Obama did it!

I - and the rest of the world - can breathe more easily again.

NTD

Just Checking In

I haven't gone anywhere... but it's hard to know what to say anymore during this economic collapse/presidential campaign. I believe that everything - from the insightful to the ridiculous - is being stated all over the place.

However, we did get to see the Divine Mister Obama live and in person on Sunday at an Asheville rally. It was a proud moment, and Obama yard signs, buttons and stickers continue to sell briskly at the shop.

The fall of the global economy is in the hearts and minds of my customers. Still, sales haven't plummeted any worse than they already had in the previous months of 2008.

Today I'm just hoping for an Obama victory and good leaf season sales.

NTD

Gasoline Blues

Are you there, God? It's me, the NTD.

Where the hell is all the gasoline in Asheville, Lord? I found only one station that was selling - and you could spot it a half mile away, with fifty cars backed up on either side of it. Multiple policemen were present in order to keep the peace.

It would be less frustrating, except that I am assured that the pumps are flowing freely elsewhere.

Any divine intervention would be much appreciated.

Your arrogant little American daughter currently residing in a western North Carolina gulag,

NTD

P.S. Really, God, it's just the PMS and an empty gas tank talking here. I will be working on resuming my gratefulness for every breath and restoring my sense of awe as I ponder the infinite beauty and wondrous glory of the universe shortly, I promise.

A Republican Drinking Game

It's a tough week in the news, trying not to write about the Governess of the North. All of us liberal opinionators are like moose caught in the headlights of Sarah Palin's Suburban, paralyzed while she aims her gospel gun toward our bleeding hearts. I miss falling asleep to the soothing sounds of Barack Obama's dreamy voice offering hope and change to those of us who have not enjoyed the last eight years.

But that was so last week; it's been all-Sarah, all the time on the news ever since John McCain made his startling announcement. The McCain/Palin ticket promises two political strategies: pandering to a brand of fundamentalists who have about three issues on which they base all of their voting decisions, and remaining defensive and prickly about anything else the candidates might have said or done which deserves comment. If the National Enquirer doesn't find some John Edwards-level dirt on Mrs. Palin soon (and what a sorry state of mind I'm in to depend on the Enquirer for investigative reporting), I'm going to be engaging in electoral drinking games until November.

Join me in the fun! Head to the liquor store and follow these simple rules, and you'll be an advanced alcoholic (but for the left!) in no time.

- One shot of Svedka vodka every time Palin denies the man-made aspect of global warming
- One shot of Gummi Bear N' Schnapps whenever Palin defends her anti-polar bear protection position
- One shot of Sailor Jerry Rum every time Palin defends her anti-beluga whale protection position
- One sip of sacramental wine every time Palin suggests that God wants a $30 billion natural gas pipeline built in Alaska
- One shot of Jose Cuervo whenever McCain struggles to appease both pro-immigration Latinos and anti-immigration white coservatives
- One shot of Hennessy every time that you notice that the McCain-Palin ticket is failing to attract black voters
- One sip of a perfect mojito whenever Palin decries gay marriage
- One Miss Saigon for every instance of McCain retelling his Vietnam experience
- One gulp of Samuel Adams Brown Ale when Palin suggests that our Founding Fathers recited the Pledge of Allegiance
- One keg stand every time that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston are trotted out as a young couple for whom "life happens"
- One sip of a Dirty Martini whenever you check out a YouTube video of John McCain staring at Sarah Palin's breasts or rubbing up against hapless female Republicans - One White Russian for each instance of Cindy McCain mentioning Alaska's proximity to Russia via the Bering Strait
- One Jager Bomb for each reference to Palin's extensive command of the Alaska National Guard
- One bottle of Dom Perignon for every time John and Cindy McCain realize that they own another home
- One liter of Fiji Water whenever some bitter Ron Paul supporter comes up and tries to convince you that bottled water lover Mr. Paul can still beat Obama and McCain
- One bong hit whenever John McCain talks tough about opposing medical marijuana
- One shot of Wild Turkey for every instance of Palin or McCain complaining about the liberal media
- One Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer each time multi-millionaire John McCain suggests that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are elitist
- One Mind Eraser every time that John McCain neglects to mention the incumbent Republican George Bush
- One nuclear cocktail if McCain starts singing his perennial favorite "Bomb Iran, bomb, bomb Iran"

The drinking game continues until the Obama/Biden ticket wins and Palin heads back to Alaska for hunting season. However, if the Republicans prevail in the presidential election, keep up the game as long as possible. Crying in your beer and/or other remaining liquor will be perfectly acceptable for the next four years (as the economy tanks further, you may substitute malt liquor or My Wild Irish Rose). But do not - I repeat, do not - drink that Republican Kool-Aid.

NTD

Lynne Spears for Vice-President

Bristol Palin is five months' pregnant... what is this, Lynne Spears for VP?

My gosh, maybe I should have thrown my own hat in the ring and given Obama an outsider choice to compete with this fiasco. At least both of my daughters made it into college without getting knocked up. And, let's see, I have owned a store for 21 years, and between that and birthing two babies - I feel about as qualified as Tina Fey's cousin from the far north....

Shouldn't McCain care about the safety of this country more than he cares about winning an election?

NTD

The Bong Show

I sell many, many things in my shop. Along with Indian tapestries, Japanese incense, glass jewelry and Obama stickers are several cases of tobacco accessories. I have always blamed this on my old friend Eric, who back in 1987 talked me into displaying three deer antler pipes that he made in between downing twelve-packs of PBR and smoking packs of More menthol cigarettes in the back of that sharecropper shack he was staying at off Highway 301. I agreed to consign them, and shoved over a few vintage rhinestone brooches in the case to make room for them.

They sold.

Although I didn't care for smoking in any form, I kind of liked selling pipes. The tobacco paraphernalia clientele is generally a grateful one, and not shy about shelling out the bucks for a myriad of smoking devices. A couple of decades later, I sell vaporizers, water pipes, handpipes ranging from corn cob to color-changing glass, bubblers, and traditional meerschaums. I still don't smoke, which means that I spend a lot of time listening to people describe the pros of cons of carburators and the widths and lengths necessary to draw from an upright sherlock, and whether a Gravitron is practical for solo use. There's a thesis waiting to be written regarding the fine art of smoking, I'm sure of it.

So - in spite of the fact that a certain 1994 Supreme Court decision rendered the selling of a thing called a "bong" a felony (so of course none of us in the business sell anything named the "B" word, we're just selling tobacco waterpipes) - I attended an accessories show in Las Vegas this week which my daughter and I nicknamed The Bong Show. We spent several hours staring breathlessly at thousands of pipes. While others at the show were obviously considering their personal smoking possibilities, I was one of those parties whose cartoon balloon floating above my head would have instead focused on this subject: Can I Triple My Money On This One? Would My Shop Move A Hundred Of These By New Years?

Besides, there were way too many Bong Babes in there. The average thirty year old dude who owns a store would salivate over dozens of women clad in fishnets and Daisy Dukes and black brassieres, but middle-aged mamas such as myself - there were perhaps another one or two women who made buying decisions in addition to me - were just angry that there was not a single Scantily Clad Man.

I mean, I feel good about selling an item which so obviously skirts the legal line of respectability. Pipe-selling makes me feel vaguely bad ass, although I realize that this is just an illusion (but it's a pretty good illusion when you're pushing fifty, as I am). It's a nice business, nice folks, nice products, and nothing that Wal-Mart can ever take away from me. Pipes have helped put my daughter through college and paid two mortgages. But - just like when I ran the biggest used CD and indie music business in a college town back in the nineties, it's a man's world. And nothing reminds me of this fact so much as being at a trade show where all the girls wear push-up bras and stilletos, while the men handle all the money.

All of this just inspires me to try harder. Pipes aren't really a gender issue, anyway, right?

BONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONG...

NTD

I Heart Hyphens

I spilled my Shredded Wheat on the keyboard the other day. There are three keys which have not worked ever since: the five, the six, and the hyphen. Rather than plugging in a spare keyboard to replace the faulty one, we have been adjusting to the change. I was definitely becoming too hyphen dependent... in fact, I am jonesing to use one right this second, and am substituting the melodramatic ellipsis instead. I've also gotten a little more high faluting with an increase in semicolons and colons. Alternating between semicolons and ellipsis, my writing resembles the ramblings of a depressed spinster English professor.

Project for the day: replace the keyboard....

NTD

Just tell yourself, Ducky
You're really quite lucky.

Dr. Suess, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? (1973)

NTD

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.

- Rumi

Mean People

The amazing Stewart left his 401K and other benefits behind him in order to help his girlfriend with her shop. That would be me and my store. While some view this merging and mingling as a precarious teetering toward potential disaster, I think that it is just peachy. A) I need the help, because all other wonderful people involved have health, family and educational conflicts, and B) Stewart is a completely excellent human being who knows how to open a cash register and make change.

Twenty one years of a very eccentric retail business has taught me that every day can be weirder than a series of Clerks outtakes. Take our bathroom: our loo has suffered everything from opiate works left behind on the toilet tank to clogged-up leavings from allegedly good friends who neglected to notice the plunger, and you can take both of those facts literally as well as metaphorically. My own daughter managed to open the superglue and taste the contents when she was two years old and another daughter was largely raised in an appliance-sized cardboard box filled with styrofoam peanuts and watercolor markers. They both ran credit card machines while too short to reach the cash register without a stool. I got divorced and fell in love (the latter more than once) while standing behind the counter. I fired one employee who had bragged about having sex in my dressing room, although that was not the particular offense which led to dismissal. I fired several others who sold drugs, stole merchandise, and/or would not leave their vicious dogs at home. Plus, there are the customers.

Stewart is already meeting The Mean People: The Mean Blind Girl, The Mean Dwarf. Any day now he'll meet The Mean Spitting One-Eyed Vietnam Vet, if no one sends him back to jail. Stewart is really nice, so he was trying to describe The Mean Blind Girl to me with compassion:

An interesting girl who couldn't see came in today, and I tried to help her with the rings...

"Oh my God! That mean blind bitch is back! Don't let her waste your time..."

He was taken aback by my nastiness, but I know this girl and her longsuffering older husband/parent/caretaker/whatever. She complains and insists on cutting deals in a charmless way:

Gimme a break, I'm blind... can't I have this twenty dollar ring for twelve? C'mon... God, why don't you have more rings my size... show me all your size nine rings with square stones, I don't like round ones... Harry! make her help me with this....

I try to look at Harry and imagine that he married this girl when she was fourteen and cute and has to face the aftemath forever, sort of how I also imagine Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. So I treat the couple like I would any other unpleasant customers and go about my business, leaving her sputtering and angry. It makes me smile.

The Mean Dwarf rarely comes in, he prefers to intimidate the tourists with a pack of spare-changing gutter punks. He has threatened to kick my ass when I declined to give him a quarter and I avoid him almost as much as the one-eyed Vietnam vet, who once spat on a friend of mine when she didn't pony up some change.

I know that the dwarf and the vet and the blind girl have had their hard knocks. Honestly, I think that they are far more entitled to their bad attitudes than, say, when a rich tourist gets huffy because I don't have a Coexist t-shirt in their preferred size and color. I just think that everyone would catch more flies with honey than vinegar, as my grandmother would say.

Welcome to the street, Stewart. No one but pregnant women and children in our employee bathroom, please. And don't ever let the mean people intimidate you into giving them something for nothing.

NTD

The Hazard of Googling One's Self

In an entirely weak moment on a lazy Sunday, I typed my own name into Google. Big mistake. For days now, I have been hot and bothered about a particularly mean-spirited tirade on my newspaper column. I really should rise above a standard flaming incident. However, it is infinitely more pleasurable on a hot summer night to jump directly into the fray.

I frequently discourage my boyfriend from reading message board tripe out loud to me when I am about two sips into my morning coffee. Why would one spoil one's mood with so much negativism, I say. But hypocrisy is so human, now that I have pulled up the personally offensive post and made him read it once more just to refresh his memory before I point out all the flaws in the writer's logic.

As an op-ed writer, one must roll with the punches. It's the reasonable, mature thing to do. You can't please all of the people all of the time, and columnists are not even aiming for universal appeal. We invite controversy, right? However, in cyberspace, intellectual discourse is rarely the goal; personal attacks are the standard-bearer. Critics are not bound by regular debate procedure, or even decent manners. In this case, the writer describes his dislike of me largely due to nonexistent details about my personal life - i.e. he doesn't even know me, but rails on, unencumbered by reality.

The kicker here? The rant against me was written by a Macon writer who also happens to be a columnist for that edition of our paper. We are unseen co-workers in the virtual office space.

Dear Macon Columnist: For the record, I am rarely one to blather on about jambands. In fact, the major events I have attended in 2008 would include the Lou Reed show in Asheville and Tom Waits at the Fabulous Fox. I would bet good money that either Lou or Tom would curbstomp anyone who linked their names to the term "jam band". I also don't smoke pot, I hate the music of Dave Matthews, am friends with many soldiers, have never aligned myself with the libertarian party, have lived a tattoo-free life, and never stepped inside a yurt. I don't feel as though I am compensating for a lack of some earlier, essential life experience by being a middle-aged person who writes two columns a month. I will eat the occasional veggie burger, but prefer barbecued pork a la Vandy's of Statesboro. I don't speak derisively of the troops, although when a security guard screams that he has been to Iraq before touching breasts in a so-called patdown, I think that I can call a spade a spade without criticism from someone who wasn't even present to witness this.

I do, however, own a pair of Crocs as you surmised. But so do most Americans, so that's only a half credit for a lucky guess.

In other words, it is lazy thinking to attempt to turn anyone, either liberal or conservative, into a cultural stereotype so that the person does not have to be dealt with as a real human being. My life extends far beyond the boundaries of newspaper and web pages, as does yours.

The larger point is not which sort of columnist is more interesting, the one who aspires to be Charles Bukowski or the one who aspires to be Molly Ivins. That’s based entirely on whether one is more concerned with tales of excessive drinking, or tales of political life. I enjoy a stiff drink considerably more than I enjoy the presidential campaign, but there’s only so much I can say about alcohol. I’ve seen its destructive power on close friends, so it would be dishonest of me to recommend it wholesale, particularly to a readership of largely twentysomethings. I might hate politics on some level, but am afraid of what happens to the world when too many good people ignore it. We can’t let the bastards shoot up and poison Planet Earth without a fight. So I write about the things I care about; and those who regale us with drinking stories are also writing about what they care about. Only the late great Hunter S. Thompson and a chosen few get to write about it all.

Write what you know, that’s the first rule of all writing.

It’s a brave thing to put yourself out there, no matter how a person chooses to do it. I commend all those who write with their own faces and names - I avoided it as long as possible myself until served with a photographic ultimatum, and deliberately chose a picture that my daughter took of me from a safe distance. I behold the hundreds of photos that the current generation fearlessly uploads online with a sense of wonder as they smile confidently at the universe. I hope that such self-assurance will follow them all the days of their lives. The lessons here are slight - don’t Google what you don’t want to read, and when it’s too late, try to work through what it is that bugs you. Be honest, and avoid cheap shots - that’s too easy, and ultimately is unsatisfying. Feel free to respond, whether privately or within a suitable public arena. Then get over it, because life is way too short to do anything else.

Quote of the Day

'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.'

