Little Green Teabag

Of course they were the topic all weekend. You can look at the pictures and the signs, or you can open up a can of the stuff on the right and get the same effect: Bland, slimy, and bad for you. People of bigger brain are pretty much clear now on two things:

1. Teabagger=Racist
2. Nothing else about what they do or say makes any sense. Aside from having a black president, they're mad about...what? Policy? That is so weird. For a longtime Washingtonian, it's almost kind of flattering, in a way. Here we go for so many years developing minutely detailed policy, and someone is actually paying attention! Even if they do get it wrong.

All I can say is it's one weird-ass world when I find myself working on poems about Rush Limbaugh and about Harriet Tubman at the same time. Course the Rush one is just an easy one-off, ought to be done in a day. It's about one time when I was in Miami in the car scanning stations and listening to his show for a while and thinking: That guy is SO HIGH.

(Remember that next time you think I'm just some happy housewife. I see all.)

Right now, I'm tuning in and getting this sense that the teabaggers, who after all are largely not powerful people, even in numbers, are actually super-bottoming masochists, hell-bent on testing the edge of human endurance of pain. Our President keeps trying to offer them a safe word, and they're all: no way. No rules. Take them away. Please, please, I must have Wall Street take my home, give CEOs my retirement, take my job away, make them beat me down to nothing, please, rich executives and limo preachers, take my money and kill our jobs and turn my town into a hull fit only for meth production, except that no one knows enough even to figure out how to cook it without blowing their asses to ash because we don't want education either, please, make me work for stockbrokers so they can buy ice sculptures and snort corks (that's not a typo, it's a shoutout to E) off naked nubile maidens. Please, no rules, no way to stop them, please do it until we bleed, and make sure there's no one there to bandage us up, no way. No government, no help, no health care, no options of any kind, no peace, no boundaries, no future, no change, no change, no change.

They couldn't get their rapture on with the war, so they're going for the End Times right here at home.

But you know what's worse? I'm also tuning in that all the protesting and talk radio bullshit is just a shiny-thing distraction. That as evil and real as the racism is, it's still all a way of saying, "hey, over here, keep looking over here!"

And I wonder what's going on where we're not looking. And who and why. And now I sound as paranoid as they do. And maybe that's actually how they get you.

I made the 13.1 miles in eight (slight correction) minutes less than I had two years ago. I feel a little achy, but fine. More than fine.