Righteous/Melancholy

May 11--

"She says the joke is on me, I say the joke is on her.
I said: Well, I have no opinion about that.
We'll just have to wait and confer."
--Paul Simon

When I was seventeen (it was a very good year), I fashioned myself a bit of a crack investigative reporter, a four-time San Diego County High School Journalism Write-off Champion, Runner-up, or Award Recipient, depending on the category. I took that responsibility seriously, unlike pretty much every other responsibility I rubbed up against at that age, and I embraced it. Through my leadership capacity on the school paper, I volunteered  to write a "candidate round-up" article about the upcoming school board election. I arranged phone interviews with all the candidates, among them a kind of proto-Sarah-Palin Fundamentalist Christian Soccer Mom who had made "family values" a cornerstone of her campaign. I prepared a list of tough but fair questions and sprung them upon her one day from the journalism room phone. Somehow, I believe at her prompting, the discussion of abortion came up. I told her my opinion, she told me hers,we finished the interview. A few days later I received a letter from the candidate, addressed to me C/O the school paper, thanking me for being a student journalist who cared about the future of my school and then reminding me that murder was a sin in the Eyes of God, and that Abortion Was Murder, and just in case I didn't fully understand that she had included a series of photos of dead fetuses to illustrate to me the consequences of LEGAL MURDER. 

That was over twenty years ago, and it still freaks me out. Soon enough I got the fuck out of Vista, and then over time Came the Fuck Back, and now I am who I am, a guy with a family and a life who has chosen to live here, to raise my family in the place I was raised. And last last night, for the first time since I was an intrepid high school Woodward and/or Bernstein looking for The Story, I found myself deep in the thick of local educational politics. And it was UGLY. 


May 16

I wrote that five days ago. I nodded off before I could finish it, then never came back to it. So it exists now as a record of my general disposition the night after the school board voted to cut all arts funding to my son's performing arts school. There was going to be more, it was going to be epic, with lots of comparisons to Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin and what have you, but I fell asleep. And my blood still boils about it but it is not what I am thinking about tonight.

Tonight I am thinking about another night, exactly two years ago, when I stood a lonely vigil on the wall. And then the night finally surrendered and soonafter so did my father, and then everything changed. If you're looking for the "Before" chronicles, you're in the wrong spot. Click the fuck back in my "Older Posts" section. Because you're smack dab in the The After Diaries.

Tonight i feel mournful. I feel old. I feel sore. I feel blessed and battered. I feel loved. I feel tired.

I feel sad.