Hello, weblog, my old friend. I’ve come to write in you again.
I could not go without commenting on the last day of this evil era. Fitting that today we also celebrate Dr. King, a man who gave the world so much hope because I confess having an odd feeling, sort of a tickle in my brain, that just might be something called hope. It is a cautious hope to be sure. Barack is not a god, nor does play one on TV; he is a calculating centrist who seems to be putting all of his eggs in a basket of artificial reconciliation rather than one of justice. Like Ford’s famous maneuver, I fear this will backfire twenty years down the line and Dick Cheney will once again rise from the grave and take over. Maybe our new president is correct to wager that real Americans, not the Washington idiots who populate the airwaves, will put aside their differences so we can all dig ourselves out of the fetid swamp of the Bush legacy—but not to prosecute and permanently dismantle the mechanism that formed the swamp to begin with at the time of his presidency when he is at his most powerful seems counterintuitive.
Well, we will see. On the one hand, Barack has such a monstrously impossible task before him that anything he accomplishes will be a miracle. On the other, a boll weevil wondering in off the street could be a better president than the one we’ve had for eight years in every respect but one: it might not stuff the suit as well.
In more important news, here is what I have been up to.
After a week-long trip to San Francisco (a.k.a. Macworld), I returned to Baltimore with a deadly cold and have been laid up for a few days. San Francisco was so delightful that I don’t mind the cold as much; indeed, although I had all that time off of work, it’s the time I’m taking now to recover that is actually more relaxing because I was so excited to be in the Bay Area that the beneficial results of “vacation” didn’t actually start to kick in until the day before we left, by which time my throat already hurt.
Otherwise, I’m on an even keel. There is much work to be done in the coming weeks, and I’m almost ready to do it. Two thousand eight, the longest fucking year in history, is over. Two thousand nine will be one of much upheaval, and I may end it with a completely different life than when it began, but that tickle in my brain is whispering that everything just might be okay. Or else I might get a lobotomy, but, you know, whatever.
