Fapo

This is my second attempt at blogging. The first lasted about two years and focused on national and international politics. Occasionally I would lapse into something more personal and close to home, but such posts were infrequent.

I ended blogging spontaneously, without even posting an epithet. It was right after Katrina when the federal government had been caught flat-footed and George Bush’s political incompetence took center stage. This incompetence had less to do with the feeble efforts of his FEMA minions as it had to do with his willingness to allow the disaster on the Gulf coast to become the poster boy of the Hollywood/MSM elites at the time when they were obviously working overtime to undermine his efforts in the Middle East. A single visit to the SuperDome with Laura Bush would have done wonders for his Presidency and bought him renewed support.

But frankly the politics wasn’t what caused me to abandon writing. My second long-term relationship (let’s call her “B2”) was starting to unravel. I had dedicated a small post earlier in the month to her, lavishing her with praise for finishing law school and passing the bar. I coupled this with some additional kudos to my eldest daughter, who is in college and always struggled with math. A day later B2 sent me an email at work, raging about how thoughtless I was not to have written something about my youngest daughter. Sadly this was becoming a familiar pattern: the drinking, the depression, and the abusive emails being sent in the middle of the day while I was busy at work. (I am in product development, and at the time was rewriting some basic security for a piece of software that powers half the IT houses on the planet.)

I threw in the towel, gave up my blog, and hunkered down for the next two years trying to salvage our relationship, which by all measures is clearly on its last legs. We recently put the house up for sale, and B2 is moving back to Massachusetts. I am spending a lot of time trying to figure out how I screwed up so badly.

I don’t like particularly like the idea of using a blog as a confessional. But I need an outlet to grieve, and this will have to suffice. A lot of what I write will be personal and I think I will be touching on the interesting problem of politics, values, and personal relationships.

About six months ago one evening, right before turning out the lights to go to bed, B2 lied down beside me in bed and lamented loudly, “Poor Yasser Arafat. I heard on the news that he is dying." I quietly left the room, walked downstairs, and quickly downed two or three shots of gin.

It was all I could do to contain myself and avoid having another fight.

I’m going to be writing about my family but I want to preserve their anonymity. I could probably just use real first names in my prose and get away with it for a while, but kids are savvy. Who knows when one of them would craft an exotic compound Google query that would produce a link to this page? So, to be on the safe side, I will resort to pseudonyms: ones that are fitting and are easy for me to remember.

Here is a preliminary cast of characters:

· B1 - my ex-wife of seventeen years
· B2 - my second, common law, and soon to be ex-wife of eight years.
· JayWon – my eldest daughter, currently 21, adopted and bi-racial.
· Adie – my youngest daughter, 20, and my only biological child.
· JayToo – my step-daughter, also 20.
· Tenacious – my youngest step-son, 18.
· Perfecto – my eldest step-son, also 21 years of age.

The kids have been the focal point and the center of my life. They are all healthy, smart, and getting good grades in college (with the exception of Tenacious who is still a senior in high school and will be graduating Friday.) They are also too good looking for words.

No one got pregnant, no one did hard drugs, there have been no major car accidents, or late night calls from the local police. Tenacious did get a couple of suspensions in his freshman year in high school, but it was for typical adolescent stuff. He was very young for his grade and was emotionally, an eighth grader. He and a buddy thought it would be a splendid idea to draw (in the words of the assistant principal) "a large detailed rendition of male genitalia" in the wet cement of a new sidewalk in front of the high school. They were so proud of their creation that they annotated their handy-work with their own initials.

Even Barney Fife could have solved this petty crime in time the time it would take to have an extra helping of apple pie from Aunt Bee.

The second suspension came not more than a week later. Freshman were playing a game of "dare" where you have to repeat some physical gesture originally directed towards you. Someone grabbed Tenacious's right breast, so he had to follow suit. Of course he picked a co-ed.

This is a small town, and in the evening while I was reading him the riot act, I asked him who the girl was. When he told me I was sorely tempted to congratulate him on his taste in women, but I bit my tongue, and gave him the standard boilerplate lecture about respecting physical boundaries. That was the last trouble he or any other of our children brought home.

A long time ago when my second daughter was just born, a pediatrician gave her a clean bill of health and said, "Congratulations. Consider yourself the winner of the Lottery." Those words always stuck with me. With the last kid ready to leave for college, and after eight years of working to successfully blend a family, this should be a time for celebration and profound satisfaction. The fact that it isn’t serves as an unflattering commentary of the dysfunction of their self-absorbed baby-boomer parents.

I sometimes wonder if kids should be offered insurance protecting them from the follies of their parents. Maybe Hillary should include it into her domestic platform.

