Step off, K-tel

If you have some time in your day . . . and especially if you don't have any time at all, you should go to Albums That Don't Exist. Trust me, it'll make you feel cool and might also restore your broken faith in humanity. Also, you might wax poetic about the order-in-chaos nature of the Web, and how interconnected secret cabals are in fact ruling the planet. You even may be tempted to start up a band. Just don't take the name London Buses. I call dibs on that one.

Ru Paul

Ru Paul
Originally uploaded by annus mirabilis

This was attached to my doorknob with a rubber band a while back. A voter registration application for Oklahoma, a Ron Paul flyer, and a strip of paper that instructed me that "In order to vote for Ron Paul, you have to register as a Republican."

Oklahoma, it turns out, is a hotbed of Ron Paul agitation. How do I know? Well, I don't, really. But it's hard to tell, because the Ron Paul volume here in Oklahoma is turned up to eleven, making an accurate head count nigh on impossible.

There're yard signs, some glossy, some handmade out of old sheets and spray paint. There are the now-ubiquitous sheets of butcher paper hanging over the highway overpasses. Someone actually duct-taped some laserprinted sheets of paper with "Google Ron Paul" onto a retaining wall that faces 15th St. near our house.

One of the local forums I go to has been spammed by the blank-faced attack-bots of the "Movement," dive bombing any attempt at online slander. Or fair discussion about the good doctor. I'm half thinking I'll attract one myself, simply for titling my post "Ru Paul."

In any event, it's fair to say that there's a strong undercurrent of libertarian politics here, if not so much a fuck-you to collective action, then at least a virulent sort of get-off-my-lawnism. It's enough of an undercurrent to embolden the Paulites to think that, if they can sign someone up, they'll be happy to fill in the R on the back. Because an undecided voter in Oklahoma, don't ya know, is really just a Republican who hasn't thought it all the way through yet.

I filled out the registration card, indicated my affiliation with a big D on the back, and slipped it into the mailbox. Let's just say February 5 will be a super Tuesday indeed. My first one as a registered Oklahoman!

And a Democrat.

Waiting for the Worst

This came to me via a chain of links I can't reconstruct, and the blog itself is new to me. But it deserves attention. It sums up one of my greatest fears for an Obama presidency.

. . . once Obama started talking, after about fifteen seconds, my wife suddenly flipped over towards the wall, covering her head and saying through the muffled blankets...

“I can't watch!”

And in that moment, she verbalized exactly what was on my mind, and I dare say what was on the minds of a considerable majority of the African Americans watching him call down verbal thunder in those minutes.

We...were afraid.

I found myself not unconsciously scanning the roaring crowd, praying to not see a weapon pop above the throng and point at him. I couldn't stop myself. When the camera lingered on him too long during stretches of the speech, I averted my eyes for a few seconds, fearful that I might catch a tragic moment playing out in horrific real-time. I'd look back again a second or two later.

I found I couldn't really absorb or analyze the speech as I'd have liked. I was too busy checking out cameras in the crowd held aloft, and wondering about security. “Jesus, he gets so many people at his events! How the fuck is he gonna secure the venues? Ohhhhh man...”

I picked up on this when announced his candidacy, and I'm your average middle class white guy. I don't normally jump to those sorts of conclusions. The threat might be real and might be imagined, but we still live in that United States, the one where there're many plausible ways that one of our own could decide we just can't have a black president.

Iowa Caucuses

First of all, I stayed up way too late to watch the spectacle, noodling around on the laptop while Matthews chortled and Olbermann cracked wise on MSNBC. Thought about blogging it all, but realized I'm not ambidextrous enough to type and listen at the same time. So I watched and then fell asleep on the couch.

In the end, it was nothing but good news for Democrats. Obama winning handily, successfully turning out young voters and independents; Edwards, who by all accounts had worked his tail off in Iowa, coming in second; and Hillary in third by a fraction of a point, which in my book is the perfect serving of humility for her campaign.