-Ray Bradbury

Summer Hiatus

It's not as if there is nothing to say; I've rarely been accused of that, at least since I turned eleven and decided that speaking to others was a skill worth honing for my personal benefit. This was fifth grade, after the late winter of fourth grade, when the kid who picked his nose in the back of the classroom raised a snotty finger and pointed it at me. The boys were choosing dance partners for the Georgia Day square dance. That was the defining moment when I realized that I had to raise my voice in protest of something. I had to set limits and control my destiny. But I didn't. So the first hand of the opposite sex that I held belonged to the booger-laden class pariah whom I despised, because I was too shy to prevent it.

I pondered this humiliation during the summer. By the first day of fifth grade, I determined to quit being the mousey girl. I opened my mouth and spoke to classmates.

By sixth grade, I had advanced to spreading rumors about bra-stuffing simply because I hated a girl. I gossiped, lied, bragged, and sometimes even said nice things when I ran out of bile and nonsense.

I have rarely been at a loss for words ever since. This has made blogging easy for me, and my newspaper column has steadily hummed along for five and a half years.

But this summer I have been struggling with family illness, business, and other stuff of life. I want to write but have difficulty finding time for the blog right now.

Long story short, I'm taking a few weeks off and will be back to posting when life settles down. This worries me - not because there are hundreds of readers out there hanging onto my wise words - but rather because I love the discipline required by regular posting. It's writing practice, and the process helps me order my otherwise chaotic existence. I had tried to achieve this via purely private writing before starting to write online three years ago. But this site has worked remarkably well for me, so much better than pen and paper. Even the most mundane post requires reflection and focused intent. This page keeps me honest - I'm beyond spreading rumors about classmates' brassieres. I have to make sure that I'm not stuffing wads of paper down my own shirt.

So I'll get back to online wordsmithing by the dog days of August - I suppose that if I were still in school, that would be the beginning of the 41st grade.

NTD

busybusybusybusy...

...busybusybusybusy.

NTD

Cancer Sucks

My niece called early this morning to complain about the cancer life. Actually, it's not the cancer or the chemo that's getting to her; it's the lack of independence. She's almost 32 and trying to enjoy a week out of the hospital with her two sons before the second round of chemotherapy. However, it's jarring to lose one's job, one's apartment, access to any belongings that might harbor excessive germs, and even the simple pleasures of taking the children for summer outings or going to buy one's own groceries.

I can listen, but that is most of what I can do today. I can promise a little vacation (if her platelets and white blood cells cooperate) later in the summer, and I can send money, and I can visit, but that's about all. It's a helpless feeling, knowing that I can't rescue her from any of this. Cancer is so damned personal.

NTD

now what?

It's the morning after the final graduation - well, at least until Anna gets through college or Sarah goes for another degree. I still wake up involuntarily to make sure that Anna gets to school on time. However, I trust my intrinsic ability to sleep too much, which should be kicking back in within the next few days.

My shop is open from 11 - 7, which seems so darned civilized compared to other people's schedules. I don't mind the occasional six a.m. alarm when it is warranted - but I prefer my lazy, leisurely schedule which requires no alarm clocks at all.

I hope that Anna's somewhat amorphous summer plans include no early bird scheduling, since she will still be home most of the season.

NTD

another day, another graduation

It's amazing how girls can fret about wearing the "right dress" - with strict guidelines spelled out in the high school handout - just to cover their entire bodies with a cap and gown in order to march into Hanner Fieldhouse with the other graduates.

10:00 a.m. graduation... so early for those of us trying to abstain from coffee for a few days.

NTD

six word memoir

My life: music, southern cooking, kissing.

Just one of those dorky computer challenges. Most of the time I head directly for the "delete" button, but this time the one-minute answer seemed about right.

NTD

Congratulations Sarah!!!

It's a three exclamation point post - my eldest daughter Sarah graduated from UGA with degrees in Latin American Studies and Romance Languages. And in a few more days, my daughter Anna will be an honor graduate of Statesboro High School!!! Three exclamation points for her too!!!

Some days it feels wonderful to be a mother.

NTD

They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for. - Tom Bodett

The martinis at Christopher's are amazing. Overpriced and luscious. I have determined that they put fresh basil in everything, which this morning suddenly doesn't seem worth the extra five bucks as my head is pounding and my wallet is feeling considerably lighter. In fact, the revelation that my two drinking buddies last night confessed that McCain was their man in November is unsettling, although here in south Georgia such statements are not so uncommon among the white middle-class. I laughed it off and suggested that neither read my column this week which is titled "McC*Ain't". I didn't ask either of them why they object to the Democratic candidates, because I was buzzed and hopeful that someone might want to pick up my tab. In some circles, this might make me a martini whore. However, here in the Deep South it's also a matter of manners. Arguing politics with kind people who only want to relax after work would be rude. What's more, I seriously doubt that I can change anyone's mind in the midst of a cocktail conversation. I learned this back when I was a Christian teenager. All of those gospel tracts I earnestly handed out were quite a waste of good southern pine trees.

In any case, I paid for my own drinks. And, when My Lai somehow came up in the conversation, I assured them that I would never ever buy a piece of jewelry from former Lt. Calley over in Columbus, GA. I don't care how misguided a soul anyone tries to portray the man.

NTD, the diehard liberal hand who tries to wear the (sometimes tight) velvet glove of kindness

I own such a collection of old magazines that I rarely need to buy a new one. There are boxes of seventies-era Rolling Stones I have not yet gotten to. Eighties Utne Readers which are worth a second look. The first hundred issues of Mother Earth News, collected long after their publication in the seventies and eighties, bought piecemeal from flea markets and yard sales back when I aspired to own a working homestead. An Ode edition or two, a stray New Yorker on my bedside table, a vintage Whole Earth Review with yellowing newsprint pages on my bookshelf.

Thanks to my love/hate relationship to the internet, I only occasionally experience a book or a magazine cover to cover anymore. This disturbs me. Instead of the expansive cultural treasure chest that I imagined my DSL connection would open for me, I find the world getting smaller and smaller than back when I depended on my page-turning ability to see other realities. As a wise writer said recently in salon.com, we have neglected "choosing heartfelt, courageous paths" and instead spent years monitoring Nicole Richie's eating disorders and Britney's breakdowns. Tmz.com and even huffingtonpost.com have become my morning crack which keeps the adrenaline pumping between answering e-mails and researching more serious concerns for my newspaper column.

I gave up television long ago, but now I realize that I have replaced it with another screen. I don't believe that computers are inherently evil. However, I am feeling an almost moral imperative to further limit my time online. This is not to say that I would disable my blog, or quit selling books on amazon.com, or stop e-mailing my friends, or composing my newspaper essays. It's just that all of the other crap - the pseudonews, the gossip, the endless wikipedia inquiries - need to be restricted to a true "need to know" basis.

Meanwhile, I plan to don my reading glasses regularly and start reading those books and magazines on my shelves. I love the surprise of opening a book or magazine, the unexpected subjects and viewpoints which challenge my own view of the world a little more than staring at message boards full of bile and stupidity and misinformation. I don't want to be a snob, but I also don't want the opinions of bitter lonely people to fill my thoughts. There's enough of that in retail, which after all is my business.

Who knows, perhaps I'll catch up and start buying new magazines and books again.

NTD

confessions of a poptart addict

I started keeping a food diary last week. No worries, I have no plans to bore the public with the sad confessions of a poptart addict - well, let's just say that I won't post my eating failures here. Counting calories is almost as much fun as filling out an income tax return.

I never pictured myself as turning into a middle-aged gym rat who pays attention to the nutritional value of goji berries and white tea. And I am not nearly there yet. But all of this hospital time spent with relatives who are diabetic, heavily prescription drugged, and otherwise malady-laden has made me reconsider my leisurely life of body neglect. In other words, I'm overweight. Some days I eat like a teenager. Some evenings I can drink like a fish.

