Gone Fishin'

Tomorrow Laurie and I head up to Sunriver, Oregon, to see what we can do about ethnically cleansing the rainbow trout population. We'll be gone for about a week, so I will be in and out of this joint. I doubt that I'll be writing very much, but I will be spending considerable time with one of my oldest and dearest who also happens to be a hard-left screaming socialist of a type that I once was.

My old college chum, Chris.

During the end of the Clinton years, and early in the Bush II years, we would stay up late and just bitch, bitch, bitch over cocktails or beer.. and cigarettes. Like many people at the time we despised George W. Bush and his entire administration with the heat of a thousand suns. We were convinced that Al Gore was robbed in Florida and that Bush was a knuckle-dragging faux-Christian war-monger of the very worst sort. We made fun of Rumsfeld and heaped contempt upon Alberto Gonzalez. Cheney was, of course, Darth Cheney, the evil genius scheming in his Hidden Location, while Karl Rove, aka "Turd Blossom," was the sniveling little Machiavelli crouching behind the throne... Wormtongue.

We nurtured our hatred, fed one another with it, and called it virtue.

Chris still maintains the old hatreds and the old faith, whereas I have moved on. Not that Chris is not an excellent guy, he most certainly is. The difference between us is that he still despises Republicans and I simply no longer do.

Heck, I'm even looking forward to voting for one come this November.

I am free of ideology, and I am free from ideologically mandated hatreds, and for that I am profoundly grateful.



"They turned a petting zoo into Auschwitz!" - Lewis Black