Beautiful Morning

Today I am just pausing and enjoying the beauty of this morning. There is nothing quite like an late spring morning; the crisp light that outlines each leaf, the dew damp grass underfoot. The smell of flowers.

Time to pause and simply say "Thank You for everything!"

Then hug my daughter and wife and run to work.

Try not to get too serious today.

Various Miscellenany

Guess who's walking? Yep, up to sixteen and seventeen steps at a time before either sitting on purpose or sitting because gravity caught up to her. No words yet although I think we are getting closer and closer...

Photo was taken at her one year birthday party this weekend. That was very cool; we had four 1 to 1.5 year olds over so we created a baby mosh pit in the living room and let them rip. That reminds me, we have some thank you's to send!

Obviously I have not figured out what to do in terms of anonymity and my family. I wasn't going to share photos, but hey, without using names it does not matter, right? That seems like a slippery slope right there.

One of my commenters suggested using pseudonyms for my wife and child. Problem is, I tried that with my very first blog and it was not very successful. I'd forget to use my wife's pseudonym and leave half my readers confused and the other half thinking I had a girlfriend on the side.

I'm going to have to figure this out and soon.

In the meantime you can watch what 15 year old Ava Lowery created to help promote Yearly Kos.

Memorial Day.

Pardon me if I don't see anything to celebrate.

Yearly Kos Makes The New York Times

Sweet! In less than two weeks I will be in Vegas rubbing elbows with folks like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Senator Barbera Boxer, Senator Russ Feingold, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Representative Brad Miller, DNC Chair Howard Dean, General Wesley Clark, George Lakeoff, Chris Mooney and oh so many, many more progressive luminaries and activists. This is Yearly Kos, the first annual convention of the progressive blog Daily Kos.

The New York Times appears to have noticed what we are up to and they aren't the only ones... I've seen the media list and it is pretty impressive.

So what am I going to say to all these famous Democrats and political activists? I'm going to keep it simple:

Don't listen to the press and the polls. Do the right thing -providing oversight for the executive branch, defend the Supreme Court from further right wing extremists, call for an end to the unjust and illegal war in Iraq - and the public will catch up to you.

Return to Democratic core values: equal opportunity for everyone, educational access for everyone, affordable medical care, stand up for the little guy against the giant corporations.

Don't abandone your constituencies. Americans of all creeds and colors, mend and women, gay and straight.

Clean up your own mess - get Rep Jefferson and Mollohan off their committees and pressure themto resign from Congress. We are not the party of criminals; the Republicans are.
And finally - remember the words of Sam Rayburn: I am a Democrat without prefix, suffix or apology. Don't let the corporate media or Right Wing noise machine intimadate you. Stand proud and lead.

Anything you want to add? I'm listening.

We Are The Bad Guys

I keep looking at this picture of an Iraqi girl, wearing the blood of her parents who have been shot to death by US soldiers at a checkpoint... she's a girl like my daughter. I wonder where she is now. Who is taking care of her, can she go to school, is she even alive...

I read today that in addition to the Pentagon admission that United States Marines committed a massacre in Haditha there are now eyewitness accounts. United States Marines murdered at least five girls, ages one, three, five, ten and fourteen.

We aren't heroes. We aren't bringing Democracy. We - the United States of America and all of her citizens - are participants in murder. The men and women who brought us there by deceit are still in power, the companies who cheat our soldiers of proper armor and food are still profiting from the American blood spilled for no good reason - yes, they are dying for a futile cause. Our soldiers lives are being wasted, squandered on nothing, nothing at all... there is no good reason for them to be there.

It is criminal what our government is doing to our soldiers and the people of Iraq. Just criminal. Our government is manufacturing psychopaths with PTSD and pushing them to the front, to situations where massacres happen.

It is so angering, so depressing, so infuriating to read this news. You want to give up, you want to say the hell with humanity, you want to drink and make it all go away...

But there are other people out there who fill you with hope and renew your energy. For example, you should visit Peace Takes Courage and see what one fifteen year old girl has done.

Then you pick up and keep on keeping on. Because as stained as our beautiful United States is with war crimes and degraded by the criminals who govern, there is still a core of worth to our country that is not dead. We washed the stain of slavery from our country, we can again reclaim our former place as a leader of nations in civilization and humanity.

But Goddess, do we have work to do to achieve that...

Brief Music Friday Post

For some reason I have been in a Psychobilly mood recently and when you think psychotic and Rockabilly there's a couple of bands out there but the first and the best are The Cramps. Poison Ivy, above, always was one of my favorite guitarists in the sense that she picked out her own style carefully and with great deliberation. Nobody sounded like her. She also was one of those women who eternally puzzle me, adopting a sleaze vamp pose when clearly whatever else she is, she is not a slut. She reminds me of a dear friend from college who adopted the moniker Hatchet Slut (to this day that is who I email). I can't figure 'em out but I love 'em.