I’ve already written two posts, and I’m starting to realize that politics is taking a back stage to the soap opera that I’m currently living through. I'm located in New Hampshire, which has traditionally been a conservative state but has recently taken on a distinct tone of purple. The newly elected Democratic legislature just failed in its first attempt to legislate the mandatory use of seat belts. We are the last state in the union to not impose this by law, and for the moment the Dems are being forced to regroup and attempt a more modest proposal. Perhaps they would be satisfied by simply modifying the state motto to “Live Free and Die”.

My family lives about fifteen miles north of Massachusetts and the town is being overrun by liberals and their failed policies. The most recent indication of this was an embarrassing break-out of lunacy in our local middle school, which held a "value diversity" night celebrating the enlightened culture of Saudi Arabia. The festivities included the segregation of women.

Massholes are fleeing their six percent income tax, their five percent sales tax, and a host of oppresive mandates from Beacon Hill. It’s not uncommon now in Massachusetts to spend fifty thousand dollars upgrading one’s septic system to comply with new state mandated standards. This upgrade needs to be done before any house is sold.

And for this enhanced revenue stream you get the Big Dig, with its billions of dollars of cost overruns and the excitement of knowing that you could be killed just by driving home through poorly inspected infrastructure.

Envious Bostonians float the canard of “Yah, you folks in New Hampshire don’t have a sales tax or income tax, but you pay through the nose on your property.” Property taxes are indeed higher in the Granite State than in Massachusetts, but this is an apples to oranges comparison which equates tax rates on the same dollar value assessment. The cruel fact is that the same house in Massachusetts can be up to fifty or a hundred percent more expensive to purchase.

In other words to have the same quality home in Massachusetts you have to pay a much higher mortgage, and the higher assessment value neutralizes any advantage of the lower property tax rate. And that’s before you get to the weekly six percent reduction of your paycheck and fork over an extra fifteen hundred dollars when you buy a new car.

The foliage is nice up here, but that’s not what is driving the migration from Boston.

Time for a clarification: B2 and I are not married. We came very close early in our relationship, and in a fit of total madness, B2 almost had surgery to reconnect her female plumbing so we could have more kids. But the hurdles of blending two very different families took precedence and we were quickly overwhelmed by the stress of juggling five teenagers. Last year we compromised and got a dog.

So strictly speaking, JayToo, Tenacious, and Perfecto are not officially my “step-children”. But at an emotional level, they are very much my kids. I never wiped their fannies or got up at two in the morning to give them a bottle, but they will forever be on my short list of blessings that came directly from God. B2 and I may not be getting along, but she has done a yeoman’s job in raising three wonderful children.

Virtually all of my immediate family are liberals. B2 comes from an old Irish Democrat family whose uncle and great uncle held national cabinet posts in past administrations. Before her first marriage, B2 had a long relationship with one of the most powerful men currently in Washington D.C.

Her kids are either apolitical (Tenacious), or have aligned themselves closely with their mother (JayToo and Perfecto). Everyday we get the Boston Globe, and once a week we get the New Yorker and the Sunday New York Times. B2 pays for this expensive propaganda. I happily take it to the dump.

While predictable in their leanings, JayToo and Perfecto are serious and smart young adults who work hard in trying to understand and rationalize the world. JayToo is like her mother, politically correct to a fault. Her greatest strength and weakness is her inherent trust and faith in humanity. It is a deeply endearing quality but one that will need to be tempered by a colder look at some of the less pleasant aspects of today’s human condition. She is a pet project of mine and I’ve started to challenge her assumptions.

A week ago, just after coming back from college she was parked in front of the television watching Al Gore pontificate while I was getting a beer from the fridge. I opined with some disparaging remark, and we were off to the races, fighting tooth and nail about global warming. When I challenged the relationship between CO2 and warming, arguing that there is very good evidence that the causality is just the opposite of what Gore would want you to believe (i.e. that the differences in temperature in the sun drives differences in CO2), she resorted to one of her mother's favorite tactics of denial.

"I've never heard of that."

Well that's what happens when your primary news source is the Boston Globe.

Perfecto has a slight libertarian streak in him and has a keen interest and passion for history. His natural interest in the world and his keen intellect make for a potent combination. (I’ve nicknamed him Perfecto because of his academic achievement. He was a straight-A student in high school and scored perfect SATs.) What I love about talking to him is his studious, non-emotional, and detached manner of analyzing things. He is a natural academic who is always open to hearing diverse opinions. The last time I talked to him about Mark Steyn's thesis on the fate of Europe in the twenty first century. Originally he balked at the notion, but after thinking it through conceded that Steyn had a point.

My eldest daughter, JayWon, is a certified, card-carrying moonbat who argues that George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden eat dinner together in the basement of the White House. Her political disorientation is probably the by-product of a lethal stew of nature and nurture.

JayWon has never had an interest in history, and has always been impatient when it comes to thinking through and untangling complex problems. She gravitates towards simple answers. She has also been indoctrinated into the political climate of Howard University. Howard is the largest black university in the world and is overtly hostile to anything remotely approaching conservative opinion. She is fun to engage in political discussions, simply because her opinion is so wacko and patently unserious.

