From the Department of Irreparable Damage

The 8-year-old comes from school today and says, "We were playing zombies on the playground and I bit three kids. So only Patrick is left."

On the upside, I don't think he LITERALLY bit them....

Why You Should Read Ta-Nehisi Coates

Since the election ended and I could quit obsessing about the real world to the degree to which I had obsessed about it before, I cut down my blog consumption markedly. There are only a few I still keep up with on a daily basis. Here's one reason why I check in with Ta-Nehisi most days.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

The current GOP is like a bottomless clown car. Just when you think, "There can't possibley be any more clowns in there!" another one stumbles out of the door.

There have in the past been Republicans that I admired, who I thought were decent people, who had convictions that, while I didn't agree with them, were at least in some way defensible or well-reasoned. Hell, the S/O is Republican, and I haven't killed him -- yet. Of course, it helps that he's cute.

But, seriously, GOP, this is tiresome. While I may not agree with everything the current administration is doing, they are smart, capable and doing their damnedest to pull us out of the tailspin. We tried your way, and it didn't work. So now we try another way and pray that it does. You say "government is the problem" but the truth is "Republican government is the problem." We gave you the keys to the bus, and you promptly got drunk, set fire to the bus, and drove it off a cliff into a ravine filled with radioactive zombies. We're just trying to claw our way back out before they eat what's left of our brains.

So, GOP, come up with some new ideas -- and not the same old ideas repackaged in a shiny "off-the-hook" wrapper -- but until you do, STFU and take your big bucket of fail with you.

Haps in the Whedonverse

I watched the first half of Dollhouse with the little voice in my head repeating the mantra "Please don't suck, please don't suck, please don't suck." The first half was dicey -- not horrible, but being a big uber-nerd Buffy-phile can open you up to a world of dissapointment. The second half picked up, and there was a line in there, you know the feeling if you're a writer, where you go, "Damn, I wish I had written that." The second half was good, not Angel season five good -- and sorry, for me, Angel season five is the apex of TV -- and not "Graduation Day" or "The Body" good, but good nonetheless. So here's to high hopes that when I can get close to the DVR the series builds on that. Don't break my heart, Whedon.

And becasue TNT reruns Angel at 6:00 in morning, I happened to catch a few episodes this week. "A Hole in the World" still stands out to me as one of my favorite episodes of TV ever, and "Underneath" was good too. Sigh. If there was a cable network that only contained the compiled works of Joss Whedon, Tim Minear, Bryan Fuller, Russell T. Davies and the tragically lone season of Now and Again, I would never get up from in the front of the TV again.

Time, She Does Fly

Yikes - so much for my internal mental promise to write everyday. Of course, said promise might be easier to keep if everyone who shares my house wasn't earnestly trying to liquify my brain. And too much work -- not the good kind that is fulfilling and leads somewhere, but the other kind, the one that pays for the macaroni and cheese and the cap & gown fees and the college applications and the kitty litter. Which of those is most important? Ask Spike - although to the list including kitty litter he would add, "And unlimited cream cheese, and not the stupid bars, but the fancy whipped stuff."

What else? I managed to read a short story. Not write one, mind you, but read one. In the bathtub, in between the cat opening the door -- no doubt looking for cream cheese -- and the 3-year-old following the cat in, asking why I didn't have more toys in the bathtub. You know what I miss? (other than being able to take a 10 minute bath unaccosted) I miss short stories. Why when I was a kid you could go down to Duckwalls and buy a paperback copy of Year's Best Horror Stories off the spinning rack by the cash register for a buck. It was literally like $1.65. Man, I loved those things. The lack of speculative fiction anthologies readily available in any local shop is a sure sign of the decline of civilization.

I am working on a story. I even have the beginning and ending all typed up, but the middle still resides inside my head. I know it all, I even review and revise while I'm chauffering or moving laundry from the washer to the dryer or trying to scrub the spilled maraschino cherry juice off the shelves of the fridge. I just can't seem to sit down in the quiet and finish it off. Maybe becasue there is no quiet, or if there is, it's the dark and lonely hours of the night when I'm too tired or still working to buy that cream cheese. I've been trying to convince myself that I really don't need the 3.25 hours of sleep I'm currently getting a day, but the body rebels.

Anyway, that's my goal for this month, small and timid as it may be, finish that story. We'll see.