Late for work so I must run.

Stay sick.

Feelings

I was surprised how violated I felt about my coworker using my blog against me in an attempt to get me fired. I was not sure I had the right to feel that way because - hey, I put it out there for anyone to see, right? I was not ashamed of what I had written, why should I be? There was nothing inappropriate about it. I stand by it, all of it, the good, the bad and the poorly written.

Yet I felt hugely violated by the whole thing and found I could not post on my blog.

Which is kind of lame when you think about it. It's not like I was raped or anything. Nonetheless the feeling is real. Trying to deny a feeling like that is impossible.

So the blog had to die. Which sucks.

I have to go now. I have work to do for the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.

Back In The Saddle Again

So people want to know why I killed my former blog, The Kilted Liberal, especially since it finally seemed to be taking off and getting a real rythmn to it. Here it goes.

About two and half weeks ago I got called into my boss' office. Time for my performance review. I was not nervous, if anything I was looking forward to talking with him about my job and upcoming and ongoing projects. The background to this is that my boss is a conservative Christian. He's told me that he believes in the end times and I know he struggles to reconcile his scientific understanding of evolution with a literal interpretation of the Bible. My boss is also a registered Republican and very active in his party. He's a smart guy, he's very fair and for every fault he has, he also has a positive. Overall I like him, I respect him, I love learning from him and I think he is a good man.

So I go in for my performance review and he hands me a stack of papers about a half inch thick and says, "What's this?"

It was a stack of pages printed from my blog. Someone had helpfully highlighted the parts they felt were most incriminating. Specifically they had singled out every post mentioning the following:

my practice of my religious faith

my recovery from alcoholism

times I felt tempted to drink

any mention of sex

my political views

any mention of work

any posts done during work hours

Now, let's be fair here: those last two are fair game I'd guess, even though I never mentioned where I worked or specifically what I do. And there was one post that essentially said I hate this fucking place. And I have no excuse for posting during work hours except boredom. My saving grace is that there were only six instances of it and all six were one or two line posts, i.e. I saw some thing interesting and posted a link.

But aside from about eight pages, the entire rest of it was Wicca, politics, drinking and sex. Some of the entries had been copied and pasted rather than printed out directly. This allowed my enemy to show only what she wanted to show.

I'm a lucky guy. My boss leaned over the desk and said: I don't give a shit what you believe, or who you vote for. In fact, I don't even want to know. I just want you to work hard while you are here. I trust you and I depend on you. Don't ever, ever post about work again (yeah, I know, I'm doing a shitty job living up to that already) and never post during work hours.

And then in front of me he tore the papers to shreds and dumped them in the trash. I got a 3% raise instead of the 5% I expected. I wasn't going to bitch about that just then.

See why I respect my boss?

When I left his office there was a coworker kind of standing across the way. She was pretending to talk to some guys in their office but she was staring at me. I know she knew about my blog. See, I was dumb enough to tell her about the old one and I guess she followed me to the new one.

I kept my face expressionless and went to my desk and began to clean the papers on top of it. This was not deliberate; I was simply remaining calm. Then I saw she was smiling. She thought I was cleaning my desk out and she was enjoying it. On my desk is a decorative black marble ball about four inches in diameter; it weighs about six or seven pounds. I really wanted to pick it up and smash her fucking brains out with it. Instead I sat down and got back to work.

The expression on her face when she realized I was not going anywhere was priceless. I do wish I had a camera for it.

For some reason, ever since then she has been very nervous about being in a room with me. I'm not sure why; I'm always perfectly polite. Maybe she thinks I'm just as nasty and vicious of a person as her.

So why did she do this? I'm not really sure. We disagree about politics and she is somewhat religious, but I don't think that is it. What seems to have set her off is one of my posts on women. I related a specific circumstance which was not about her, but I think that she thought it was about her. That's my best guess, but I really don't know.

What am I going to do about it?

Keep blogging. But this time, I am going to try to remain anonymous. That sucks. I really enjoyed sharing pictures of my baby girl with you guys. But her name is distinctive and the biggest value I got out of blogging was an ability to be very honest with my feelings. I'm thinking of starting a separate blog which will be very public, attached to my name and career, but that will be very bland and as a matter of self preservation, dishonest. I kind of need to do that; I'm about to be published in a major publication in my profession. But I won't talk about that here.

Pretty fucking sad, eh?

Maybe I'll just have to start my own company so that I don't have to worry about keeping others happy so I stay employed.

Lots of prayer, meditation and 12 step action needed on this one...

Photo is of the Rocky Mountains from just behind Denver in Golden Gate State Park. On the far right is Estes Park and Longs Peak. In the middle is Mount Evans. Both Evans and Longs are over 14,000 feet high and I hope to climb them both before I die. The photo is of my home, I just don't live there yet.

Starting from scratch...