I don't want high cholesterol and I don't want to take prescription drugs. At 47, I have to admit that health does not come as easily as it did when I was 27, or even 37.

There you have it - the boring part of my daily life as it is now. But we went to a Lou Reed concert last week and I stood fairly easily the entire evening. I felt fine the next morning. And there's a whole lot of shows I would be happy to dance at all night, as long as my body continues to hold up.

Plus, Lou Reed is 66 and, judging from his biceps, lifted a few weights himself before this tour.

If ex-junkie hipsters can do it, so can I.

NTD

The Coffee Fast Ends

I ignored coffee for four days out of the past seven. I assured myself that attachment is suffering and felt free in my headachey under-caffeined state to move through the world with a hazy confidence. Green tea is enough, I repeated daily.

But today is Friday and I am not getting sh** done. So there's a potful of emergency Folgers(!) in all of its schwaggy glory awaiting me.

NTD

R.I.P. Albert Hofmann, father of LSD.

Sweet dreams, and thanks for altering the consciousness of so many - including me.

NTD

Well Said

From salon.com's Dear Cary:

One does not write only to display one's talent. One also writes as a spiritual practice and a mode of self-discovery. One writes in order to see. One writes in order to remember. Writing is like a sixth sense used to apprehend a reality not detected by the other five. It is the memory-sense, or the feeling-sense, the organ through which we make known to each other a rich world not otherwise knowable. It is also the medium through which we make known history and the soul of our culture. It keeps something alive that otherwise might die. It is an important act regardless of whether it gains an individual writer fame and praise.

NTD

Full-fetal umbilicus separated spoon

According to Janet Kinosian in her book The Well-Rested Woman: 60 Soothing Suggestions for Getting a Good Night's Sleep, there are four basic sleeping positions which indicate certain personality traits. They are:

1. In the prone position, sleeper lies face down on the stomach with arms extended and bent, usually framed above the head. People who regularly sleep in the prone position - and both Madonna and I are in this category, interestingly enough - tend to have strong compulsive tendencies and stubbornness in their personalities and are persistent and goal-oriented.

2. The royal position is the geometric opposite of the prone. The royal sleeper lies supine, fully on the back, with arms slightly akimbo at the sides. It's an open, vulnerable and expansive position, and these people display self-confidence and self-involvement. Workaholic businessmen and entrepreneurs often prefer this position.

3. The most common position, the semi-fetal, has sleepers lying on their sides with knees slightly bent, one arm outstretched above the head, the other resting comfortably on the opposing upper arm to cradle the head. Conciliatory, compromising, non-threatening, non-shakers; sleep experts claim this to be the optimal sleep posture position.

4. The full-fetal is the characteristic womb position. Sleepers lie curled on their sides, with knees pulled all the way up, heads bent forward. Usually a pillow or blanket mass is centered at the stomach. These people are highly emotional, sensitive, artistic, and have intense one-on-one relationships. Oddly, it's found that women who sleep in this position normally have heightened capacity for multiple orgasms.

Add four (or more) pillows to Position Number Four and there I am, Ms. Intense. While I wonder how they would quantify that heightened orgasmic capacity, I won't complain about such positive assumptions.

NTD

Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

- Albert Einstein

NTD

My daughter Sarah has declined to sit through the traditionally interminable stadium gathering in Athens known as the University of Georgia graduation ceremony. Instead, we'll play hooky, eat barbecue, and let UGA mail her two(!) degrees to the house the following week.

This is a particularly good plan for me upon the news that UGA has booked Supreme Court Justice "Long Dong" Clarence Thomas to speak at graduation. That would be even worse than when I yawned through the glories of chicken eating back when the founder of Chic-fil-a spoke at my sister's ceremony.

NTD

...and now my beloved (and only) niece has leukemia.

What's up, universe?

NTD

Life at the Cuckoo's Nest

I returned my father to his home from the hospital yesterday around 4:50. By 4:58, I began questioning the wisdom of this.

Craniotomies are funny things. The speech comes and goes and rational thought comes and goes. And when both disappear, it's difficult to determine how far the patient has strayed from what used to be (so-called) "normal". For instance, the minute we left him alone in the bathroom, he found pills in the cabinet that suddenly looked pretty tasty. His house is not childproofed or crazyoldman-proofed in the least.

But I made Daddy promise to be good and left him with my stepmom who was preparing a dinner for him (pureed, as indicated on the doctors' orders). Then I went to my own home, which is starting to suffer from serious neglect.

The phone calls from my stepmother - not a strong woman, to say it politely - began around 10:30 p.m. Around 6:45 a.m. I told her to try not to cry and I would call home health care at 8:00.

So today - which was supposed to be the official day of celebration for my daughter's eighteenth birthday - we will be instead celebrating "Get Every Vitamin and Pill Out of the House and Move All the Cords off the Floor and Threaten to take Daddy to the Nursing Home if He Misbehaves" Day.

And I apologize for complaining when so many others go through more difficult times than this. I realize that I have been extraordinarily lucky in life. But while some blogging days are for bragging and some for expressing gratefulness, and some simply describe a moment in one's personal time and space without commentary - a morning like this is made for venting about one's crazy (and getting crazier) family.

NTD

A quote by Marianne Williamson, not Nelson Mandela as commonly attributed:

OUR DEEPEST fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

NTD

My little tomato and pepper seedlings are getting their true leaves, and the sunflowers are towering over everything else already. My formerly black thumb is showing shades of green (so far).

Even on these worst days, there's a ray of sunshine when I really need it.

But I still plan to call the doctor's office and beg for a dozen anti-anxiety pills to get me through this next month.

NTD

Another day, another hospital visit. On the bright side, Daddy is strong and his vital signs are great. We just miss his frontal and temporal lobes working like they should. But the nurses assure us that things will be much better in the next few days.

I'm waiting.

NTD

Ain't Misbehaving...

...no sir, not when I'm in ICU trying not to fall apart while my dad thrashes in mental confusion and my sister is exerting every atom of her Leo narcissism directly toward us unwilling bystanders (which is a remarkable hat trick in which one can convolute all concerns both reasonable and unreasonable about medical competence directed toward a beloved family member and still twist all attention entirely to one's self and one's latest gallery showing until other caring family members only abstain from fratricide because we are, after all, here to support Daddy, not to upset him).

I try to remember that the higher path of family life is to remember to put the "fun" in "dysfunctional".

If any of you readers are of the praying variety, please remember my Dad in your prayers.

NTD

Two Things

First: My family began gathering at my father's hospital bed yesterday. It's an estrogen pit, and as strange as anything television producers dream of for reality shows. I am not in the mood to parade the colorful characters right here and now; maybe later. It's disquieting to being thrown in a very small room together and noting which of us fed Daddy (my sister was remarkably patient, being such a Type A non-nurturer by nature); who combed his hair on this last day before they shave it for brain surgery (most of us); and who grabbed the plastic urinal for Daddy first (none of us - we all yelled for the nurse). We're very imperfect but are all on our best behavior, because this is a serious surgery.

It all starts over again in an hour.

Second: I recommend Alice Walker's essay which appeared on alternet.org this week:

http://alternet.org/election08/80898/

NTD

My Grandparents' Motel Circa 1953

R.I.P. Sister Sarah White

Around age fourteen, I quit drinking gin with Miss Lil (see 3/21 entry below) and dragged my stack of gospel music and Baptist hymnals to piano lessons. I had dedicated my life to the Lord and wanted to play His music. Miss Lil rolled her eyes, but did my bidding. She loved gospel music, too, and tried to teach me to play like Aretha Franklin during her Muscle Shoals sessions. I picked up chord improvisation and did my best. I was white, but was sure that the Lord would provide me with the proper soulfulness.