Adie, like Perfecto, is passionate about history. Unlike Perfecto she hasn’t spent enough time hitting the books and has a way long way to go before achieving a sustained level of academic discipline.

She was a terrible slacker in high school, a side effect of an ongoing battle with depression, but she is turning around and is making up for lost time. Adie is the most interesting child, in the sense that she always surprises me with the depth of her insight into human nature. She studied the Greek and Roman history and is already starting to challenge and question what she is hearing from MSM and her professors.

She got into a heated discussion a few weeks ago just before coming home from school. She was arguing that Bill Clinton will be rated in history as being an average president. Of course, virtually everyone else thought that his visage should be carved into Mount Rushmore. Adie dug in her heels and held her ground.

When all is said and done and she blossoms into her own, I think she is going to continually surprise people.

Tenacious is graduating from high school today. He is the fifth high school graduate we’ve had in the past four years. They will all be in college next year and needless to say we will be hemorrhaging cash. Tenacious has been mad at B2 ever since she told him that she was selling the house. He’s a classic teenager: laconic, and occasionally sullen.

His is the wit of the family and loves to pepper his verbal exchanges with dry, mordant humor.

Recently though he is openly sarcastic with any exchange with B2. Last night I had to gently remind him that he was to respect his mother and not give her such a hard time.

I’m trying to figure out how to approach him about our split up. I’m sure the move is stirring up a lot of emotions and because he’s lived here the longest, he has come to love this place. Also because he is still at home, he’s seen or heard some of the flair ups we’ve had.

Before they moved north, Tenacious was angry and destructive and afraid of his biological father. At age ten he would climb in bed with his mom. His first year up here was difficult. He was in sixth grade and cliques were already well established. But he found his niche, mixing it up with buddies who shared his skateboarding interests.

Recently I talked to one of B2’s closest friends, a woman who has known her for over thirty year. She knew B2 before her first marriage and told her that she was making a huge mistake. We talked about our situation and she asserted that my relationship with Tenacious saved him. I think that is an overstatement. Simply living in a quiet stable family where people treated each other with respect and decency seemed to do the trick. Everyone contributed to his turnaround, including an unlikely but great relationship with his two older step-sisters.

Today is his big day, and I’m very proud of him.

B2 is emotionally checked out and I am quickly becoming a fixture of her past. She is house hunting today in Massachusetts and that is her “next shiny thing”. This is a phrase I coined to characterize her behavior when she externalizes her depression. She is constantly fixating on something new to take her mind off the pain that haunts her. The origins of this go back a very long time, decades before she and I ever met.

Eight years ago I was the “next shiny thing”. Her infatuation with me lasted a little over two years and then the depression came back with a vengeance. This was coupled with an underlying rage, fueled by a stark realization that her huge investment in this new relationship (i.e. relocating her kids and moving up to New Hampshire) didn’t provide a permanent escape from her past.

She started gaining large amounts of weight and obsessed about her kids which had served as a distraction from her own problems. But the kids were quickly becoming young adults. They were finding new friends and starting to have lives of their own.

The next shiny new thing was law school. Finishing school and settling down to a regular job was a let down, and in less than two years of practicing law, she is already having second thoughts about staying in the profession.

Last year, out of the blue, she wanted to get a dog. I tried to give her forewarning about the work it takes to raise a puppy, but she insisted that she was up for it. I come from a family that knows and loves dogs although my house training skills were rusty. The house was chaotic for about six months, full of dog droppings in unexpected places. Last fall she told me that she wanted to get rid of the dog, saying that it was too much to deal with.

When it comes to dependent creatures, be it kids or animals, that’s where I put my foot down. The pooch is a handful, but I’ve taken her to obedience school and she is becoming a wonderful companion. Come hell or high water, she stays with me.

B2 will come back tonight and be full of high-spirits and energy. She has a new focus. She will spend endless hours going over real-estate listings and working out the process and logistics of financing and moving, while totally ignoring the people she will be leaving. She will start idealizing her new life. When she moves down there, and things become routine, the pain of the past will re-emerge.

Selfishly I’m glad that I will be living elsewhere and no longer serve as a daily focus of her inner-rage. I was the one who first floated the idea that we should live apart. It wasn't something I wanted, but she has been pushing me away for a very long time.

She is the love of my life and I already miss her. It kills me that someone with so many wonderful qualities is driven by daemons that are so ruthless, and self-destructive.

Yesterday I called JayWon. She is staying in Washington D.C. this summer, taking a slew of summer courses trying to backfill her cumulative credit hours. For some reason, Howard requires one hundred and twenty eight credit hours to graduate, which means three more courses above and beyond the typical undergraduate load of five courses per semester. Frankly it sounds like a scheme to get parents to pay for a ninth semester. She is also struggling to satisfy her math requirements. I've heard that a lot of parents are now actively helping college students in their assignments. My girls have been in college for four years now, and I've done two or three proof reads of some essays that they've written as freshman, but that was my limit.

