constant narrator

Riding home from campus tonight the first cold wind of the season bit into me. I was heading up to Hyde Park and a steady headwind met me from the north. I fought it up the hill on Speedway past the new hooka-cum-internet-cafe on the curve. By the time I was in Hyde Park my ears were really starting to hurt and I was riding with one hand in my coat pocket. As I turned east into the neighborhood towards my house, the wind wasn’t in my face and I got to notice how clear the sky was. Orion was rising above the treeline with Mars just to its left. Orion is my winter-sky buddy and it made me happy to see him again. My body had the strange and not entirely unpleasant juxstaposition of my extremities aching from cold and my torso being hot and starting to sweat. It was very quiet, except for the late night dog walkers with their jingling dog collars. A few houses had fired up their fireplaces and they smelled really good.

While it’s harder to get on my bike when it gets cold, it’s such a luxury to be riding a bike in mid-November. Sweater-licious.

The election results have me despairing, but the web is full of this despair and I’ll add nothing to it other than to say that my goal is to fight such utter blindness with a creative response and not sustained bitterness.

In other, much, much better news, the strangeness along my scarline is not a recurrence of the skin cancer and I have been given a gloriously clean bill of health by my health-care team. The weirdness may or may not go away on its own but it’s not to crazy looking so I’m not sweating it. This takes a huge freak-out off my shoulders, er, nose. Now I can concentrate on my projects: house-buying, GRE trouncing, and article-writing.

I will not be beaten. But I will be trying to take a media hiatus.

“The genetically vicious nature of presidential campaigns in America is too obvious to argue with, but some people call it fun, and I am one of them. Election Day — especially a presidential election — is always a wild and terrifying time for politics junkies, and I am one of those, too. We look forward to major election days like sex addicts look forward to orgies. We are slaves to it.”

— HST
November 2004 Rolling Stone

To the world beyond America, I would like to offer my apologies and sympathies on today, the day of the American election. While this election may very well affect you in both large and small ways, you can do nothing but watch and wait. It is in the hands of an often hysterical, under-educated, xenophonic and manipulated American voting public. We have no idea which way it will go. I understand this stress and strain, and I’m sorry. We can only hope it will turn out for the best. Good luck and god bless.