By sixteen I began dating other Christians who shared my evangelical zeal. Sometimes these dates turned into familiar making out sessions - with Eddie, I think this happened in a 1964 Falcon with wide bench seats. With Butch, a hot date meant holding a black leather Bible between our laps, thighs touching, reading some stern admonition from that most uptight patron saint of chaperones, St. Paul. Eventually I settled on my future husband Jack, who not only enjoyed all of the above but offered the additional cachet of knowing Lester White and the White Family.

Jack played guitar and wrote songs in a somewhat lazy seventies-style. He would earnestly sing ballads while his hair and beard grew longer. He began to resemble seventies Jesus, the hippie God who ruled the cooler churches back then. We formed a shifting coalition of musicians and singers who became our band - Butch, Sonya, Danny, Eddie, Gary, and a few others over those three years or so. This was our mission, sharing the Good News with church after church in Savannah, Garden City, Port Wentworth, and Pooler.

At least three times, the gracious White Family let us open for them at black churches around the county.

The White Family was an institution in local gospel music. Brother White was a blind guitarist who might have had a career in blues music had he chosen that path. Sister Sarah and their grown children Lester and his sister (forgotten her name) sang along Staples Singers-style. They were great, and we were white kids trying to keep up. But we were convinced that God would bless our efforts.

While I am grateful that no tapes exist of our musical attempts, I am so glad that Jack and I spent time with the White Family. They were kind, encouraging, and loving as they invited us into their home and into churches that would not normally ask grinning Caucasian wannabes to minister to them through music. The average five year old in those congregations could sing rings around us.

I began to really love black churches and started attending a few on Sunday evenings with Jack. But back then it was hard to fit in - this was before southern churches began to integrate on any level - and we went back to the white church.

I lost my religion, moved away, and lost track of the White Family. But on Sunday I was scanning the obituaries online - a regular obsession of mine - and found one for Sister Sarah:

Sarah L. White - SAVANNAH - White Family Singer, Founder, and Legendary Gospel Singer Dies at 82 Renowned gospel singer, recording artist and exemplary mother, Sarah L. White, made her transition from mortal to immortality on Sunday March 6, 2008 with family and friends around her bedside. She was under the care of Hospice of Savannah, Inc. Born, November 23, 1925 and educated in Liberty County, she lived all of her adult life in Savannah. Her husband of 42 years; Minister James White preceded her in death. They raised five children in the Pentecostal Faith. Popular radio personality; Lester Lec'k White is her baby son. Affectionately known as a "songbird", Sarah was the founder and lead vocalist of the award winning White Family Singers. The group was esteemed by the masses, including mayors, governors, senators, and even president of Egypt; Anwar Sadat, Evangelist Oral Roberts, and actress Carol Burnett. A tribute in 2005 to induct the singing clan into the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum, Savannah Mayor Otis S. Johnson Stated; "your unique ability to enthrall audiences is confirmed that you possess n extraordinary musical gift that is being used to speak and encourage the lives of others." She leaves to honor and respect her legacy her sons; James (Angela), Julius, and Lester White, adopted son; Edward (Dorothea) Lowe, Jr., daughters and stepdaughters respectfully; Kathleen (Leroy) White-Scott, Sarah Glover, Ruth White-Coles, 16 grandchildren, 27 great-grandchildren, and 11 great-great-grandchildren.

NTD

P.S. For those who want to hear a sample of the White Family's music, there's a downloadable version of 'Wonderful World' about halfway down the following page:

http://www.sirshambling.com/articles/gospel_soul.htm

Terrible Tuesday Blues

It's life on the hormonal rollercoaster today. I started crying while my daughter waited at the counter for her chicken tacos. I was indifferent to a friend on the phone. I sort of wish that I was back in bed. This is... undignified.

I think that a hot shower is in order. Then, maybe the dishes. Finish up the taxes. If a bad mood is like an unruly child, the first order of the evening might be to just ignore it and hope that the blues tantrum will pass soon.

But otherwise, things are peachy. My daughter actually decided to forego prom, which in my opinion is a sanity-saving decision on both our parts. The issue had been festering for weeks - her boyfriend is not, shall we say, the ambitious type. I wondered when he might break from his exhausting schedule of video games and action films in order to be fitted for a tuxedo. Trouble was brewing in all quarters regarding the lateness and the open-ended expense of this prom plan.

So that is one great relief in my life. Also, a friend has generously offered to help fill in the employment gaps at my shop temporarily. So there's nothing particularly wrong other than the usual stresses of life.

Tonight's Plan: Watch a Marx Brothers film.

NTD

Am I the only white person in America not particularly horrified by certain sermons of Jeremiah Wright? I hope not.

The presumption of so many Americans that God is on our side and every military action that we engage in is somehow the will of the Prince of Peace himself - including nuclear bombings, napalm, firebombings, and the current arsenal of depleted uranium bullets and three trillion dollars' worth of death and dismemberment - is, in my opinion, one seriously deluded viewpoint. And to think that angry fanatics are never ever going to strike back is an exercise in mindless optimism. When Wright stated as much, he was called un-American.

Let me tell you that, right here in my own community, I hear denigrating words about blacks, Hispanics, women, and Muslims with stunning regularity. I got to thinking - when Americans casually suggest that blacks are "taking over your neighborhood" as if black people are not really bonafide U.S. citizens with every right to live next door to me, for instance - isn't this a language of hate that denies the basic humanity of an entire group of Americans? When I hear that one "hates shopping at Wal-Mart now that it's full of Mexicans" or that "I always vote Democrat, but I will never vote for that Barack Obama" because "he's not smart enough to be President" when that person graduated from community college while Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School - I can't help but look at the speaker and think, Jeff Foxworthy-style, "well, you might be a bigot". I hear porch monkey and towel-head and women's libber and wetback and worse.

Most of this talk comes from people who consider themselves good Christians (although I don't believe most Christians speak this way). But to me it smacks of demeaning hate speech far more than what I have read of the Reverend Wright's sermons.

America is not religion to me; it is not heresy, but in fact my duty as a citizen to criticize any actions done in the name of my country if I think that they are wrong. The great writer James Baldwin said it best:

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

NTD

Wisdom from Henry David Thoreau

In honor of these difficult economic times, I offer this quote from Thoreau:

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

NTD

World Water Day

I consider myself a conservative water user - American style, at least. I don't shower every day. I don't flush at night. I limit paper and plastic products, and rarely buy bottled water since learning that manufacturing the plastic bottle itself requires an average of 1.5 gallons of water. So, on the morning of World Water Day 2008 (today) I confidently bounced right over to an online water use meter to calculate my water footprint. You can find this calculator here:

http://www.h2oconserve.org

But damn - because of my gasoline usage, my consumption of dairy and some meat, and a few other conservation busters - I am only about a hundred gallons below the national average. Which means that it still takes over a thousand gallons of water per day to keep my lifestyle going.

I'm so embarrassed.

NTD

Happy Birthday Marian McPartland

I practiced piano for hours on most days between ages twelve and sixteen. Because my parents - divorced by then - were struggling to make ends meet, there was just enough money for one piano student in the family. So my older sister was the first recipient of piano lessons from the beloved and talented piano teacher, Miss Lil. My sister displayed little talent, but she lusted over Lil's handsome blonde surfer son. It seemed as if she would never admit the obvious - that she had no patience for scales - and simply let me have my turn. In the end, she convinced Daddy to buy her a guitar and we heard her sing Cat Stevens "Moonshadow" in the key of D for a decade.

Finally, it was my turn to open those John Brimhall instruction books and put all of my adolescent angst into some mean versions of "The Bells of St. Marys" and "Lightly Row". Or so I thought.

Miss Lil was not only a great piano player - jazz standards at bars on Saturday nights, church organ on Sunday - but she was an alcoholic. I would walk into the music room and she would immediately offer me gin on the rocks. It is pretty heady stuff to be treated like an adult's cocktail companion when one is twelve and thirteen years old. But Miss Lil didn't think about corrupting youth so much as she was displaying some southern hospitality to a guest. So I would sip along with her while focusing on the keys, trying to impress her with a week's worth of intense practice. Frequently she would sit on her naugahyde recliner, cigarette in hand, and her thoughts would drift far beyond my little piano ditties...