It's sink or swim time.

Math has been a very big part of my relationship with my eldest daughter, going back to elementary school. I was big on making sure the kids got a good foundation of both math and reading. The reading end of it was a cinch. JayWon has always been very verbal. She said her first word (i.e. “Ducks” ) at seven months and was reading books by herself at the outset of kindergarten. Math was an entirely different story. Bricks are easier to teach.

We would do the standard parental due diligence. Go over the times tables, do flash cards, watch PBS children shows, purchase "educational" games at Toys-R-Us. Nothing stuck. She would master some quadrant of the times tables one week, and have virtually no recall two or three weeks later.

Our earliest fights were about math. Determined to drill stuff into her head through the twin tactics of mind-numbing repetition and total immersion I would ask her to cite times tables when we were driving someplace. JayWon is a classic alpha female and nothing if not argumentative and stubborn.

“How much is seven times six?”

“The same value I told you yesterday.”

“Which was…?”

“I forget. Give me a hint.”

“That’s ridiculous. I ‘m not going to give you a hint on something so basic. In fact I wouldn’t know how. Just give me direct answer, please.”

“Thirty five.”

“How in God’s name did you come up with a number like that? We’ve gone over this stuff a thousand times.”

“Thirty eight?”

“Stop guessing.

“Forty eight, no forty four. How about thirty seven?”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. You’re running out of numbers. Try again.”

“Thirty eight.”

“You already guessed that.”

“I give up.”

“No you don’t. You NEVER give up. You’ve got to at least try.”

Dead silence.

At which point I pull over the car, pull the emergency brake on, and turn off the engine.

“Why are we stopping?”, she asks.

“Until you get this right, we’re not moving.”

“That’s dumb.”

“No it isn’t. This is important.”

“Why is seven times six important?”

“Because.”

“Why?”

“Will you just think about it carefully and give me an answer. I have other things I’d like to do today.”

By this point things have escalated. This is no longer about times tables. It is about who is the parent. We sit there for forty-five minutes until a cop passed us. He put on his flasher, pulled over, and slowly walked to the car.

“Okay.” I said to JayWon. “Let me do the talking here.”

The officer bent down and looked at both of us. “License and registration, please. What seems to be the problem here?”

“Seven times six.” JayWon replied loudly.

I intervened and convinced the officer that we were lost. JayWon almost wet her pants laughing as the cop pulled away.

That was more than twelve years ago, and frequently this episode comes up in our conversations about her current struggles in school.

“The days of me bailing you out are long over. You’re twenty-one years old, kiddo. Do the math.”

Tenacious graduated Friday evening and the event was uplifting. This was the fourth ceremony we attended in as many years, so I was expecting it to be somewhat anti-climactic.

When you are the fifth kid in line, the novelty of such occasions tend to wane and family attendance starts to thin out. When JayWon and Perfecto graduated we had a huge gathering of friends and family. This year though it was just B2, Adie, and myself. Two of our kids were away at college (JayWon and Perfecto), while JayToo was working on the Cape. She’s a serious and responsible kid, and didn’t feel comfortable asking for a day off on the first week of her job.

The night was one of those perfect northern New England evenings in June, reminiscent of the one idealized in the musical “Carousel”. The air was crisp, there were no mosquitoes, and the tall blue green pines that circumvented the football stadium beautifully framed the speaker podium and the graduates.

Perfect weather in New Hampshire is as rare as it is unpredictable. When it dovetails with a special occasion, it makes a lasting impression.

The student speakers complimented the physical grandeur of the occasion. Their addresses reflected poise, maturity, intelligence, and wit. One of the girls who sung the “Star Spangled Banner” was the cute co-ed Tenacious “dared” as a freshman.

It reminded me of a pre-9/11 moment that is still etched into my mind. It was in central New Hampshire in late August 2001, and I was attending a softball tournament at St. Anselm’s College, where JayWon was competing.

The reason the night was memorable owed itself to a strikingly beautiful rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” sung by JayWon’s teammate and pitcher. The girl, slight in frame, sung it solo without any instrumental accompaniment, and without the strained pop-vocal theatrics that we hear nowadays at professional venues. She sang it with perfect pitch, purity, and reverence. When she finished people were visibly moved and stunned. Parents of the opposing team shook their head and laughed, “I hope she doesn’t pitch as well as she sings.” (She pitched very well, but lost in the tournament on a heartbreaking error in the outfield. She and JayWon would continue to play together and win the high school state championship two years later.)

I knew I was in experiencing one of those idyllic moments where everything in America was perfect. I also knew that it was transient, although I could not imagine how soon things would change.

A few months ago I surfed over to GutRumbles who represents the “old-guard” of personal bloggers. I was saddened to discover that Rob Smith had passed away, just hours after writing his last post. Friends and family are keeping the site alive, and recycling the best of the Acidman's rants.