The highlight of the whole shebang, though, was Obama's acceptance speech. I can't remember a damn thing about it -- there was a lot of broad talk about the audacity of hope, having more work to do, and thank you, Iowans, for proving that we want change. It's here if you haven't seen it yet.

But the true success of the night was that he proved he could win. People could and would support him, and stunningly, in unprecedented numbers. He's not just the black candidate. He's everybody's candidate. I think, amongst Democrats at least, there was a holding back of judgement, a sense of wait-and-see. He's so new and his rise so meteoric, that it's hard not to want to take a step back and question his fundamentals, so to speak. In that way, Hillary's initial sense of inevitability might make more sense. If you're looking for someone to project competence, Hillary's your lady; charisma and star power, though . . . not so much.

But, here we are in the caesura between Iowa and New Hampshire, and polls are uniformly showing an Obama surge of 10pts or so over the rest of the field. It's early still, obviously, but if things break the way they're looking to, it may already be a done deal.

Nu Shooz*

I don't know the exact date that I took up running, but it was about a year ago. My wife and I had just quit smoking (her for good; me, limpingly), and she suggested we inch our way into running a 5k. The 5k in question was the Y ME breast cancer awareness run. Being the preparedness junky that she is (and, not incoincedentally, an ex-girl scout), she sussed out an excellent resource for ex-smokers who want to start running, the Couch to 5k program. And it's not just for ex-smokers, it's for anyone who's currently on a couch, which, in our country, is a much larger quorum.

Anyhow, we got fitted for shoes. The Couch to 5k program says you should have some good ones, and the knock offs at the Target shoe section don't qualify. You need a light shoe, and one that has room for your foot to spread, and one that can breathe. There're other criteria, but I was still a newbie, and could absorb only so much expert information.

At the suggestion of the running store guy -- a runner himself, lean and owlish at the same time, and not altogether comfortable with people -- I bought a pair of Asics Gel 2120. I ran em up and down outside the store. It was late winter in Chicago, and I remember dodging mounds of sidewalk ice. I taking deep frigid breaths (still a novelty for newly clear lungs). Felt good, so far as I knew. The Asics sure as hell beat my Target specials.

So I ran my first 5k, and then ran two more last year. I don't have an odometer but figure I've put about 250 miles of training and on those Asics. Lots of road grease. Lots of treadmill rubber.

This Christmas, using a generous gift card from my Pa, I raided the shelves of the local Sports Authority and came up with another deeply discounted pair of Asics. Turns out the Gel 2130 line is shouldering out the old guard -- among which my shoes belong -- and they were mostly giving them away to make room on the shelfs.

So all this is to say, Happy New Year. Look at the wear and tear on 07's pair, look at how gray and frayed. They're a touch collapsed. Compare with the 08 model, which is blindingly white, plump and healthy. I can't tell you that I have a necessarily rosy outlook for the year, or that I'm constructing a bulwark of resolutions to make then one by one fail at. But let's just say that if I can make those shiny new 08's look even a little like the 07's, we can consider it a small-scale victory for will power, optimism, and the absence of the much-mourned Camel Lights hard pack.

*80's hippie-pop band, known in certain circles -- mostly my circles -- for their top forty hit, "I Can't Wait."

Oh the humanity

I wrote a lovely post yesterday. Maybe it was two days ago. Maybe it was on December 31, in the evening, just before the ball was going to drop. In any event, not long ago, I wrote this post. And I wrote it and formatted it and did some editing to perfect and then hit "publish post."

And kerplooee. It was gone. There was an error on the page, there was something wrong with the syntax . . . the computer actually didn't like what I had to say . . . something went wrong and it was lost. Gone all gone.

I shake my fist at you, Blogger. You will feel my wrath. As soon as I disentangly myself from my teammate. Sorry, Chas.

I'll be hitting post now, to see if posting still works, or if my new blog is so corrupt it will eat any post no matter how short and no matter how bizarrely homoerotic.

*slaps button*

Update:  magically, the late lamented post slipped in between the couch cushions, into the Drafts folder.  Rather than getting eaten by the internets.  I don't make a habit of apologizing to inanimate objects but . . . Internet, my bad.