"God, that ___ who has the lesson before you gets on my nerves... no talent at all... excuse me while I check on the chicken... I'll be damned, do you smell pot? That son of mine is smoking in his room again..."

But just when I was feeling like the entire lesson was musically pointless, Lil would stand up and sharply reprimand me for a shaky G# or for hurrying through the piece. Then she would demand that I move over while she played it correctly. And then she did the thing I loved best - forget about the silly song on page fourteen and dreamily interpret a Beatles tune or a St. Saens piece or a Johnny Mercer classic. She would begin simply, then take over the keyboard and hit most of the eighty eight keys. I would frequently have to slide down the bench until I was hanging by an inch in order to give Miss Lil room.

I would leave her house every week, frequently buzzed on alcohol but even more buzzed on the piano. And I would practice for hours and hours every week with the hope of pleasing Miss Lil which was usually the same thing as pleasing myself.

I hoped to develop the technique and skill to teach and play as she did. Two of my aunts still teach piano as senior citizens, so I believed that the talent was in my blood. But age twelve is pretty old to begin, and Lil was not as stringent on technique as the harsher teachers that most accomplished pianists had survived. In my mid-teens I was suffering from hormonal moodswings and the usual issues that kept me from pushing forward in the classical tradition. I did, however, continue to improvise and play for church and kindergarten and can still play without embarrassing myself when asked. The piano has been my friend.

Miss Lil died years ago of cancer. I still think of her often and wonder whether she ever realized how much her attention meant to me and so many others. Her unconventional methods somehow lit a musical fire in me that still flares up during times of great stress and also on other days when I am overcome with happiness. I still love to play piano while most of my friends who took lessons back when they were kids only feel stiffness and plead amnesia when asked to tap out a tune.

Also, gin is still my drink of choice.

I read that Marian McPartland celebrated her ninetieth birthday this week. She played piano at Lincoln Center on Wednesday although suffering from arthritis and a fractured pelvis. More than anyone in my adult life, I have frequently listened to the amazing Ms. McPartland on public radio for continuous inspiration to keep playing and trying to improve my limited technique. She always reminded me of Miss Lil by her love of the keyboard and her willingness to improvise with all kinds of musicians. She is probably my favorite pianist of all time.

Happy birthday, Ms. McPartland. I'll play a a few tunes in honor of both you and Miss Lil today.

NTD

Tonight is the Equinox, and I have hardly blogged all March long. The grass (read: weeds) are overgrown in my backyard. I worked too much this week. Things are running a little behind right now.

I have noticed that the dozen or so other blogs which I tend to check on every week or so have all either slowed the posts down to a crawl or even gone on serious hiatus (I miss you beautydish and rockstarmommy.com!). Some days I wonder whether it is worth taking time to post such minor thoughts which so rarely sparkle with the wit I hope to convey - I think this about my column in The Eleventh Hour as well, because after five years of commentary I sometimes run out of anything to say.

But I did get called to read a commentary on Georgia Public Radio last week, which was a small boost to my literary ego.

Maybe springtime will get the honey flowing again.

NTD

the rain, the wind, the music

We drove into a monsoon around West Palm Beach. For the next several hours Mother Nature gave my windshield wipers a serious workout as we crawled along Snake Road into the Seminole Native American Reservation. Anna and I were sandwiched between late-model Mustang convertibles - college kids whom we later shared a camping row. Let's just say that these young people were not accustomed to camping etiquette in close quarters. In fact, let's be blunt - the next time I get stuck with a pack of loudmouth New York brats who narrate every minute of their three a.m. acid/mushroom/ecstasy trips within three feet of me (think: the Sopranos on LSD), I will personally locate the nearest dready pharmaceutical salesman and purchase one half-dozen vicodin tablets and force them down their dark-star-orchestra-ROCKED-dude throats and sit on their chests until Mister Sandman kicks in. I am too old to camp next to the loudest folks at the festival.

Other than tornado watches, high winds, rain, fire ants and jerks on drugs, Langerado was great. I promise.

Favorite performances:

- Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars. Really, I shouldn't complain about anything in life. The All Stars have suffered more than any of us ever will, and still make a joyful sound.
- Golem. Energetic klezmer punk from Brooklyn.
- Matisyahu. I must be going through my Jewish phase.
- Arrested Development. AD played "Tennessee" and "Mister Wendell", but their new material was great also.
- The Dynamites. Charles Walker sounds like a cross between Joe Tex and James Brown. His incredibly tight rhythm section got me dancing during the hottest part of the day.

I find myself skipping the bigger names and the jammiest bands more and more at festivals. I want to be surprised by something different.

Oh man, it's an hour later than I thought. Thank you, Daylight Savings Time.

Gotta run -
NTD

damn the torpedoes...

... full speed ahead to Florida.

Beastie Boys, here we come.

NTD

the best-laid plans of mice and men...

... oft go astray. My daughter Anna was squeezed into the doctor's tight schedule early evening. She appears to have developed a remarkably bad case of the flu. She is finally sleeping under the influence of six or seven medicines.

And now my own throat is feeling scratchy. I am writing under the influence of six or seven herbal remedies, vitamins and minerals.

Our spring break trip down to the Everglades this weekend is not looking good.

NTD

Winner of the Most Out-of-Touch Award

Ralph Nader.

I admire the man - hell, I once voted for him as a Georgia contrarian back when a third party seemed like a political possibility. But in 2008, Nader-as-Don-Quixote is an embarassment.

NTD

I'm about to hit the road - in the rain, with questionable windshield wiper blades, no power steering, a weird squeak in fifth gear, and four hundred miles to go. And with a hacking cough I woke up with last night.

Crossing my fingers for good luck as I type this (which is not so easy to d0) -

NTD

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. – Annie Dillard

NTD

Go Obama!

In other news, I finished up my newspaper column this morning and sent it on. This does not get easier after five years - it's more like writing Rocky MCMXV, because all the original ideas were used up years ago. What's worse is that, unlike Stallone, there are no human growth hormones or steroids to help... just a strong cup of coffee or two. It gets difficult to find something I can talk about for 800 words.

But I did it... on to other tasks.

NTD

the naked tapdancer succumbs to a cute Asian

From NBC's Today Show:

CURRY: It has nothing do with the economy, the war — spending on the war?

G. BUSH: I don’t think so.

You know, I wake up with ideas to write about - my own little world, the birds singing in the back yard trees, the moonlight shining in my window so brightly at 4:30 this morning that I had to get out of bed just to get a good look at it - but then, I get the notion to check the news before going to my blog. And the willful ignorance of old men who stomp on the hopes and dreams of humanity as if they are six year olds jumping on anthills for sport, their arrogance and foolishness, it all just derails my train of thought.

I sometimes think that my life could be better without this darned internet and its thrust of too much information into my poor brain.

It's a love/hate relationship, I tell you.

NTD

Thanks to feministing.com for this hilarious (but scary) piece about Texas dildo and sodomy laws (in honor of the recent overturning of the state laws regarding sex toys):



God, I miss the late great Molly Ivins.

NTD

Rhymes with Hunt

Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, said this about NBC's recent apology for airing Jane Fonda's utterance of the word "c**t":

"Let me just say something about that word," she said. "The whole point of the play is to reclaim that word, and to make that word beautiful, and to make that word powerful, and not denigrating, and not ugly."

I completely agree. The word "c**t" has not bothered me since I was a shy, repressed pianist in a little church in the woods. Once I became a mother and a feminist, I wondered what the fuss was about. For some reason, there are dozens of socially acceptable words to describe the almighty penis, but hardly anything suitable to say on television - or in any polite society, for that matter - about what Ensler has called "down there".

