violation of civil rights by military or civilian forces looks like.



or maybe



That, my friends, is silencing dissent.

When you take to the streets to protest, you must understand the covenant that you are undertaking. Yes, it is your right to go in the streets, but it is the right of the government to keep you from rioting. In Kent State, the National Guard fired live rounds. In Miami, there was bruising from rubber bullets.

According to the protesters themselves, they were wearing black masks. You cannot wear a mask in a mob protest rally and expect there to be no repercussions. Think for a minute, son. If the police were in riot gear (which they were), masked and anonymous (which they were) would you feel safe, or like this was a confrontation doomed to end badly? Well, those guys behind the shields felt exactly the same about you. Masked, anonymous, and clearly up to mischief.

While I'm on the subject of rights, I'd like to revisit the Constitution of the United States. I've been reading it, and reading it, and I have yet to find the right to not be offended. In fact, as best as I can tell, that whole first amendment thing is pretty much the right TO BE offended. As in, I don't like what you say, I don't like what you stand for, but under the laws of this country, you can say and think pretty damn near anything you want, and it is everyone else's obligation to ignore you or agree as they see fit.

This is how that works, for those of you new to the whole concept: I say, for example that I think George W. Bush has the intellect of a shoe. You are free to agree, or to disagree. If you agree, you keep reading my blog. If you disagree, you send me e-mail calling me names. Or if you are the FBI, you open my dissident folder and start keeping track of all the times I say Dubya is a self-serving moron. Either way, though, I have the right to my opinion.

You do not have the right to silence my opinion because it offends you. I'm offended by plenty of stuff, as readers of my blog are well aware. Occasionally, I let the offender know that I am offended. But usually, I just bitch about it here, to my own amusement, and presumably, yours.

That's the bottom line of the first amendment, you see: Everyone has the right to their opinion, and the right to express that opinion. Nobody has the right to prevent you from expressing your opinion.

In theory, at any rate. I can ban your comments, because this is my private, personal press, and I don't have to let you blither if I don't want to. The Miami Herald can choose not to print some lunatic's single-brain-celled screed about making English the exclusive and mandatory language for all visitors to this community. Not because they wish to silence a dissenting opinion (that multi culturalism is bad), but because such letters are usually written in crayon and with no sense of grammar or literary elan. You can find me such a bleeding heart liberal pinko retard that you develop a tic every time you read me, and so choose not to read this blog, or even block it from your personal computer.

The one thing an individual in this republic cannot do, is prevent another individual's voice from being heard. Otherwise, believe me, I would prevent Rush Limbaugh from ever being heard on the radio again. It is not my job, nor my right, to silence him.

The only way offensive viewpoints can be made to disappear is to not listen to them. If everyone would quit buying Madonna's albums, eventually she would have to stop making them. Look at how well that worked in the case of her remake of "Swept Away." It stunk. Nobody went to the movies to see it. It never even made it to video. Now she's having a hard time getting roles.

Censorship doesn't work. Ignoring what offends you works better.

OK, obsessive compulsive behavior alert. I woke up this morning to the sound of birds. Various songs and calls. It was beautiful. I could identify the cardinals and the orioles, but someone was making a racket I couldn't recognize.

I went outside to feed the koi, and there, in the avocado tree, was a flock of ... something. They were jay-sized. They were black, with a white eye line. They had long-ish, sharp beaks (like a blue jay). The beaks were bright orange. They had white wing patches.

They are not in my Audubon Field Guide to the Birds of North America. They are not starlings, or red-winged black birds. They are not anything I can tell.

Nor, after an hour of internet research, and let me tell you, I can write a search query better than most folks, are they on the internet. I can't even find an on-line field guide.

Of course, I didn't get a photo, either. Any birders out there with any sort of clue? Remember, it's winter and I live on the end of Florida, so there are migratory birds passing through.

We're in week two of the boss is out of the country. This leaves me with plenty of time on my hands at work. So, in the name of research, I am teaching myself how to skin this blog, by teaching myself Cascading Style Sheets. I used style sheets all the time in PageMaker and Quark, so I figured it wouldn't be too hard.

I was, typically, wrong.

Thanksgiving was uh, well, I gave thanks. I gave thanks that my father is still with us, despite his illness. Crabby and fussy and, in his own words, "sharp as a rat's turd and twice as nasty." I gave thanks that my nephew has the sense and sensibility to come to town and visit his grandparents. I gave thanks that my brother wasn't at the actual dinner which allowed me to scarf down all the fried turkey skin by myself, since the rest of the family has fat and cholesterol issues which make poultry skin repellent.

