Pet Cobra

Sarah Palin and the GOP, in a Nutshell.

Real quick. John McCain's - let's get real, John McCain's GOP Masters' - choice of Sarah Palin is a cynic's choice, a reflection of the utter contempt that the Republican Party apparatus has for the American voter in general, and American women in particular. Let's pick a woman, they thought. Never mind her qualifications (or lack thereof). Never mind her politics (ANTI-CHOICE, Creationist). All of the women that supported Hillary, they won't see past the extra X chromosome, they'll disregard everything that Hillary stood for because, hey! Us gals gotta stick together!

Sarah Palin - brought to you by the same people who used our fears and national grief against us, hoodwinking us into fighting a war that's killed thousands and cost billions; the same people who claim to wear the mantle of fiscal responsibility and small government, all the while pissing away a budget surplus and leaving the country drowning in a bottomless vortex of debt and deficits; the same people who claim to be the last true defenders of the Constitution, all the while spiriting away nameless prisoners to be tortured in some dirty cell, and demanding the power to intrude on our daily lives, conversations, and very thoughts.

The word stuck in my head last night, and will remain there until Election Day. "Enough."

NewsFlash! DadCentric Endorses Obama!

Over at DadCentric, I make the case against McCain. Such a douchebag, that guy.

http://www.dadcentric.com/2008/08/dadcentric-thro.html

More-tality

Everything in this life is earned. A few days after I ate shit on the bike, that's become my mantra. My mantra was bouncing around in my head yesterday morning, bouncing in time to the EEP-EEP-EEP of the alarm clock. 5:45. In the a.m. Dark O'Clock. That's why it's called the Dawn Patrol. Or in this case the Pre-Dawn Patrol. You want the good waves, you gotta earn them, and they come up when the sun does.

I've been doing this for so long it's hardwired. I make the coffee and pop in the contacts in a fugue state; a half-asleep automaton programmed to measure out 6 scoops of Trader Joe's Free Trade Organic, add 6 cups of water to the pot, pour water into the Mr. Coffee, contacts, boardshorts, keys, board, mug, coffee, Splenda, milk, ignition, launch. I'm awake only when the Xterra starts to move. How'd I get here? Where am I going? Oh yeah.

The morning is out of February. The sky is the color of well-driven pavement and the palm trees are bending. The ocean's compressed under that wind, the waves foaming and unridable. What will happen: I'll eventually get back in the car, swing by the gas station for a fill-up, maybe a wash. I'll go back home, and Beth and the kids will be awake. I will pick Zoe and hold her aloft and say "FLLLLLLYING BABY!" and she'll giggle; Lucas and I will discuss Star Wars ("Dad, when does Plo Koon become a bad guy?" "He doesn't. He's a good Jedi. The bad ones have the red lightsabers.'); I will take a shower and get dressed and take Lucas to school and then head in to my client's to spend the day working and pretending to work; all the while I will worry about insurance and elections and money and war. That's in the future. In the now: I watch the sea for a while, thinking about nothing. The silver lining of mornings like these. 

Mortality

One minute: we are pedaling up the street, literally - there is a slight incline, and then it turns into a full-blown hill, and Beth and I, being novice cyclists, she with the single-speed cruiser, me towing the trailer with the kids, decide that we need to turn around and seek a flatter route. The next minute I am a bleeding heap lying in the middle of the street. "FUCK!!!" I scream. Fuck, I think. The kids. Are they OK? Yeah, there they are, this is why we got the trailer so that if, so that when one of us went down the kids would not go down with us, Zoe was napping and now she's awake and yelling as is Lucas, who is more than a little freaked out at his swearing dad, swearing in pain, stabbing pain, it's actually been a while since I've really fucked myself up, let's see, must have been that rugby practice three years ago? Yes, three years ago, I went one way, my right knee went the other, and down I went and I've never been the same since, it always hurts, some days less than others. Spots. Should I be seeing spots? Did I hit my head? Would I know if I had? Spots. The last time I saw spots...Mount Whitney, Mike and I had left San Diego mid-day, the idea was to get there in the evening and crash the trail, reach the midpoint of the mountain by 9 or so, sleep, get up before dawn and reach the summit by mid-morning, only we forgot about the whole sea-level-to-14,505-feet in the span of several hours thing. We also forgot about eating, except for a few handfuls of dried apricots that morning. I started seeing those spots when we reached the Trail Crest - 13,600 Feet sign, then the spots became a kaleidoscope and then I began puking and didn't stop, we turned around and staggered back down the trail, apricot-flavored dry heaves, a light snow falling, and when we got to the base of the mountain I sat there for what seemed like hours, breathing, breathing, breathing, like there could never be enough air in the world. Sitting. Sit up. I should sit up. The kids are still crying. Beth is asking me if I'm OK. Everyone sounds like they are underwater. I am sitting in the middle of the street, and it occurs to me that when the car runs us over as one surely will if we stay here it will hit them first and I will get to watch them die. Moving out of the street seems prudent. I stand up. My left knee is a bloody mess, as is my right ankle. I push the bike over to the curb, out of harm's way. I am sweating but I'm cold. Odd. The cold comes from the realization that everything is tenuous, that everything in this life is earned but, really, that doesn't matter. One misstep and it's gone. All of it. "Are you OK?", Beth asks again, and it's a while before I can answer.