I bring it up because about three years ago he wrote something about race relations, specifically that he objected to cross-racial adoption. Basically Rob was saying that mindless white parents were adopting black kids without thinking through the implications and hardships that would be imposed on the child. I posted a reply on his site, explaining that while there are serious issues when one adopts a black child into a white family, the problems are certainly manageable. With the myriad of serious issues that come up with kids, race differences are simply another parental challenge. It isn't insurmountable if you know how to make it to work. To drive home the point, I linked an essay in Adoption.com which was written by JayWon during her senior year of high school.

Rob got back to me personally that day and complimented my daughter. I passed this on to JayWon. I didn’t go into the specifics about Rob or his blog and I wasn't sure how she would have reacted to getting praise from someone who repeatedly characterized his ex-wife as a “bloodless c*nt”. Actually, in retrospect,I think I do know. She would have found such stuff crude, but she would have quickly looked past it, and recognized his writing skills and been amused by his direct and candid opinions, regardless of whether they aligned with her views.

Getting back to the issue of race, it will continue to loom large in our family dynamics since it looks very probable that the interracial ties will soon be extended. JayWon told me recently that she and K-Man are starting to talk seriously about marriage.

K-Man wasn’t originally listed in my post of “Players”, so I need to introduce him here.

He is an immigrant, six years out of the country of Togo which resides in what was once known as French West Africa. Togo is on the cusp of the cultural line that cuts across Africa and divides the Islamic north from the tribal and Christian south. Needless to say this line is not just a cultural boundary, areas it often represents a front of some civil war. Darfur comes to mind, as does Sierra Leone.

K-Man is the same age as JayWon and they started dating in their last year of high school, but instead of going on to college, he is working very long hours cleaning out cars at a rental agency. There wasn’t really a choice in this decision. His family is relatively poor and he spent his years in high school simply learning rudimentary skills and English. For a while he didn’t have money to fix his car so he had to resort to walking an hour each way to get to his work. He supports his stepmother, his adolescent sister, and his younger brother and pays the majority of the rent. His father abandoned the family about three or four years ago. K-Man doesn’t have much spare time, but he is working through the classes he needs to take to get American citizenship. All this responsibility at the age of twenty-one.

During the winter, B2 got tickets to a live stage performance of “Grease”. Tenacious was to bring one of his friends, but he bailed at the last minute. I invited K-Man thinking that this would be a chance for him to have a evening out doing something different that having a beer and catching a late-night NBA game on television. Whenever he is around me K-Man is soft-spoken and reserved, but he was even more so in the company of B2 and Tenacious. We went to dinner and then went on to the play.

I had to wonder what K-Man must have been thinking sitting in the balcony listening to some blonde cutie on stage crooning, “I’m Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity.” It wasn’t clear from his muted reaction whether he was bored or confused by all the pop-cultural references of 1950’s America. Frankly, Tenacious was looking equally disengaged. When the play ended we dropped K-Man off at his home, and he thanked us politely for the evening’s entertainment. B2 and I figured the evening was a bust for the two boys.

Later that week I talked to JayWon about taking K-Man to the play and how I didn’t think he had a good time. She laughed. Apparently one of K-Man’s buddies at work had given her a call to complain about his new passion.

“JayWon. Why did you give K-Man that god-awful CD?”

“What CD?”

“That musical. We’ve been listening to him play that “Grease” shit non-stop for the past twelve hours.”

Apparently one of the perks in cleaning out cars is that you get to use the built-in stereo and CD player to listen to your own music. K-Man had immediately gone out after the play, purchased the sound-track, and was inflicting Sandra Dee on his buddies. JayWon clarified that the CD originated with K-Man and that she never bought it. K-Man’s buddy relayed the information, and JayWon heard muffled protests of K-Man getting tossed into a dumpster.

JayWon also informed me that K-Man does a killer Michael Jackson imitation. Obviously there is a lot more to learn about him.

Rick Moran does a great job taking Bloomberg to the woodshed for his opportunistic leap from the GOP to independent status. He makes a good case against the aristocracy class which is constantly dabbling in political theater and making their own rules.

My take on Bloomberg and his presumed independent run for the Presidency is that it is a familiar and tired exercise in vanity. NYC is still ground zero for the next terrorist attack, and Bloomberg has spent his political capital fighting the evils of trans fats. It reminds me of Howard Dean and his war with bicycle paths.

I have high respect for Betsy Newmark and Dean Esmay , both of whom give a big thumbs up for the Clinton “Soprano” video posted a couple of days ago. I took their comments at face value, that they constituted detached political analysis rather than any ringing endorsement of Hillary. (Although, interestingly, Dean conceded that it was close to even-money that he’d vote for her in a general election.)

After seeing the video, I had a completely opposite reaction. When I saw it I wanted to scream, “Are you freaking kidding me? Do you think we are idiots?”

