With friends Janet and David at the Democratic Club victory party.

These comments from members of The Free Republic conservative grassroots network are illuminating. What are they so, so angry about? Bush congratulating Obama. Apparently now on top of everything else, W. is a race traitor.

The image above is from Sheila Pree Bright’s series “Young Americans,” which features young Americans with their flag. I like the series enormously.

My wife voted when our polling place opened at 7 a.m. and told me the line was longer than she’d ever seen it, and that by the time she was finished it was longer. When I drove our filthsome chidlers (with apologies to Roald Dahl’s “BFG”) to school just after 8, I scoped out the line and it looked lengthy, so I went back home, got on the internet for an hour and a half and went back. Now it was almost 10 and the line was longer. I found a place to park — far away — and wound up as number 49 in line. Previously, the longest line I’d ever been in to vote in my 20 years in Burbank had been a line of 6. I wish my father were alive to see this. Yes, he would have been a McCain voter (as I once would have been), but he would have been delighted to see all those people waiting to vote and he would have befriended every one of them. All up and down the line those of us waiting to vote were engaged in conversation about politics and what the future holds; judging solely from this line, we need to retire the myth of the uninformed voter.

There are reports of long lines such as this across the nation. Here’s my conclusion:  George W. Bush and his disintegration have been very, very good at motivating people to go to the polls. In their third debate, Senator McCain said to Senator Obama, “If you wanted to run against George Bush, you should have run four years ago.” Maybe so, but whether he knew it or not (and I suspect he did), McCain has been running against Bush all year, with both of them losing. In a final irony that I hope has escaped neither of them, Karl Rove yesterday predicted an Obama landslide. He should know:  He will have helped to create it.

David Byrne just sent me (and, okay, thousands and thousands of other people) this message, which I thought I’d share.

Pardon the bulk mailing. I Can’t Vote. I am an immigrant with a Green Card and, therefore, I am not eligible to vote in a federal election. FYI – I can get drafted (luckily, Daniel Berrigan burned my draft board’s records) and I pay taxes, yet I cannot vote for President. On Election Day, I see my neighbors heading to the nearby elementary school to cast their ballots. The voting booth joint is a great leveler; the whole neighborhood – rich, poor, old, young, decrepit and spunky – they all turn out in one day.

But most of you can vote. What can I say? The Republicans have made us less safe than before 9/11, bankrupted this economy, started an illegal war they can’t – and don’t intend to – finish, removed what sympathy (after 9/11) and respect the world had for the US, and have robbed US citizens of many of their basic rights. Global warming? What’s that? Science and education? Investment in our future? No, thanks – we’ll stick with a good ‘ole hockey mom. Ignorant, and fucking proud of it, as is always the case.

Although it looks like a shoo-in, it ain’t over ’til Florida. And there are plenty of racists in this country who will vote against their own best interests. So please, get to your local elementary school, post office, town hall, or whatever, and cast your vote and make this a country we can all be proud of. We can get out of this mess, and life can be better than it is.

David Byrne
NYC

I wrote these thoughts shortly after completing the ING Amsterdam Marathon — well, shortly after hobbling from the finish line in the Olympic stadium back to the train, detraining at Centraal Station to walk 10 minutes back to the hotel, showering and then briefly collapsing — but trust me, these were very much my thoughts while doing the marathon. And yes, my thoughts were in kilometers, because that’s what I was counting (believe me, I was counting every one of them). These kilometer markers are, by the way, approximations, since  I could barely think straight.

Kilometer 0:  Let’s go!

Kilometer 8: Wow, I’m still cold.

Kilometer 10: There’s a Dutch windmill. I’m running past a Dutch windmill.

Kilometer 15: There’s that damn windmill again. (In other words, we had to run back around it again.)

Kilometer 18: Where did this wind come from? It’s slicing right through me.

Kilometer 20: Marathons are stupid. People are not designed to run 42 kilometers.

Kilometer 22: I’m stupid.

Kilometer 23: Where am I? Alone somewhere way out in the countryside in a foreign country. What in God’s name am I doing here?

Kilometer 24: Thank God. There’s the turn. Now I’ll have the wind at my back instead of running against it.

Kilometer 25: The wind shifted and now I’m still running into it!

