Leave your answer in the comments section, please, because I'm at work and don't have time to research the code for a real poll.

Do you have in your closet (or attic, or where ever) a pair of shoes which you no longer wear, for what ever reason, but which you absolutely cannot part with?

I have several, myself, including a pair of 80's post-modern pop, magenta suede pumps. Photo will come later.

As opposed as I am to public grooming, I wouldn't have objected if it had been a brush in one hand. I've seen her on the train often. She always looks vaguely peeved, and never, ever has brushed her hair. She always has an air of having just rolled out of bed, walked through the shower and put on whatever was in the front of the closet, clean or not.

And yet, look at her. Not one, but TWO cellphones and talking on both simultaneously. She is obviously too important to bother with such inconsequential things as brushing her hair, or ironing her clothes. Or hiring someone else to do it for her.

There's a poll up today on Excite, about the proposals to fence off the US border. The options in this poll are that one supports the House proposal (700 miles of fence), the Senate proposal (370 miles of fence) no fence, or all 2,000 milles of the US/Mexico border (which, just to be clear, is not a proposal on anyone's table). The results of the poll?

63% of the respondants (almost 5,000 people as I write this) think that the whole fucking border should be fenced off.
Once more forcing me to ask: What the fuck is WRONG with you people?

Yeah. Because building a wall worked so well in China. Or in Germany.

The problem with a wall, as I see it, is that it works both ways. "They" can't get in, but WE can't get out. Maybe it's some weird genetic memory or something, what with the fact that whole branches of my family met their ends in box cars and showers, but the idea of a sealed border just scares the beejeesus out of me.

Next, we'll all need papers to cross state borders. Oh, wait. The national ID card idea is already gaining momentum in Washington.

Papers? We don' need no steenkin' papers. Or do we?

I don't want to be an alarmist here (oh, who are we kidding? I most certainly DO want to be an alarmist: WAKE THE FUCK UP, PEOPLE!!!) but, it is looking more an more like a totalitarian government to me.

But let me just shift this rant a little over to something else: fairness across the board when it comes to illegal immigrants. See, here in Florida, we have the wet foot/dry foot policy regarding Cubans, who, as we all know, have a special immigrant status, unlike, say, oh, just randomly searching for another ethnic group, Haitians.

Cubans, you see, can stay in this country if they make it all the way to land (dry foot). If they are intercepted at sea, or even 20 feet off shore, they have to go back to Cuba and try again. Haitians, on the other hand (who, PS, tend to vote Democratic when they become citizens, and who, by and large, are Very Poor and Very Black) have to go back to Haiti even if they have two dry feet and an adoring family waiting to take them in and support them.

We already have special status for one immigrant group. And that immigrant group has a history of being given amnesty. Over and over and over and over again. But, well, Cubans are special. They vote for Republicans no matter what. No matter that every administration that arranged boat lifts, air lifts, amnesty and every other damn thing for them was a Democratic administration, to Cubans, Democrat = Communist. End of fucking story.

On the other hand, most other Hispanic groups tend to vote Democratic. Thus, a fence, and no amnesty and the clowns like Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (whose own family came in illegally). This is a prime case of there being truer no believer than the converted sinner. Kind of like that a-hole Clarence Thomas and his stand on equal opportunity.

I just gave myself a headache.

There's a little meme going on here and here and here, and for a while, I considered doing it here.

There are a couple of things that will stick with me forever, such as my grandfather saying to the room, upon the arrival of my girl cousin "Oh. Now the pretty one is here." Ouch. Thanks, Grandpa.

And then the ever popular comment by a former boss regarding my attendance at a meeting to discuss the hospital developing a web site: "Nobody wants to hear what you have to say: you're only going to tell us what we're doing wrong and it doesn't have to be done right, it only has to be done."
But those are such negative things. I thought I'd mix it up a little and tell you about other words...written words, that changed me and stayed with me and that I have to read now and again, just to make sure that they are forever etched on my soul.

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

"I saw this morning morning's minion"

"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

And this, which was later stolen (or adapted, whatever) for the greatest scene Kevin Costner ever played, and which I give you in its entirety.

From "The Bushwhacked Piano" by Thomas McGuane copyright 1971.

"What I believe in? I believe in happiness, birth control, generosity, fast cars, environmental sanity, Coor's beer, Merle Haggard, upland game birds, expensive optics, helmets for prizefighters, canoes, skiffs and sloops, horses that will not allow themselves to be ridden, speeches made under duress; I believe in metal fatigue and the immortality of the bristlecone pine. I believe in the Virgin Mary and others of that ilk. Even her son whom civilization accuses of sleeping at the switch." Missus Fitzgerald was seen to leave the room, Ann to gaze into her lap. "I believe that I am a molecular swerve not to be put off by the zippy diversions of the cheap-minded. I believe in the ultimate rule of men who are sleeping. I believe in the cargo of torpor which is the historically registered bequest of politics. I believe in Kate Smith and Hammond Home Organs. I believe in ramps and drop-offs." Fitzgerlad got out too, leaving only Payne and Ann; she, in the banishing of her agony and feeling she was possibly close to Something, raised adoring eyes to the madman. "I believe in spare tires and emergency repairs. I believe in the final possum. I believe in little eggs of light falling from outer space and the bombardment of the poles by free electrons. I believe in tintypes, rotogravures and parked cars, all in their places. I believe in roast spring lamb with boiled potatoes. I believe in spinach with bacon and onion. I believe in canyons lost under the feet of waterskiers. I believe that we are necessary and will rise agian. I believe in words on paper, pictures on rock, intergalactic hellos. I believe in fraud. I believe that in pretending to be something you aren't you have your only crack at release from the bondage of time. I believe in my own dead more than I do in yours. What's more, credo in unum deum, I believe in one God. He's up there. He's mine. And he's smart as a whip.

