I’m Sitting Here Dialing My Cellphone with One Hand, Digging at Some Obscure Pebbles with My Shovel with the Other

I don't really daydream of braining Dis Chrodd with a shovel, though I do hope to give him the finger someday. This is true: I do work for his brother who teaches at Hilltop, an urbane and respectful guy (relative to the coordinates on power's grid he and I, um, occupy vis a vis me and other powerful dickweeds I need deal with*). I'll introduce you to my brother, he told me when I'd told him in 2004 I was driving to Harrisburg on election day to canvas for Kerry, He genuinely appreciates loyal Democrats like me, Dis Chrodd's brother told me. So when I say I daydreamed of braining Dis Chrodd with a shovel I really don't daydream of braining Dis Chrodd with a shovel, nor do I daydream of braining me, the rube of the story who I was implying truly deserves braining with a shovel: Dis Chrodd is still happyfat being Dis Chrodd. He was that happyfat when I'd have voted for him in 2008 instead of McCohn Jcain.

• Witnessing the birth of Occupy.
• Occupy's next phase: avoid cooption in election season.
• Now what?
• Killing the competition.
• Uplifting thoughts for the day.
• Terrible optics, wonderful metaphor.
• Conservatism and violence. Not just conservatives, yo.
• Who killed the public option?
• Left/right.
• EJ Dionne notes the Corporate wing of GOP wins again, fails to note the Corporate wing of the Democrats is running uncontested for renomination. 
• Enlightened and spiteful self-interest.
• *Emeffing business school and econ profs unsurprisingly the most consistently dickweedish of the bunch.
• Bleggalgazing!
• Bleggalgazing!
• Bleggalgazing!
• Thoughtful post on antivax vapidity. 
• Some lit-links.
• Mining the audio motherlode.

CROSSROADS IN THE PAST

John Ashbery

That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,

but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.

“That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?

‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do

when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”

I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.

Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject.

No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know

exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could

seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?

I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone

with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel

with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,

on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.

We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,

talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know

that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean.

I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some

sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater

had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards

drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves

sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly

crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully

know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly

amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.