Kilometer 26: Who am I?

Kilometer 27: Stop looking at me, stupid farm animals!

Kilometer 29: Who am I going to give all this running stuff to? Because I’m never doing this again.

Kilometer 31: My urine is orange. That means something bad. But I can’t feel anything any more, so it doesn’t matter.

Kilometer 32: If I could stumble over to that gentle slope of grass I could die happily right there.

Kilometer 34: I can chew this pretzel but no matter how much water I drink I can’t swallow it.

Kilometer 35: There’s Coach Jack! At this moment, he is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen!

Kilometer 40: [Jack is running the final few kilometers with me.] I love Jack. We should all be more like Jack.

Kilometer 41:  There are other people I know cheering me into the stadium.

Kilometer 42:  I got a medal. They called my name over the loudspeakers in the stadium. I’m not dead. I have to call my wife.

Back in the hotel room, on the internet:  When is the next marathon?

A relative sent me an email with the subject line “Good Info.” Turns out it’s anything but. Here’s the content — and no, don’t read all of it. Just sniff around it so you can get the gist, then note my response at the bottom.

This email comes in three parts:

Part 1
Remember the election in 2006?  Thought you might like to read the
following:
1) Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high
2) Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon
3) The unemployment rate was 4.5%.

Since voting in a Democratic Congress in 2006 we have seen:
1) Consumer confidence plummet
2) The cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3.50 a gallon
3) Unemployment is up to 5% (a 10% increase)
4) American households have seen $2.3 trillion in equity value evaporate
(stock and mutual fund losses)
5) Americans have seen their home equity drop by $1.2 trillion dollars
6) 1% of American home s are in foreclosure
America voted for change in 2006, and we got it!  Remember it’s Congress
that mak es law not the President. He has to work with what’s handed to
him.

Quote of the Day……..’My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the
history of the world.  I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.
— Barack Obama

Part 2:
Taxes…Whether Democrat or a Republican you will find these statistics
enlightening and amazing.
www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.html

Taxes under Clinton-1999                  Taxes under Bush 2008
Single making 30K – tax $8,400          Single making 30K – tax $4,500
Single making 50K – tax $14,000        Single making 50K – tax $12,500
Single making 75K – tax $23,250        Single making 75K – tax $18,750
Married making 60K – tax $16,800      Married making 60K- tax $9,000
Married making 75K – tax $21,000      Married m aking 75K – tax $18,750
Married making 125K – tax $38,750    Married making 125K – tax $31,250

The democratic candidate will return to the higher tax rates.
It is amazing how many people that fall into the categories above think
Bush is screwing them and Bill Clinton was the greatest President ever. If
Obama is elected, he will repeal the Bush tax cuts and a good portion of
the people that fall into the categories above can’t wait for it to
happen. This is like the movie The Sting with Paul Newman; you scam
somebody out of some money and they don’t even know what happened.

Part 3
You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much?   Read this:
I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the
war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.
I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until
they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them.  I
have included the URL’s for verification of all the following facts.

1.  $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each
year by state governments.
Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77

2.   $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such
as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

3.   $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

4.  $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school
education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of
English!
Verify at:  http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the
American-bor n children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

6.  $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

7.  30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

8.  $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare &
social services by the American taxpayers.
Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html

9.  $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by
the illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

10.  The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two
and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens.   ;In particular, their
children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US .
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html

11.  During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens
that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens
from Terrorist Countries.  Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth,
heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border.
Verify at: Homeland Security Report:  http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12.  The National Policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass
deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an averagecost of
between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.
Verify at:  http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf ant

13.  In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to
their countries of origin.
Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14.  The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes
committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States.
Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml

The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.

Are we that stupid?  If this doesn’t bother you then just delete the
message.  If, it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, I hope
youforward it to every legal resident in the country including every
representative in Washington , D.C. – five times a week for as long as it
takes to restore some semblance of intelligence in our policies and
enforcement thereof.

My relative, someone I love deeply and think highly of, asked, “what do you think about this???????????????”

Here’s what I thought, and I figured I’d share it with you now just a day and a half prior to the election, not because I think there’s anyone left to sway, but because I just need to write it one more time and this seems like my last chance.