Are we really supposed to swallow (pun intended) the nonsense about a warm and caring Hillary looking out for the well being of her shamelessly philandering husband? “Monica-Gate” paralyzed the federal government in protracted impeachment proceedings. The country was immersed into debates about semen stains on dresses and creative ways of enhancing Cuban cigars. Kids in schoolyards were getting a crash course on the merits of oral sex by the antics of the Command in Chief. Half the population was taking an extra bath every night after listening to the network news. This went on for almost two solid years.

All politicians take huge liberties in sanitizing their personal lives. But they do so hoping that their shenanigans won’t ever see the light of day. This entire revisionist “loving husband and wife crap” is WAY after horse has left the barn. The verdict on the Clinton's marriage was in years ago.

To me the video underscored my big problem with the Clintons, one that goes back to1992 when they did the famous “60 Minutes” interview that salvaged their tanking campaign in New Hampshire. My objection, then and now, had nothing to do with policy or extra-marital sex, but it has everything to do with respect for the people they are asking for votes.

They think we are dumber than a fence-post and have an attention span and memory of a three year old.

Yes our country is in peril, and if the Republicans don’t get their act together in a hurry, perhaps I’ll hold my nose and join Dean in voting for Hillary. Perhaps we need a cold-hearted witch who can dispatch her flying monkeys to get things done in this country. And it would be nice to elect someone who can convince Hollywood to look the other way if she decides to nuke Tehran on a hot summer night.

But I’ll never like these people or their approach to politics. They have nothing but contempt for the people they want to represent.

Aside from the logistics of moving, my biggest concern is what will be my future relationship with B2’s kids. When a divorce happens, your parents are still your parents, but what will I be? I can imagine one of them trying to explain me to some future spouse to justify making the time for a visit.

“I’m confused. Now who was this guy and when did he live with you and tell me why is he more important for us to visit than my Grannie Fricket?”

I think the only way to handle this is to be direct and honest. I’ll tell them that I fully expect them to keep in touch by telephone, to respond to my e-mails, and to show up at least once during the holidays for my smoked turkey. I’ll tell them that when I die I fully expect all five kids to show up for my funeral. I expect the girls to be bitterly wailing and gnashing their teeth. I expect the boys to propose a toast drinking cheap beer in my name. I’ll tell them that whatever happens, I’ll have a spare bed for them to crash as long as they want.

That should suffice. B2’s kids are far too polite to blow me off.

When I first moved in with this family, I did some reading about how to deal with step-kids who were adolescent in age. The key piece of advice that I picked up was that with teenagers, you have to let them define the relationship and go from there. I took this to heart and it worked very well.

Predictably, the father figure role loomed largest for the youngest, Tenacious. He and I have been living under the same roof for eight years. I remember the time when he was a squirt and I could toss him over my shoulder and toss him in bed. He is the only kid of B2’s I ever had to discipline, not that that happened very often. B2 actually suggested that after his first year in college he could live with me in my new digs in New Hampshire. That way he could hang out with his high-school buddies. I’m delighted that B2 suggested it. Our relationship is close but not verbal. Grunts and monosyllabic exchanges seem to suffice.

“Hey there, I’m home. How’s your day?”

“Ok.”

“How was school?”

“The same.”

“Have you done your homework?”

“Yes.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Yes.”

“Anything I can get for you.”

“Nope.”

This sums up about ninety percent of our daily conversation. We are guys who intuitively relate to each other. If we live together next summer, we only have to worry about delousing the place in the fall.

JayToo’s relationship with me is much harder to characterize. She loves her father but as a young adult has started to see the flaws in his character that probably undermined her parent’s marriage. She went through a lot of the anger that Adie did when I got divorced, but she had much more time to heal, and she is more resilient. Like Adie she is very private, and her feelings are on a “need-to-know” basis. She is great at sizing things up and spends a lot of time observing people.

One time, inadvertently while picking up stuff on the floor, I found some writings of JayToo’s that were personal observations. It revealed all sorts of existential questions, the kind of stuff that weighs heavily on smart kids minds after suffering through the writings of Jean Paul Sartre imposed by some high school literature class. I wanted to give her a big hug and tell her to ignore that crap, but I had already overstepped her privacy boundary so kept it to myself. I was pissed because I went through the same stuff when I was her age and I didn’t want some overrated and dead French author busting her bubble. She has her whole life in front of her. Let her do it herself.

Perfecto and I relate at a different level. Ours is not a father and son relationship. It is more of a relationship of a mentor. When he and I are together we typically launch into serious discussions either about current events, or something related to his academics. Perfecto is a natural teacher. He loves to explain theoretical physics, specifically string theory. I usually get lost about five minutes into the conversation, crack stupid jokes and feed him home made sushi. Perfecto isn’t big on touchy and feely conversations and happily floats through life on an intellectual plane. I do owe him a private correspondence of a “man to man” flavor to explain to him the circumstances that prompted B2 to move her family up north to live with me. It will be about my daughters.

