George Bush’s qualifications for sale on Ebay

Which is more credible, exit polls or Diebold?
Voting arrangements in Florida do not meet “basic international requirements” and could undermine the US election, former US President Jimmy Carter says.

Gamma has changed her career plans. She no longer wants to run a disco.

“It will be like a disco, only the lights will be subdued and there will be sofas and there will be lounge music, for people to relax.” Gamma likes lounge music lately.

“You mean a chill-out club.”

“Sure.”

Gamma had a friend over for Halloween. They dressed as witches and I took them trick-or-treating. The next day, while Gamma was at her grandparents’, my wife and I did a little housecleaning. First of all, these being seven-year-old girls, there was a ring around the bathtub, like any bathtub ring, except this one glittered. In Gamma’s room, we found a mattress completely covered with toys, hair accessories, bags and other booty. Hundreds of little shiny objects, every single one of them a Hello Kitty product. I guess she was showing them to her friend.

In the playroom… Ah, the playroom. A large plastic bag full of the horse chestnuts Gamma likes to collect, all covered with a wicked fur of mold. Countless containers full of various poisonous-looking potions and stinking mixtures bad enough to make a health-department inspector wince. A soup made of stones and corn. Many unrelated things tied together with string, yarn and/or leather straps. A toy stuffed tiger rendered glittery. Container after container full of smallish objects ordered according to a principle obvious only to Gamma, and perhaps some ancient Lovecraftian being. My personal favorite: inside a baby doll’s crocheted underpants, a plastic scorpion.

Listen, my personal belief is that tiresome parents who brag about their children deserve a special corner in hell, but this girl bears watching.

I suppose if I’m going to link that then I ought to link this and this as well.

Fog this morning.
Mmm, fog.
There was a wreck on the freeway, so probably not everyone feels the way I do.
I woke up in a good mood.
My daughter cuddled with us in the big bed last night. The big daughter, Beta. I’m writing it here so I don’t forget it. Actually, she was just going to cuddle, but she fell asleep and stayed there the whole night. Beta the blanket thief. I woke up at midnight and got up to turn off the hall light, then moved to Beta’s bed where I had both a blanket and a pillow to myself. Alpha, on the other hand, spent the night in the big bed without any blanket. Which was okay since she fell asleep in her lounge wear.
We were all exhausted yesterday, I guess.
When I woke up in the morning a certain stuffed rabbit was on the floor, although it had started the night in bed with me, making me wonder what I had dreamed. I never remember my dreams lately. Except the wild nightmares.
Anyway, sitting there at breakfast I said out loud, I’m in such a good mood today.
Anyway.
I was looking at people in their cars yesterday. They all looked so desperate and sad. What a world, where desperation, fear and dread are so abundant, where depression, grief, aggression and frustration are the sane reactions and the only solution seems to be an array of pills or walking on hot coals.
When your conscience hits you knock it back with pills.
(Had Led Zeppelin in the car stereo this morning until the fucker started to skip.)
People looked so isolated and sad. So oblivious to the love and beauty around us.
Because it’s there, man.
If we could only be made aware of it. Of our fundamental love for each other, our connection to each other.
If you could only make everyone aware of that, I thought. If you could only make everyone aware of that. There must be a ton of money in that, I thought.

If the day went, you know, directly from your morning commute back to bed, that would be best some days. Some days, you would be ahead of the game if they ended right then.
Like, I mean, it’s still pitch dark, you’re in the kitchen head-on-the-table tired waiting for the coffee machine to finish its brewing cycle and while you wait you go outside to look for the moon and it’s warm as a summer evening (16 degrees celsius) and you really have to look for the moon, because although it is full it is in the middle of a total lunar eclipse too.
You finally find it over the neighbor’s house with the barking German shepherd, about 100 degrees from where you expected it (over the neighbor’s house with the biting tortoise), emerging from the Earth’s shadow like a grey pollywog out of its egg sac.
Your wife goes and wakes up the kids so they can see it. They look and go back to bed.
You forget why your wife was mad at you and maybe she does too.
You drink coffee. You forget to eat anything.
The sunrise is the best of all. It’s that nice light again. You wish the sun wouldn’t come up, would just sit there just below the horizon until all the chickens gave up and climbed out of their coops and scratched around the flowerbeds, squinting in the dim golden pink light to see if they turned up anything good.
If you could go to bed right then, you’d be ahead of the game. You’d be sustained sufficiently to begin the next day already.
Just skip work, skip trying to decide what to eat for lunch, or whether to skip lunch and buy some more time for your cell phone. Skip trying to start outlining that novel, skip the drive home and everything else.
You wonder if you could sort of close your eyes and coast through it.
You wonder how long it will take for this depression to peter out.
You wonder, if you found the energy instead, if it could be a productive day, friends won and enemies influenced.
You wonder all sorts of things.