But mostly, I was thankful that my mother got released from the nursing home/rehab back to her own home. She recognized it as her home. She knew me, and she knew my nephew. On Sunday, she looked at me and asked when I was going back to my home.

For maybe ten minutes, I had my mother in the room. After that, she went back to babbling non-stop about things that no one in this world can comprehend. But. For ten minutes, my mother was there with me.

Alzheimer's has got to be the most cruel disease inflicted on man. Jackie, at the needlework store where my mother used to buy her supplies said to me: "Her light shone very brightly, for a very long time." Jackie, I know you'll never read this, but thank you. It did. She did.

Maybe because of that sentiment, and my own recognition of how her light has failed, I'm taking up knitting again. For years, my mother made me a sweater for each birthday. I haven't gotten a new sweater in maybe eight years. I bought yarn from Jackie, and a pattern, and this morning I cast on 70 stitches and began a turtleneck.

Also this morning I read the obituary of a senior girl from a local high school. She was on the crew team. She was a friend of my surrogate daughters. They are destroyed. This is the first death that they've experienced of a peer, and not an elderly relative. They are gobsmacked by the suddenness of death, its random nature. How could it happen? Why? There is so much she will never know...

For all the joys they list in their blogs, I think of the other things this unknown girl will never know. She will never have her heart broken in first love. She will never discover that the person she trusted has stabbed her in the back over something as insignificant as a job promotion. She will never worry that the world is no place into which to bring a child. She will never look in a mirror and wonder what happened to her youth, her innocence, her love of life. She will not live to see her parents die.

And it's World AIDS Day, the day that I think of my friends who are gone. My peers who will never bring children to the world, never find love or happiness, or sorrow or fame. My peers who died senselessly and randomly.

I wrote to my daughter-by-choice and I told her, from the vantage point of age and repeated loss, what I know of sorrow and death. I said: Say their name aloud. Remember them. Don't ever let a moment pass where you know they would have found joy or amazement or sorrow and not say their name. Wait for them in your dreams. Eventually they will come to say goodbye.

So in memory of the men I loved, who died because they loved other men, I say their names: John Borella, whose sisters disowned him, and who died in the arms of kind strangers. Nick Cannon, who was so bright, and so funny, and who was my college friend, and who never told me he was sick. Shel Lurie, who was an artist of amazing talent, and a man of such brittle and bitter humor. He stood by me and wrote my letter of recommendation to graduate school. His pride was such that he never let me visit him in the hospital to say goodbye. Scotty Neail, who was the first boy I ever had a crush on, who took me sailing on the St. Lucie River, who was the first to die. Scotty's little brother Richard, who was my friend, too, despite being so much younger. And Rick, and Mark, and Ken, and Adam, and Robert, and all the others. So many. Too many.

I have a word of advice to all those baby docs I see around campus. I know that you are still in your training years, just out of your undergraduate salad days, and have yet to absorb the teachings of medical school that will allow you to stroll through this world with the utmost assuredness of your own genius and infallibility, but. But you cannot start to inculcate that belief in others until you stop dressing like you are going to med school in your pajamas.

Today on the train was a young man of above average good looks. He was studying a medical text. He had on scrubs, at least the bottoms. He was wearing a SpongeBob SquarePants t-shirt. When he stood up, his scrubs were sitting low on his hips, showing a good three inches of boxer shorts.

Eww. And Eww. The thug look is overdone to begin with, but trying it with a pair of scrubs? Just icky. And the combination of scrubs and SpongeBob? Not a good image maker there, pal. Shouldn't a doctor, even a baby med stud, be beyond Saturday morning cartoon wear?

The female med studs are even worse, affecting as they do, at least on this campus, the just-prior-to-breakdown hair style of Anne Heche. Spikey, blonde with dark roots, and in desperate need of a shampoo. They are also fond of the belly-exposing scrubs. They are, to a man (oops, but if you could see them, you'd understand my confusion), fond of the black bra under pale tank top look favored by the lower-class stoop sitters of popular 50s fiction.

Eww. And Eww. For the last time, girls: Black bra under light colored clothing is bad. I don't care if Carrie wears it on Sex In The City. She is fictional. She lives in a fictional New York. She wears things on the streets of that fictional city that would get a real person in real New York arrested for real crimes against fashionable humanity. Do not emulate her.

And that dirty hair and dark roots thing? Why should I listen to you about my health when you so clearly can't shower on a regular basis, something that is generally known to promote good health? I don't want to see your belly, either. I want you to pretend to be a grown up, and I want you dress in a way that gives me a little bit of confidence in your ability to make decisions.

Doogie Howser wore a tie, not a Scoobie Doo t-shirt for a reason. I suggest you do the same.