The Week In Me for Friday, August 22, 2008

Friday seems to a day for slack-assedness around the blogosphere. I am not one to buck the system, so I think that every Friday I will just recap what I did on the other sites that I write for (along with any guestblogging I might do. I like guestblogging. Hint hint.) Here's what I did over at my other haunts this week:

Over at DadCentric, I reviewed The Clone Wars and posted a nice little film about bunnies.

Over at MamaPop, I addressed an Olympic travesty and almost reviewed a "video game" featuring Amy Winehouse.

SavvySource was kind enough to run a piece of mine, which appeared in a slightly different form on this site a couple of days ago. I didn't actually think it would be posted there, and I wasn't really happy with the version I sent them, so PetCobra readers, you got the Director's Cut.

In other non-writing news, I did not surf, I ate some leftover carnitas, and today I spent about four hours trying to get a piece of some sort of dried herb - I'm guessing oregano - out from 'twixt a couple of molars. 

The Life Aquatic

I tell people that we’re lucky to live a stone’s throw from the Pacific. It’s a lie.

The ocean: most people who claim to love it don’t live anywhere near it.  They go to the beach for a week in the summer, maybe on the weekends if they live within an hour’s drive. They are not Ocean People, for one simple reason - the ocean has never tried to kill them. I’ve been held down by fifteen-foot waves that snapped my 9 foot long fiberglass board in half like a twig. On my last scuba dive, my equipment failed at around 85 feet. I’ve been bounced off of razor-sharp reefs, and have been speared in the skull by errant surfboards. I’ve been dragged out to sea by insidious rip currents and gotten hopelessly lost in vertigo-inducing fog banks.

I moved down to Pacific Beach sixteen years ago. Since then I’ve married, had one kid, then another. We moved north, to the fringes of San Diego county, but never east – I’ve never lived more than 10 minutes’ walk from the sand during this time. Every night for the past sixteen years I've fallen asleep to the hiss and crash of waves breaking on the shore; every morning I wake to the shrieks of hungry gulls. Living by the ocean is living on the border between the world we know and the one that we dream. 

The other morning, Lucas came out to the patio to watch me slap a new coat of wax on my surfboard. He asked if he could help; I happily obliged. “Don’t push down hard”, I told him. “Nice and light, from side to side; that way it gets nice and bumpy, and doesn’t smear.” “Dad,” he asked, “is surfing hard?” He’s got that habit, the one shared by all four-year-old boys, of asking the same questions over and over again, sometimes in the span of a minute. I give him the same answer, as always. “Yep. But if you stick to it, you’ll learn. It takes what we call commitment.” I think of waking on a winter's morning before sunrise, driving up and down long stretches of empty coastal highway, tugging on my cold and damp wetsuit with numb hands and frosted breath. “Surfing’s fun, huh?” Old muscle aches return, as does the terror of being held down by invisible, impossibly strong hands, lungs burning. “Oh, it is, and much more. You’ll see.”

I caught my first wave when I was a year shy of 30. What I remember is the silence. Hearing nothing but my heartbeat as I slid across the face of a gently peeling left. Feeling that I had been let in on a precious secret. That was the day I swore I’d never move away from the shore. My kids will grow up in the company of dolphins and seals, ever-present sand between their toes and salt in their hair. 

Lucky? That’s the lie. Luck implies chance. This is the life that we chose.

The Fame, She Exacts A High Price

Now that this site has readers other than my wife, Whit, and my sister, I feel pressure to actually write stuff that people might actually enjoy reading. I'd like to think that I'm somewhat clever and creative over at DadCentric and now MamaPop (I'm feeling good about the way things have gone over there so far; two for two on posts, some nice comments, Amalah added me to her blogroll). And while I am still sticking to my guns on this site's Mission Statement (all random crap, all the time) I do feel somewhat compelled to provide the occasional bit of thought-out material. I will begin with a brief fatherhood anecdote, one that I think captures what it's like to be a 21st century dad, the laughter and the tears, the joys and heartaches, etc. Show me that smile again/Don't waste another minute on your cryin'...

(Clears throat.)

"Daddy", Lucas says to me as he devours his second bowl of Cheerios this morning. "My penis is getting big."

Whew! Let me tell you, that was difficult. 3 re-writes on that one. It's hard, this writing for an audience thing.

(ETA, somewhat later, same day: This is Post #501. That's gotta be some sorta milestone. I think Corporate HR is supposed to give me an engraved paperweight or something.)

Serendipi-T-shirt

I Roll Out The Welcome Mat

So...you probably made your way here from MamaPop. Hi. Sorry I didn't take the time to straighten up the place...the stack of dog-earred Hustler magazines and the Star Wars figures aren't mine, by the way. They're my, uh, brother's. Feel free to look around. The Archives are a good place to start. There's some good stuff in there about surfing and Hillary Clinton and great films and the time I almost got killed by a creepy vagrant. (I linked to that because it's a pretty good story and there's also a completely random comment by someone claiming to be Maureen but who I think was actually a very drunk Howard Zinn.) There's snacks as well. Unless you're one of those people that thinks Hostess Twinkies are better than Dolly Madison Zingers. You so-called "foodies" and your elitist ways.

I Am The New MamaPop Pop

I've landed a new and bitchin' cool writing gig. Starting this Friday, you can catch me rubbing shoulders with some big time bloggers over at MamaPop. As I put it in an email to new compadre Sweetney, I feel like that guy from the Judas Priest tribute band who was recruited to replace Rob Halford.