On not giving a damn

Disclaimer: Geoff loathes this movie and book upon which it is based.  That’s not why I am posting it here.  That’s just a bonus.  (Love you, sweetie.)

The scene above is important for one really major reason.  For all of their ups and downs and crazy drama, Rhett no longer cares for Scarlett.  At all.  He doesn’t love her, he doesn’t hate her, he just doesn’t care.

This is probably where I should warn you that this post is about unpleasant things.  Trauma, PTSD, abuse – a lot of stuff.  Turn back here should you need to.  Likewise, for a variety of reasons, what I’m going to write may be a bit opaque with oblique references.  This is necessary.  I apologize for the confusion.

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My first ever political protest

While I have been in parades and candlelight vigils and such, I have never been in what could be called a political protest until this weekend.  But I am glad I did it.  In fact, it has given me a great deal of satisfaction, and has cheered me up somewhat from what has been for some time a generally dark mood.  The crowd ended up being MUCH bigger than was originally anticipated.  I think they were expecting maybe 90,000 people, but the totals were probably more like 150,000 to 175,000.

We saw these two women dressed as suffragettes, and I just had to get a picture with them. LOVED it.
We saw these two women dressed as suffragettes, and I just had to get a picture with them. LOVED it.

I would never have imagined that I would look back on the Presidency of George W. Bush with any type of nostalgia.  And I certainly never imagined that I would live to see a Presidency that was not only worse than Bush’s, but is well on the way to topping the administration of James Buchanan as the absolute worst Presidency of all time.

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Notes and Open Letters Regarding the Election

These are things that have been rattling around in my head since the horror began to reveal itself last night.  Some of them are fully formed letters, other are just too long to be tweets.  Read them, share them, do what you will (with credit of course).  Fair warning, I don’t have the tolerance or patience to argue with Trump supporters, anyone who opted out of voting yesterday or who voted 3rd party.  If you show up here spouting crap that in any way irritates or stresses me I’ll bring down the ban hammer so fast it won’t just be the door hitting you in the ass on the way out.

Oh, yeah, and I’m probably gonna break my own rules and swear.  It’s the apocalypse.  I think my mom will understand.

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Brexit, or when people vote to harm themselves

Frankly, I am just stunned that the voters of the United Kingdom decided to leave the EU.  Obviously I am not British, and I can’t pretend I understand all of the issues going on there that might motivate people to vote that way.  But I do know that many of the consequences predicted were not good. And I also know that many of the people who voted to leave are in the parts of the UK that depend on the EU the most, like Cornwall.  The government of Cornwall is now insisting that the UK government make up for the 60 million pounds a year of EU funding that will be lost by Brexit.  To quote from Cornwall directly:

Prior to the referendum we were reassured by the ‘leave’ campaign that a decision to leave the EU would not affect the EU funding which has already been allocated to Cornwall and that Cornwall would not be worse off in terms of the investment we receive. We are seeking urgent confirmation from Ministers that this is the case.

Suddenly Cornwall is like some teenage kid who seriously pisses off his parents, and then suddenly doesn’t understand why they aren’t going to pay his college tuition anymore. You guys really didn’t think this through, did you?  And you believed everything that the Leave Campaign told you?

Oh, dear.

You know, that would be comical if it wasn’t so damn tragic, because there are going to be real consequences now, which will affect a lot of people’s lives.

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A terrible anniversary today – the Freedom Summer Murders

Fifty two years ago tonight, three young men were murdered by a group of white Mississippians in the Ku Klux Klan.  Among the men complicit in this crime were members of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s office and the Philadelphia (Mississippi) Police Department.

This was a mere six years before I was born.  Many people of my generation are familiar with this event through the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, although the film doesn’t even cover everything that happened that awful summer.

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Dear Benioff and Weiss… WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?

OK guys, I get it.  George just hasn’t been able to crank out the books fast enough, and now the TV show has caught up to the books, more or less.  So now you no longer have all that juicy source material to work from, you just have whatever tidbits GRRM has given you about where the story is going.  That’s fine.

But guys?  I’m worried.  Frankly, you are starting to scare me a little bit.  Not having Book Six or Book Seven to work from does not mean that you should suddenly become nihilists.  It’s not a race to see who can kill more characters.  Moving the story forward does not mean taking a large metaphorical dump on the hopes and dreams of the fans, ok?

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April 15th is another eventful date

Well.  April 15th is another day that it seems like so many things happened throughout history.  And for the most part, it seems like it has been a date on which a lot of truly tragic things happened.  Honestly, I can only think of one really cool thing that happened on this date: it was the day that Jackie Robinson first debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.  And as big a fan of baseball as I am, and as happy as I am about how far my favorite sport has come since that time, I can’t help but contrast that event with all the other terrible, tragic things that have happened on this day.

Of course, the most immediate thing for me is that this is the 3rd anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing.  Hard to believe it has already been three years.  But I am glad that Boston had really come together and bounced back.

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A Eulogy for the woman who was and the girl who never got to be

Yesterday was my sister’s memorial service.  She was 31.  I’m not going to go into great detail, I already wrote about my reaction the day she died and when her dog, my first niece, passed.  Here it is, my sister’s life, summed up in written form the best way I know how.

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2015 has been kicking my ass

Regular readers will recall that a little while back I said we’d be away for a while due to the death of a friend.  Truth be told, his loss was, at the time, the latest in a long string of Very Hard Things 2015 had handed us.

It seems, however, that June might bright A New Hope.  (Sorry)  But, before we get to the good stuff, let’s go over where we’ve been, shall we?

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