Here are a few thoughts about the origin of the C-word, according to takeourword.com:

Cunt is believed to derive from a Germanic root kunton "female genitalia" which also gave rise to Old Norse kunta (ancestor of Norwegian and Swedish dialectical kunta and Danish dialectical kunte), Old Frisian, Middle Low German and Middle Dutch kunte, and the English doublet quaint. The word wasn't always considered derogatory... the proto-Germanic root of cunt is ku- "hollow place".

Therapy for the day: cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt

Gosh, I feel better.

NTD

Everything's coming up roses

The roses are beautiful, Stewart.

Happy Valentine's Day - slightly belated - to all.

Love love love,
NTD

21 Percent

Good Lord... my shop figures for January are off twenty one percent from the previous January. Generally, I read the dismal retail news and smugly think - well, that's Wal-Mart. That's Gap. And then, I go about business as usual, knowing that my store (both Incarnation#1 1987-1997 and Incarnation #2 1995-present) has survived the following:

-Birth of a child
-Surgery
-Divorce
-Terrible divorce financial settlement in which I basically paid for the shop twice over in order to secure the exit of former husband
-Crazy Former Boyfriend
-Institutionalization of Crazy Former Boyfriend
-Crazy Former Boyfriend stealing many shop assets with stolen key
-Two Burglaries
-Numerous unsuitable and/or dishonest employees
-Twenty years of economic ups and downs and two Bush regimes

But until yesterday, I have never faced what the Wall Street Journal would call a "significant economic downturn affecting the retail market" with such a statistical dip in my own back yard.

This must be what recession looks like.

Plan for the weekend: slashing prices (at least a few).

NTD

R.I.P. Dixie Crystals Sugar Refinery of Port Wentworth, Georgia

NTD

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. - Mark Twain

NTD

Today I'm going to walk up to the courthouse and vote my hopes, not my fears.

NTD

The New York Times columnist William Kristol has spoken. On February 3^rd he told NPR/Fox News contributor Juan Williams the following:

Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women. The Democratic establishment - it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that's led it to defeat year after year. White women are a problem, that's, you know - we all live with that.

I am offended on so many levels, but why should I be surprised?

Certain white men - such as Bill Kristol - just might be a problem, too.

NTD

Obama's Secret Weapon

It's all over, folks. Barack Obama now has the power to render every man helpless to resist his name on the Super Tuesday ballots.

Scarlett Johansson appears in the new Will.I.Am/Jesse Dylan promotional video for Barack Obama, looking as lovely and sincere and lust-inspiring as any actress this side of Angelina possibly can.

Every man I know has succumbed to Scarlett Fever in the past.

I'm sorry, Hillary. But Scarlett chooses to whisper the holy name of Barack. The Goddess has spoken. Resistance is futile.

NTD

Florida rocked, and an attentive reader might notice that I almost never ever use the term "rocked" which I would include in a list of Top Ten Annoying Overused Words in America, along with "awesome" and "sweet". But Florida in late January is warmish and wonderful, particularly when one scores a beach-eating highrise room featuring an ocean view and an always-available jacuzzi downstairs for fifty bucks a night. So Stewart and I did all the wrong things, like eating too much fried seafood and impersonating Giuliani supporters at a RonJon Surf Shop rally in order to photograph the top of Rudy's head as he rushed into the bus. As a dieting left-wing liberal who officially hates overdeveloped beachfront condos, Republican politics AND cable television, it was frightening to watch myself morph into the Ugly American Tourist so effortlessly. What the hell, it was fun. And you can bet that I will be perusing only the Democratic candidates on my state's touchscreen ballot next Tuesday. And No More Television, other than the endless stacks of VHS tapes now found in virtually every room of my house. And eating sensible food in sensible portions. And decrying developers and ugly tall buildings like I usually do.

NTD, who does not plan to use the word "rocked" again for the rest of 2008

Busted

As loyal readers and friends know, I love to peek in dumpsters. So today after the gym I swung behind the shopping center to peruse the interior of my favorite receptacle at the rear of Office Max. There was a motherload of office supplies in there, MIB as they say on Ebay. So I got my dumpster tool and started stacking the post-it notes, envelopes and notebooks on the hood of my car.

I've been doing this for years, undisturbed by the suits.

But the manager came out today and assured me that all the contents of the dumpster belong in our county landfill. I cannot have them. Neither can any charity or school in town. No, the landfill needs unopened blister packs of perfectly fine merchandise. Thus spoke the Office Max gods.

So I agreed, he went back inside, and I loaded up everything stacked on my car into the trunk and drove off.

NTD

Spitting on Dan Fogelberg's Grave

This morning in my inbox, I found an alarming sort of critique from a stranger. A Mister Wenick wrote the following:

Profiteering from Dan Fogelberg's death by charging ridiculous prices for his CDs is sickening. You have no conscience, just a lust for money. You might as well spit on his grave.

My first thought was - this man is really grieving over Dan Fogelberg's demise.

My second thought was - what a weirdo.

Here's the backstory on this sad tale of musical avarice: I sell a few rarities on Amazon the way that other people have joined the Tribe of eBay. And yes, I got a little misty upon the news of Fogelberg's recent death and even watched a few sentimental performances of ol' Dan via YouTube. But then the practical girl within grabbed a mediocre early nineties Dan Fogelberg album - The Wild Places - and listed that sucker on Amazon. Surprisingly, the other sellers had priced their copies of The Wild Places in the thirty-forty dollar range. So I did too, and looked at this as a compliment to Fogelberg. Desirability is the name of the collectable game, right? To me, an opening price of one cent is sad. Now that's an insult to the music recorded on that CD.

Apparently I have offended at least one member of the Same Auld Lang Syne contingent of Dan Fogelberg mourners.

The point here is far more worrisome than one man's angry letter to a total stranger. It is the disturbing internet tendency to spew utter bile as often as possible. Look at message boards - most of the whiners are people who appear to wake up mad at the world with trigger-happy fingers on the keyboard, searching for an available target.

Some people need a seminar in gratefulness. When I read about starving babies being killed and dismembered in Darfur, for instance, I am so happy to be safe and warm and comfortable every day. When I hear about the houses reduced to rubble in Iraq, or the plight of Palestinians, or the continuing saga of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, I think that most of us Americans should give thanks to the universe for an embarrassment of utter blessings. We don't have a whole lot to complain about.

Dan Fogelberg's music was so sweet, in that earnest seventies/eighties manner that I have grown to miss in these cynical, mean times. He never was a favorite of mine although I wouldn't turn the station if a song of his was playing. Not too long ago, it was okay to be sensitive; now we live in an age of snarkiness and anger. I sort of miss that kinder, gentler time.

Listen, I don't spit on anybody's grave. And profiteering? Mr. Wenick, I suggest you look up Halliburton or Blackwater on your computer if you are interested in current random acts of profiteering. I can't think of any used music dealers who park their Hummers next to their McMansions. It's odd how a person feels so comfortable insulting me and sizing up my motivation in order to allegedly defend a dead man who certainly seemed way too nice to care about the price of his used CDs on the internet. It doesn't make me angry so much as it makes me feel strange, as if a world full of pissed-off e-mailers is not the world I hoped to grow middle-aged in. But hey, I'm grateful. God bless America and all that.

And now, a few choice lyrics from Dan Fogelberg:

Capture the moment/Carry the day/Stay with the chase/As long as you may
Follow the dreamer/The fool, and the sage/Back to the days of/ the innocent age

NTD

An Exclamatory Post

While I continue to obsess about my upcoming trip to Florida, everyday reality marches on. So all weekend I have been doing the work which requires squinting and reluctant wearing of drugstore reading glasses and sitting on nice soft surfaces - for instance, addressing fifty envelopes and rewriting a vendor application to stuff in those fifty envelopes along with a perky cover letter since I have taken the job of this year's vendor coordinator for the FRM Festival. Although I can behave slightly hysterically when I am talking to folks face to face - I have been known to giggle nervously and overemote and blather on with the best of 'em - I hate using exclamation points and appearing to overflow with perk when I write.

