Totally unrelated (or not), my son told me his “success” yesterday was that he got to present both his “clue can” and his “share day” in preschool back-to-back. The day previous, he “hadn’t been listening to the teachers” and “had to spend some time in the babies class” and couldn’t present.
His share day item was a fallen leaf he found from the plum tree over the driveway of our new house.
…
Since just before the election, I was doing so well at avoiding any direct knowledge of what was going on with politics. Deleted Twitter, didn’t open Apple News, moved any political blogs into a folder I don’t read, and unrecommend anything about US politics. Almost made it through the week.
This morning someone at work noted that there was a perfect tie for city council in District 1 in San Francisco (11,001 to 11,001). I went to confirm it was my old district because it is amusing to think that M—’s and my vote — if we hadn’t just moved away — would have decided it. Unfortunately, I accidentally saw the presidential returns for city at the top. Harris won with 80% of the vote in the city.
This explains what happened when Biden dropped out. Since I’ve been paying attention (2004), the Democratic presidential candidate has always had a larger percentage of the vote in a city like San Francisco, so it wasn’t 3rd party, or enthusiasm for Trump, or whatever — it’s lower Democratic turnout, plain and simple.
Even though I skipped past it as fast as possible, it did depress my fragile mood to have been right about people pushing Biden out. Of course, I didn’t like having people gloat at me for the last few months about how I should eat crow about being angry and scared when that happened, or how wrong I was to even believe nobody should have pushed him out. I no longer want to be the I-told-you-so-but-with-facts-on-my-side mirror of them.
That was why, on election day, I woke up and decided to not be the person who has to be right. Nor will do I want to fall again into the politics-as-sport / pay-attention-to-things-I -can’t-control — and what a deep fall it’s been! “We won!” When all I did was vote and donate some $ for merch — no more that I would for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers.
The vast majority of it has been a poison for my soul for the last 22 years. I can act correctly politically enough to look at myself in the mirror about who I am and what sort of world I’d like Benjamin to grow up in. I can do all that and not have a bitter person staring back at me.
Political aside (one last time — hopefully with less holier-than-thou shit… but probably not)
M— is right that we were right to have felt sick with Biden being pushed out even if our preferred candidate was the replacement. I voted for Kamala Harris every time I could and only missed two times in total: once when she first ran for DA before I became a resident, and the other time she dropped out before the presidential primary in 2020. I was excited to vote for her. She didn’t push out Joe Biden. She made the best with what position she was thrust into, ran an excellent political campaign, and simply lost due to circumstances beyond her control.
M— noted to me later, that these people didn’t vote because they don’t care about the issues, they didn’t vote because the issues that were being presented were so big and so beyond their ability to affect it that they simply opted out. By focusing on Trump, Project 2025, Gaza, tariffs etc. and not the things people care about that affect them and they have some agency over, we froze them from voting. The pundit class — yes the liberal part especially — was part of that, while the Democrats in the trenches working for 30 years to turn Texas blue, running and losing, were most definitely not. She is proud to be a Democrat; I need to check my party registration because I don’t remember if I stopped being “Unaffiliated.”
Democrats have a huge hill to climb because a lot of their base has been eroded into non-voters, though perhaps only temporarily. My guesses is this is due to general disgusting turn in political discourse in America has broken the Mean Voter Theorem by easily manipulating them into non-voters. “Luckily” the Republicans are so terrible at governing they’ll get voted out every time they have power because they’ll crash the economy or find some dozen new ways to make more vulnerable people’s lives miserable, and there wasn’t a big, long enough to to fix much of what they messed it up last time, and how close we are to all that for them to cause the electorate to forget. They can’t actually pass any policies; they can only destroy stuff.
(Heck, I don’t think the rich will even get their tax cut this time around, just a brief stay of execution. At this point there’s a significant number of the 0.01% who would prefer to be taxed more, not less that I’m not sure most of them even want it. After all, a lot of insanely rich people were on Team Kamala even if many were misguided on how to be so.)