I hope he will appreciate my reasons, and understand that this is the kind of responsibilities that you sign up for when you get married and have kids, regardless of how things go with your spouse.

La Shawn Barber and various others are posting about the latest ham-fisted proposal from our newly elected Democratic Congress. It seems that legislation is being proposed to re-instate the “fairness doctrine” to radio, to force broadcasters to compensate the popularity of conservative talk-radio with equal time and access to liberal counterparts..

This basically means forcing owners to either drop Rush Limbaugh or use the show's revenues to subsidize the Al Frankens of the world who generate no audience, and hence generate no advertising revenue.

The whole idea is absurdly stupid on so many levels. Aside from it being demonstrably unprincipled, the intent of such legislation would never achieve its goal, which has nothing to do with fairness, but everything to do with changing the rules of the game because you are losing. Technology is constantly creating new and diverse means of communication: blogs, satellite radio, podcasts, YouTube. If there is a message that wants to be heard, it will find a channel that doesn't fall under some regulatory bucket.

And it’s not as if there aren’t already well established and entrenched venues for liberal spin.

From Iowahawk:

Let's face it, Bush had hate radio and "fair and balanced" Fox pushing him during the entire campaign. To counteract the incessant bias of "Faux News," Democrats need to have their own media voice. I've got an idea -- why not line up three or four television network news organizations, a couple of weekly news magazines and a dozen or so major newspapers to run non-stop anti-GOP stories? I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work.

Just from a tactical point of view , this legislation is an obvious non-starter. Talk-radio has a very good record of quickly mobilizing the ire of citizens to shoot down bad legislation. One can only imagine how listener's will respond when they hear that the show they are tuning in and listening to everyday is about to be targeted for censorship. Defeating this will be like shooting ducks in a barrel.

I can't exactly say that I'm in a deep state of grief over the breakup of our home and family. The kids are all grown up and happy. My relationship with all of them is as strong now as it ever has been. Thankfully we never tied the knot, so we don't have to go through any divorce process. I fully expect that B2 and I will continue to be friends for the rest of our lives. We are both looking forward to living alone and having some serious down time.

Let's just call this "Grief Lite". Great haste, less trauma.

We are selling our house (the only shared asset) and are going through hell trying to reach a purchase and sale agreement on an offer made three weeks ago. Everything is in a state of limbo: the house, life after the house, not to speak the relationship between B2 and myself. The one thing that we do see eye to eye on is that we want to sell the house as soon as possible. That can create some serious head games. The pleasantness of the moment momentarily creates the illusion that everything is all right in the world that segues me into a state of denial harking back to a time where B2 and I enjoyed each others company. Then I wake up and come to grips with the context of the conversation and realize that this is the end game. It puts be in a gloomy mood until I spend time thinking about a no-maintenance condo. Then I feel like Kevin in "Home Alone" the day after the family leaves for France.

The potential buyers could be cast-offs from an Ed Wood movie. After reducing the price of the house by twenty percent to entice them to make an offer, they came back with a laundry list of improvements they wanted us to make on the house. We are not talking about fixing things that are broken. Nope. They wanted us to make modifications to the house (e.g. add a backyard stairway from our deck porch). They had a list of over twenty home improvements they wanted us to make.

They were foisting this as a precondition BEFORE making an initial offer. Can you say "BUYER'S MARKET"?

We told them to pound sand, and they quickly came back with an offer slightly less than the list price agreeing to the "as is" condition of the house. That's when the fun started. The inspection process has been tortuous and protracted, and the buyers have exploited the process to resurrect a partial list of goodies that they wanted us to pay for.

New water heater - check
New water softener - check
Spray for ants - check
New garage opener - check
Hydro-seed the lawn - check
New clapboards - check
Five years of indentured servitude for our youngest child -- check

Ok. I made up the last bullet, but you get the drift. The list goes on and on.

B2 who is a lawyer noticed that in the original offer faxed to us, they penciled in two items that were never negotiated: three stools that we have for our kitchen counter, and our dog's electric fence collar. A few nights ago, I had a few stiff drinks and was seriously tempted to take the stools down to my woodshop and lop off a quarter of an inch of wood from one leg of each stool.. Not sure what I would do to the dog's collar, but let's just say PETA would hardly approve.

I remember when I first discovered blogs. It was a few months after 9/11. Fed up with going to MSM sites like the BBC and reading how America deserved the attack because of Kyoto and world poverty, I googled the phrase "to hell with root causes" to find a kindred spirit.

Google responded with a link to Rachel Lucas. After spending a few minutes there I was hooked and became a daily reader. Rachel is sassy and fun, and she is without a peer when it comes to taking on Hollywood liberal "asshats" (a term that she did not invent, but made popular). The combination of humor, writing talent, female sensibilities, and Texas values makes her a fun read (unless you are the unlucky actor on the receiving end of her wrath). The only warning is that she is an unabashed potty mouth.