"Anyway," he said melifluously and with a shabbily urbane gesture, "you get the drift. I hate to flop the old philosophy on the table like so much pig's guts. And I left out a lot. But, well, there she is."

And it was too. Now and again, you have to check the bread in the oven."

Where do I begin?

With the US government spying illegally on its citizens and then trying to spin it like "O, we are only collecting data on who you call, we aren't actually listening in on your conversations" but in the next breath rationalizing this illegal, unconstitutional, covert and terrifying activity by saying that not only will it help them capture terrorists (yeah. right. and I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I can let go cheap) but also child pornographers. Uh, if you aren't listening in, how would just a phone number let you know you are on the path of pedophiles? Just asking.

The whole thing is so disingenuous it makes me want to heave more than I usually do when I look at that smirking chimp and his band of devil-may-care draft dodgers, thieves, criminals, cold-hearted bastards and jack-booted thugs.
This particular cabal of evil doers (aka the Bush White House) is so fluent in double speak that George Orwell his own self could use them to write the play book for Big Brother.

I am not afraid. I will not be made to be afraid.

I will take this fight to the polling booth and despite the best efforts of the corporations who have bought this administration, I will attempt to vote all of them out of office. I will write my spineless, Republican hand-puppet representatives and demand impeachment, or at least a dog and pony show of an investigation.

While I'm ranting about the ugly and the evil, can I just say, once and for all, that I am sick and tired and disgusted with you people? You people (women) who seem to think that MetroRail is the appropriate place to pluck your facial hair and apply your pancake makeup? Look. It is really very simple.

If you need to wear makeup to appear in public, it should be applied BEFORE you appear in public. And let me define public, since that also appears to be a concept far beyond your limited capacity: Public is anyplace outside of your house. That means your car, too. Any form of transportation referred to as PUBLIC, i.e.: buses, trains, els, elevators, trams, trollies, jitneys, taxis, tuk-tuks, car-pools, camel caravans, rikshaws. All of these and anything I may have left out, are public transportation and you should shut the fuck up on your damned cell phones, stop plucking your chin hair, and curling your eye lashes and applying foundation.

And still I'm not done with the ugly and the evil, because I haven't even started on ANTM and Darth Jader. She has to be the ugliest, nastiest, stupidest, annoyingest, delusionalest (that's Darth Jader-speak for most delusioned) hamster this series has ever foisted on us. And that is saying something, since we have had girls with she-nises and Adam's apples, girls who thought all birds are blind, Camille and Ya-Ya.

She looks like a pointy, wet, pissed-off cat and acts much like one, only without the endearing quality of being cute and fuzzy when dried off. Even when the judges say they see her being soft, I only see sallow skin, squinty mean eys and an infinite abyss of stupidity.

Yet, still, I watch. I want to see her fall. I want to see her fail. I want her humbled and brought down. Is that so very wrong?

Tomorrow is my mother's birthday. She'll be 88. She won't know it. She won't know it's her birthday. She won't know that she's 88. She won't know that she's in an assisted living facility. She won't know that I've come to see her and brought her a cake. She only knows... what?

In some ways, I think, Alzheimer's Disease is like severe autism. The person with the disease has an interior life that nobody else will ever know.

I've said before that I think Mummy is in the store, taking inventory, or changing the displays. I think that because of the words I pick out from the neurological static that comes out of her mouth. There are numbers, and colors. Sometimes she'll tell an invisible assistant to put something there, where people can see it.

But who knows.

She's been saying the names of dead people for the past couple of weeks, and pointing. At them? I don't know. I've asked her if she sees her cousin Milton, who was her favorite relative. I don't get an answer.

This is what she's become: an empty shell, a blown-out egg. Fragile and hollow, with only a hint of what was inside before. Let me show you something else:


This was the hottie who did her part for the war effort by dancing with sailors at the USO. She drove them wild. Check her out, in her sailor's cap and her peacoat. I still have that peacoat. It had her name written in indelible ink on the inside label, where the sailor's was supposed to go. She always giggled a little when she let me wear it, and told me it was a REAL peacoat, one that a sailor had given her, and they weren't supposed to do that.

The old dame had some set of pins on her, didn't she? And she still has a trim pair of ankles, even if she can't really walk.

I wish she was still on that beach, smiling with those dimples at whoever took the picture. I cropped it, but his toes are in the shot, at the bottom. I wish she were dancing with the sailors, and not counting pairs of shoes.

I have to believe that she is where she was happiest in her life, because to believe otherwise is too cruel. For me, for her, for anyone who ever loved her.

Happy birthday, Momma. I love you. I made your recipe for macaroni and cheese for dinner tonight. I'll bring you some tomorrow.