I looked everywhere for the “Good Info” promised in the subject line, but I couldn’t find it. Instead, I found a tissue of innuendo and bad argument, the main thrust of which is to conflate two separate dynamics:  the Democrats winning control of Congress in 2006, and, well, the seeming apocalypse since. One benefit of having studied logic is to understand that whether or not these things happened concurrently, it doesn’t follow that one led to the other. Otherwise, if a two-headed calf were born in early 2007, one could blame the Democrats.

Lee

In my circle, some people know James Smith as an actor who has appeared in several of my plays over the past 15 years, including “The Size of Pike,” “Happy Fun Family,” “Safehouse,” “Animals,” and probably a few more. My students this semester at USC know him as one of the actors who made a guest appearance in my Survey class last month to read their scenes. (Some people may know him as the bartender at the Black Cat Inn in Absecon, NJ, but that’s a different James Smith.)

I’m now thinking that more people are going to know him as the pitchman of a post-apocalyptic console game. (Which my son and I, coincidentally, are playing.)

My wife called me tonight from work to share a story. She’s a respiratory therapist at our local hospital, where she does things most of us don’t even want to consider, like resuscitating patients, monitoring respiration levels, giving breathing treatments, and exchanging your blood gases. I have only a vague idea what the latter is, but I do know that if I’m going to exchange my blood gases, I’d rather my body do it on its own. I’m sure you feel the same. Often over the course of her career she was assisted patients who have no idea what she’s doing, because these patients are comatose, unconscious, or otherwise not fully in control of their faculties, as with Alzheimer’s patients. Still, she talks to all of them — you never know when one of them is going to come to.

Tonight she said she was giving some sort of life-saving treatment to an old woman with Alzheimer’s who didn’t seem conscious. Something came on the television in the room about Barack Obama, and Valorie, talking aloud as usual to a patient she was sure couldn’t respond, made some comment. “I sure hope he wins,” said a weak voice. It was the old woman, suddenly responsive, catching Valorie by surprise.

“Do you like him?” Valorie asked.

The old lady said, “Oh, yes,” and then once Obama was off the screen she drifted back to wherever she normally resides.

So who knows? Maybe he is a miracle worker.

A few thoughts before closing out this month:

1. I’ve always loved Halloween. So much so that my wife and I got married on Halloween (as I wrote about here last year).  Yes, today is our 21st wedding anniversary. I think that Halloween is growing (and, it’s spreading around the globe, a phenomenon I noticed last week in Amsterdam with the opening of the sort of Halloween-specific stores you see across the U.S.). Tonight my wife predicted we wouldn’t have any trick-or-treaters because we hadn’t had any by 6:30; for reasons I couldn’t understand, she seemed to think the annual attendance at our door has been dropping, while I’ve seen precisely the opposite phenomenon. Usually I take the kids trick-or-treating and she stays home and hands out candy. This year our roles were reversed because I couldn’t be sure I could make it around the back with my locked and angry lower back. I counted the number of trick-or-treaters. We had 129. Is that more? Fewer? I don’t know, but it seemed like  a healthy number. Over the course of the night, all but three had costumes; those three were teenagers (they didn’t come as a group), and when I asked where their costume was, to a person they said, “I’m wearing it” or “This is it.” At least they were bold about it. Later, after I’d had some of the natural medicine my mother continues to prescribe (we call that “liquor”), I asked where the best yard shows were and my wife and daughter took me to three just a couple blocks’ walk away. They were fantastic. One was a pirate ship with assorted undead mateys and a tentacled captain working it; one was a chop shop manned by ghouls; and one was an accident site where someone had been accidentally decapitated. At that one I said, “Another FEMA emergency shelter!” Everyone laughed knowingly.

2. For our anniversary, I got my wife “Torchwood,” Season 2. (I got her diamond earrings for Valentine’s Day, okay?) She was thrilled. She got me a massage for my back, scheduled for tomorrow. I am thrilled.

3. The past few days Senator Obama has been in the news lowering expectations — not just about the odds of his  success, but also about the daunting challenges facing the next president “whoever that might be.” I think that’s wise. He has run on hope, but no one should hope that he has a magic wand. If he wins, that first year will be disappointing. Of course, if he loses, I think the next four years will be vastly more disappointing.

