This is a beautiful example of what types of art can arise from the combo of technology, outrage and repression.It also gets major credibility points for being anonymous, and tempered with regret. A masterpiece....here's some thoughts that went through my head last night while I was trying to walk precincts, work flights, answer emails, and keep up with no novel, all without a computer or coffee. ..- What was going through Rove's mind while he sat there next to Chimpy watching the election returns? - Would it be shabby if I used my Commendation Bonus to get some action on the Las Vegas line I just got about Bush blowing whatever he has in his head out by the end of his term?- Out of my favorite novels, almost all are political dystopian allegories by foreign authors. Is it because they understand the non-black-and-white nature of how nice, easy going people become fucked over? Is it a respect for fables and allegory? Is it just a matter of taste? "The Fifth Sacred Thing" and "Blindness" have been playing in my head like an audiobook while I knock on irongrilled gates and graffittied doors.- Yeah, I understand a christian minister being sexually marooned and starved for lovingkindness, since they do make rather an industry of de-integrating both sexual feelings and charity from everyday living existence. But, who buys a 49-year-old whore? I mean, what kind of person?- (volunteers are annoying. Narcissists with a boddhisatva complex, or frustrated leaders looking for true believers, or bored do-gooders that need instractions and praise every five minutes. I know this. I accept it. I try not to make it worse. But could this be one reason why more [young] people don't get 'involved'? Voting is a proactive and anonymous action. No one saves your preferences or gives you feedback or buzzes or dig points. In fact, it seems that even the good guys were fucking things up at every turn. The poll workers where I voted were having a LOUD and extremely distracting conversation about their respective reproductive histories; one actually looked annoyed when I told her my husband's Diebold robot flipped a vote. But to be fair, a mysterious and anoymous volunteer from VideotheVote motored his scooter all the way out to my workplace to get Odysseus' story, and we didn't even get a chance to thank him.)- ..and while I was doing my annoying volunteer thing, I realized that every time I was moved to change, it was after a huge disappointment in myself. This made me think again of the novel "Blindness" when the (invisible, but not really blind) middle aged doctor's wife almost loses her mind when the blind thugs rape the women in her unit. This thought made more sense when I was sitting next to a morbidly obese diabetic and a limited-English small business owner,and a scared little Democratic teenager married to a mean Republican, driving them back to polls where they had all been turned away earlier in the day. I remembered "Blindness"'s doctor's wife leading the blinded and raped women back to their cell before she found the needlepoint scissors to drive into the lead thug's neck. No one suspected her. Who is more invisible, and less important, than someone's middle-aged wife?- and then I worked all night. I when I got home I had two big glasses of maker's mark and fell asleep immediately and woke up just before noon and the dream that woke me up made me want to write:There was a guy named Andy the Donkey Man on the reservation where my grandma lived. He shot people's pet turkeys and dogs. He was rumored to have abused the foster kids he took from the reservation orphanage. He offered my mother twenty bucks to help him 'wring the turkey's neck'. He never let anybody but rich tourists and cute Anthropology students ride his donkeys (my personal grudge) and he loved to whip the donkeys in front of the kids who really liked the poor beasts.No one challenged him. I couldn't get even one cousin to kick his ass. Then one day, one of his donkey's that he was wearing out with a dogwhip kicked him in the chest. Andy broke a bunch of old bones and ended up his days in a wheelchair, drunk and alone. He never recovered either socially or physically.You never overcome getting kicked by a fed-up donkey.Sorry I haven't been visiting. It's been quite a week. Now....time for coffee. I think next week will be pretty interesting too.