It does show how easily manipulated and insidious (politically, not to judge them) the “blame the Democrats” crowd is as a bloc, because the Democrats aren’t poisoning the well, the Republicans and the “lie-beral media” are. If anything, the sort of person who blames the Democrats is a huge contributor of poisoning the well for the average voter, and shows how easily and how they can be manipulated to play their part — an easy psychological trap is being exploited: this person can “win” by pushing Biden out, “win” by voting for the better side (Democratic or 3rd party), and “win” by blaming someone else for what they actually caused (losing the election because they turned off so many potential allies that regular people collectively said, “Fuck it!”), free from the direct consequences of what they have wrought (safe in their liberal local city/state enclaves… as am I), while the people actually trying to help others and make a real difference are targets of their ire (“worse than MAGA” or “the real problem” or “this is why you should’t find common ground with <insert my enemy> in my enemy-centered world”).
Apparently how we feel about our vote (or not voting) became more important than what actually happens as a result of it. I was wrong and others were always right that the “solution” was for us to become more like them. I just didn’t realize that we both wanted the same stupid outcome: to feel good about acting against our interests.
M— dropping a truth bomb on me
I’m so lucky to have M—. She is truly my better half in so many ways, it’s become obvious the definition of “half” is being stretched here — like when Benjamin takes a huge bite out of his favorite candy and then gives me “half.” So much of what makes us “better” is with her, and not me.
She’s recently re-read 7 Habits, and just shared with me a new (to me) anecdote about Steven Covey that is in either the new edition or the audiobook form. He was asked “What habit do you have the most trouble with?”. “Habit 5. Seek first to understand, then be understood, I have to work on that one the most.” he says. He said his children always complained about how he didn’t follow that one and he would tell them, “It’s hard to listen when you are always right.”
M—, of course, brought this up as her way of telling me my mouth is always open and I need to fucking shut up and listen more. After the election, she resolved to stop keeping her true self bottled up, and her true self had been wanting to drop that truth bomb on me for years now. Besides, she only married me for the hoppa baby anyway. 😀 Of course, being the better half, she did it by first recounting that anecdote and then saying, “You know, you’re a lot like Stephen Covey.”
…
I don’t know how I’m going to listen more on this blog — it’s not exactly a two-way street here. But it’s been so long nobody is reading at this point — you are on Instagram, or listening to podcasts, or repeat watching a much funnier version of this shit on TikTok, or, — if you are still so old school as to still be reading at this point — paying for someone to tell you some insightful shit on in some paid newsletter you subscribed to.
Because of that, I’m going to act like The Woodwork is a safe place to get these toxins out of my mind so I can be a better person out in the real world. Kind of like a good BM for my brain. I suppose, not that long ago, I’d have concentrated this into 140 characters and put it on Twitter (but you may have missed that I’m not on that anymore — I don’t slow down to watch a train wreck).
So here it is. We all gotta pee and poop somewhere, and this is my safe space. Feel free to not read this. I’m just going through some things.
Return to (better than before) form
When it comes to politics, I want to not waste an insane amount of cognitive surplus on what I can’t control. I need to use just enough to know who I’m going to vote for and what causes I’m going to donate to. That takes a pitifully small amount of effort at this point — not any more than the amount I paid attention back before George W. Bush did his axis of evil speech and I almost drove off the road. Before that moment, I never had even voted. Before that moment, most of my friends would call this place “the Left Coast” while actually living here. After that I became active — eventually too active. None of you were with me because I hadn’t yet started this blog. I voted for the first time, and joined the loser club, and, after that election day now twenty years gone, I became resolved and started this blog actually.
After 20 years of wasted thought on “religion and politics” I have enough of a bank account of knowledge to do know how I’m voting. And, I’m not going to change anyone’s minds there, and that goes against the motto of this blog.
I want to put some of that surplus into just being a more joyful person instead of some crazy fucking Cassandra who nobody can stand and is generally unpleasant to be around. For the last eight years, I’ve been the latter and that’s why I’ve barely written anything because that person is trash and has nothing good to say.
I started this blog with the motto I had had engraved on my iPod at the time: “write for another to think.” At some point it must have become “write to be right, and fuck others” which is why I haven’t been blogging.
Fuck that guy, I’m turning over a new leaf.
Or, as Benjamin often puts it: “Daddy shhh! Stop interrupting mommy!”