See you next month. Starting with those long-promised photos from Amsterdam and the marathon.

When last we tuned in here, I was happily working on my play, although noting that while washing the dog I had somehow thrown out my back.

Since then, several things have happened — but not one of them has seemed notable compared to the pain in my back. It is a locked and angry mass, like a Lovecraftian horror trying to enter our world.

Sunday night after reading to my 6-year-old, I had to ask him to gently shove me off his bed and onto my feet because I couldn’t get up. Thinking it some sort of new game, he was delighted to comply.

On Monday morning I struggled to reach the phone from my bed to call someone — anyone — to help me get up. I couldn’t get the phone. Then I called for one of my kids to come help; none came. Finally I tried to shove myself off the bed and onto my feet, applying the methodology employed by my 6-year-old, but with my own hand rather than his feet. That worked. Once I was up, I was somewhat mobile, but over the course of the day gravity compacted the problem until I strongly considered calling out from my class. It’s team-taught, and my three colleagues could have divvied up my section of eight students among themselves, but since I had missed the previous Monday by dint of being in Amsterdam, that didn’t seem fair. Somehow I was able to lurch down to USC and walk around campus in a manner I hope was not reminiscent of Steve Martin in “All of Me.” Late that night, I soaked in a hot tub filled with Batherapy crystals. In my experience, there are two all-powerful cures: soaks in Batherapy Mineral Bath Salts, or doses of the miracle drug NyQuil. Once you know which to use for what, pretty much everything is covered. Both have the added benefit of helping people (even me, sometimes) sleep.

Tuesday morning I couldn’t get out of bed, so my wife took our kids to school. I did finally have to get up to give a speech at noon to a local service organization. I soaked further in Batherapy first, which helped enormously if briefly. On the way to the speaking engagement I thought about my speech and my back, not in that order. Later that night, my wife extracted the electric heating pad from whatever crevice of the house it’s hidden in and plugged it in downstairs for me. I lay on the couch and watched something (and no, I have no idea what it was) and thought about my back.

I would say yesterday was a blur, but it was more of a throb. I got up, barely, at the unconscionable hour of 6 a.m. to attend a conference in Beverly Hills. The conference featured a succession of speakers with unrelentingly bad economic forecasts. Now I was thinking about my back and the economy. When I finally couldn’t sit there any longer I left early (also, so I wouldn’t have to sit in crawling traffic). I found that my daughter had now laid out the electric heating pad and switched it on high; this was becoming a ritual. She and I watched the first half of a movie about the brothers Van Gogh, “Vincent and Theo,” directed by Robert Altman. When Theo kisses the ankle of his fiancée, my daughter, aged 10, covered her eyes, then ran up into the kitchen to inform her mother. My wife said, “If she’s too embarrassed to watch that, maybe it’s inappropriate.” I could only imagine what my wife thought was happening in this PG-13 movie, but didn’t have the energy to shout up there that it was just ankle-kissing. I wondered if the source of Vincent’s mania was an aching back.

Today I explained to everyone everywhere, “I’m crabby. Just so you know. Not at you – at everything. My back is killing me.” I shared this with the guy at the Apple Store trying to figure out why none of my contacts would synch from my laptop to my iPhone since my return from Europe. Except in his case, when I got back to my office and found out definitively that his fix had not worked, it was him I was crabby with, not just the back. Apple Store “genius” Michael fixed some of the problem; true genius elder son Lex fixed the rest. (“Genius” Michael: “They give us 15 minutes to fix each iPhone problem. This one has taken me an hour and forty-five minutes! This is the most complicated problem I’ve ever dealt with.” Me, acidly: “Congratulations. You’ve scaled new heights of achievement.”) When I got home to watch the remaining half of “Vincent and Theo,” my two younger kids fought over who would get to set the electric heating pad for me, and how high.

Now I’ve been invited by my marathon training pack to join them for an eight-mile run this Sunday. It’s tempting. I never had a bit of back problem while in training, or afterward. It was washing the dog that did this, and I’m doing my best not to resent her for it. As my pace group leader emailed me, “Don’t wash the dog.” So I may join them on Sunday, and I may get those marathon and Amsterdam photos up on this blog. If I can get out of bed.