Let me tell you, those FRMF women love their exclamation points. So I have excised the majority of them as gently as possible from the existing application, and managed to type a single ! in the cover letter. I hope that this will fulfill the exclamatory requirements.

I realize that !!! is a matter of taste. My friend Srini would only write his name for years with three !!! on either side - !!!Srini!!! But Srini is kind of a hyperactive shouter type, even though you might not suspect this from an Indian with a Stanford degree. But I have found that perkiness can rear its bouncy little head where you might least suspect it.

Because I am a southern woman, I sometimes wonder how the mega-perk gene became absent from my genome. Like I say, it's not as if I can't muster some smiley nervous energy at times. But my daughter Anna and I often go out and the blondefaketanandpearlssororitygirl
SQUEAL - like a rebel yell for a Sweet Potato Queen convention - that squeal, it is rampant in our southern college town. It crawls up my spine and then does the kundalini Dixie dance inside my brain. And General Lee does not beckon me to join in. He raises his musket and threatens me with a migraine.

So I try to remain free of the personal !!! in most of my public life. I might jump on the bed in my bathrobe while singing a medley of Ramones Meets Rodgers and Hammerstein, but that's the private world that only the lucky(?) few personally know and try to love. Generally phlegmatic, but at least I'm not one of those Type A overachievers.

And exclamation marks are kind of Type A - bossy and demanding of your attention. So I hope that the lack thereof as demonstrated on the updated applications will not subliminally turn the vendor hopefuls into overly relaxed slackers who do not bother to mail in their apps until the last possible minute.

I envision a world with perfect and meaningful punctuation. Long live the humble period.

NTD

The weather outside is frightful...

... and the snow up north in Asheville closed down my shop early today.

Next weekend, however, we'll be down south in Florida for trade shows. Orlando, Daytona, St. Augustine... blue skies and sunshine, I hope. A walk on the beach, shrimp, mojitos, someone who is paid to make up my bed, an indoor pool, no real work, warm weather, no internet to check incessantly - a real vacation.

I can hardly wait.

NTD

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries. – Wendell Berry

NTD

Thanks to Wonkette, I have found a winner for the musical torture CD:

http://wonkette.com/342986/the-day-the-music-died

I am officially ashamed to be a white person now.

God, I hope that "Stuck on Huck" doesn't linger in my head the way that John Ashcroft's "Let the Eagle Soar" did awhile back.

NTD

Joni Saves the Day

Just when I was getting lost on vintage Tammy Faye - Oops, there goes a Smile! and other children's classics - I got a hankering for some quality tones. So it's been a half hour of the great Joni Mitchell, making me smile with her impeccable songwriting and complicated chords (what the hell is she playing? Sixths? Minor Sevenths? Thirteenths? Can't follow any of it.) and lovely voice. It's the perfect antidote to an Annoying Music Search.

My recommendations:

Free Man in Paris
Coyote
The Last Time I Saw Richard
A Case of You

NTD

Torture Music

My daughter Anna is trying to make a torture CD. So far, all she has come up with is the song "Muskrat Love", the Captain and Tennille version. Of course, this is a perfect choice. So I suggested listening to a couple of my personal albums - Soft, Safe and Sanitized, and of course Pat Boone's In A Metal Mood. But she doesn't want terrible covers so much as terrible originals, which makes the work more challenging.

But any good mother wants to rise to the challenge. So I have been digging through YouTube and Amazon, looking for genuinely horrible memories - not new discoveries, but those repressed tunes which were long forgotten until now.

Here's eight songs which were actual hits which I experienced (except one, which I first heard as an eighties cover) back in the day. I can't wait to show them to Anna after school:

1. They're Coming to Take Me Away by Napoleon XIV
2. An Open Letter to My Teenage Son by Victor Lundberg
3. He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) by The Crystals
4. This Girl is a Woman Now by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap
5. Once You Understand by Think
6. Mercy Rewrote My Life by Tammy Faye Bakker
7. You Never Done It Like That by Captain and Tennille
8. Never Been to Me by Charlene

All of these golden memories, by the way, can be relived via YouTube.

NTD

The Primitive Shopkeeper

I never incorporated my business for several reasons - laziness, uncertainty, and the armchair thrill of never limiting my personal liability. I can't stand lawyers, and until recently managed my extensive tax returns without an accountant. Sole proprietorship means never having to include those extra, pesky IRS forms.

So last night I suddenly realized that my income went up alarmingly in 2007. Most people might have noticed this before January; however, I only write myself a paycheck when it is absolutely necessary. But the Christmas influx of deposits shot my business account into impressive and unprecedented territory, and I am scrambling to protect my money from climbing into the next tax bracket.

It's too late to buy a 2007 Hummer... but I'm digging around to find any extra mileage that was overlooked, any daughter labor that wasn't compensated, any meal bought for a sales rep. Sometimes it seems harder to be on one's own than to let the attorneys and CPAs do what Congress designed them to do, i.e. allow the corporation to live large while avoiding taxes.

I suffer from an obsession with an anarcho-primitive neo-Luddite pencil-and-graph paper itty-bitty shopkeeping model. I grew up watching my grandfather nap on a naugahyde recliner at his non-air conditioned furniture store, sometimes only waking up when a customer needed assistance. He made it look easy, and by the time I was climbing on the stacks of warehouse mattresses, it probably was. Granddaddy was my small business guru.

I don't particularly want my shop to grow in sales so much as figure out how to cut costs and make enough money to not worry. I lack ambition, but in this nation that worships industrial growth and the stock market, I feel positively subversive.

But enough of this. It's time to go recline on my futon and handwrite the rest of my checkbook expenses.

NTD

Although Dennis Kucinich has been my man whenever anyone has asked these last several weeks, I am perfectly willing to play political slut here. Obama? Edwards? Any of the above. I don't know why I cannot yet warm up to Hillary... self-loathing feminism dancing in my head, perhaps. But like supporting John Kerry in '04, which I managed to do with reasonable enthusiasm back in those days - I can get my mind around H.C. if she's the one. I am just hopeful that Barack Obama will take the nomination.

I am due to write my next political column by Wednesday, but cannot muster any deep thoughts about current politics. It's so much easier to read Britney gossip than to think.

Must... think... original... stuff... SOON.

NTD

It's been AWOL for my blogging life for days now... perhaps this is a good sign, being busy in the real world?

Actually - other than working - Stewart and I spent time sitting around trying to restructure those same old resolutions in the form of newly-created words, which began with great promise when I proposed that we also make those words sound like tasty alcoholic beverages. Gymnotonic! It makes mere exercise sound like my very favorite cocktail! The next dozen or so resolutions would be a snap. I envisioned a New Age-like article on changing one's life through a bartender's vocabulary. We could chat up Oprah, telling her that this is a post-The Secret world, and we have the scoop on the sequel, which is this: make virtuous changes by rephrasing them to sound like something fun and bubbly.

Of course, we couldn't think of a damned thing for Resolution Number Two. So we wrote clever made-up words which pleased us very much - and yes, I really do plan to Unlard and all the rest - but the original theme fell by the wayside.

But special thanks to Wells, who was buying cigarettes at my counter and tossed off "Artini" in honor of the painterly Stewart.

Most of our evenings were spent watching old movies, which included: Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, a pair of Hitchcock films, Strangers on a Train and Vertigo, a terrible biker film called Black Angels, a boring stoner video called Scrapple, and the undefinable eighties fantasy Teen Witch.

By tomorrow, the Real Changes begin. I hope.

NTD