Cackelacky Logic

I talked tonight with a former friend/lover, all now tucked away in North Cackelacky with two kids, a wife and a house--a total amnesiac about our affair, too, (which, BTW, happened long before he was married) and which is probably better for him in the long run, but hangs like a white elephant doing the merengue on the telephone line between us.

We talked about the election. He's voting for McCain, because he thinks he's straightforward and won't "Rob Peter to Pay Paul", as he thinks Obama will do. So even if he agrees with Obama on social policy, apparently owning a house will make you vote for, essentially, the perception of better financial security.

As I don't own a house, I couldn't jump to the defense of Obama's economic policies. That and I know squat about economics in general.

Shamefully, especially since my friend lives in one of the most hotly contested battleground states in the union, I did not try to turn his head with my Most Heated Liberal Arguments. Instead I just kind of lay down and let him turn traitor. Why? Because I didn't want to push him any further to the right. It seems these days that that's all arguing over politics does--entrench people even further in their beliefs.

I went to hippie-dippie Montessori school until I was seven. In my hippie-dippie heaven, there was no gender, no race, no religion. It was *so* late-'70s nirvana. I have carried all those teachings with me ever since, and the school remains my imagined "happy place" when I see what's wrong with the world. I fit in well in San Liberal, where it seemed everyone lived in a hippie-dippie bubble.

Now that I'm back here, in the Red Part of a Blue State, I cling vehemently to my past, to my liberal views, but I've stopped trying to convert the McCainiacs. They'll just call me Pinko Commie Liberal. And I'll just call them Redneck Xenophobes.

God, I miss my friends in San Liberal. Not that they were open minded. They were not. It's just that their closed-mindedness I understood and agreed with. San Liberal is a bubble, though, and I'm learning more about what it *really* means to be an "Amercun" here in SJ.

I don't like what I see.

It's very lonely here these days. Just the writing and the working and the 'rents. Very little in the way of friends. And even less by way of dating.

Maybe I should call an ex-boyfriend or two. One is lurking outside of D.C. and another outside of N.Y.C.

Consider yourselves warned. ;-)