Today's rant is about Cameron Diaz.

One week and I have my first reference, courtesy of Free Thoughts. It is one of my

A while ago I discovered that Google now has a search engine for patents. On a whim I searched on "sex" and came up with this.

The following is an abstract of the invention:

Abstract

A method of sharing erotic experiences includes providing a building with a number of compartments, entertainment viewable from inside the compartments and surround sound music audible throughout the building, participants entering the building and go to the compartments, starting the entertainment at a proscribed time, and turning on the power from a central control booth at a proscribed time to a stimulation device for sexual pleasure found in each of the compartments. The facilities are such that sounds from the participants are transferred between the compartments, such that couples or individuals in one compartment can hear others in the building also experiencing intense sexual pleasure. The individual compartments may further contain a whirlpool tub with jets starting at a proscribed time. Importantly, security is provided to maintain order in the building, and regular cleaning and sanitizing of the compartments and stimulation device is provided.

The diagrams are embedded in PDF documents and can't be displayed here. But the facility looks like a geodesic dome populated with little gas chambers. Only here the chambers service the Pee Wee Hermans of the world who pay to walk in, get artificially stimulated, and listen to others in various stages of ecstasy.

I have a few patents, and one of the things you have to do is differentiate your proposed patent from "prior art" (i.e. stuff that has already been invented.) The citations for this include:

THEATER WITH SEPARATE VIEWING BOOTHS Jun 1972

4843788 Modular seclusion room Jul 4, 1989

5024398 Office module for passenger aircraft Jun 18, 1991

5163447 Force-sensitive, sound-playing condom Nov 17, 1992

5651219 Dynamic workspace module Jul 29, 1997

5928170 Audio-enhanced sexual vibrator Jul 27, 1999

6199552 Bed with suspended platform Mar 13, 2001

6368268 Device for interactive virtual control of sexual aids using digital computer networks Apr 9, 2002

Notice the timeline and how things evolve from the mundane to the degenerate.

"Progress is our most important product."

My workplace is supposed to be apolitical but it isn’t.

It is a high-tech stomping ground for presidential candidates traipsing through New Hampshire. The gleaming glass and brick building, and the marquee name of the company provide a great photo-op which allows candidates to babble about “cutting edge” technologies of the twenty-first century. It makes an interesting contrast to the other standard New Hampshire venues: the small town with the Congregationalist church in the middle of an early 19th century common, or the a crowded breakfast diner where people are more interested in finishing their pancakes than investing time in some presidential wannabe.

On 9/11, I arrived at my office about a half-hour after the first tower had been struck. I noticed a crowd gathering in an auditorium at the facility. It was full of people watching the events of lower Manhattan unfold on a large wide-screen television. People were sitting in chairs, stunned, watching the atrocity unfold in hushed tones, except for one lunatic who was thinking out-loud about the next shoe to drop.

I walked out after seeing the first tower fall. I was physically ill and was seething with rage. Most of the people in the auditorium were Americans. Non-Americans, if they stopped by at all, quickly disappeared to their cubicles or to quiet groups congregating around the various coffee stations. I think they didn’t know how to react to this situation. They were clearly not emotionally invested in the events of the day and seemed to want to distance themselves from their American co-workers. I also sense that they felt they were intruding on a family crisis, and weren’t quite sure how we were going to react.

At least sixty or seventy percent of my co-workers are Asian, about evenly split between Chinese and Indians. In general I find that the Chinese are much more reticent to talk about politics. I remember one time I was having a loud discussion with a friend of mine who is of Italian American descent. In other words smart, verbal, and very opinionated. A young Chinese colleague stopped by to ask some technical question and we tried to engage him on some political hot-button topic of the day regarding international relations with China. The poor guy almost went catatonic with fright and sounded like an oriental version of Sergeant “I know nothing!” Shultz. He went bug-eyed and started rapidly spouting platitudes of how all he wanted was peace and how he had no opinion on such matters. This seems to be a common reaction. A legacy of the stories they heard from their parents about the days of the "Cultural Revolution".

Indians are much more diverse and outspoken. They happily engage in political discourse and seem to thrive on it. Their comfort level is grounded on obvious reasons: the commonality of the English language and the shared experience of achieving independence from the British Commonwealth. There is a deep respect that exists between our two cultures that is one of the few positive developments of this first decade of the new millennium.

While there are obvious political tension points that fall along cultural lines, it is the generational differences between Americans that are more aggravating. The fact that this is an engineering environment doesn’t help the situation.

One would think that engineers, being hyper-rational by nature, would engage in constructive conversation. The opposite is true. Engineers are inherently detail oriented, cautious, and afraid of jumping the gun on a decision. These are wonderful traits when you are tasked with building the next jumbo-jet airplane or some new medical device that performs laser surgery on your retina. It is a lousy trait to bring to the table when debating the future of Western civilization. Virtually very conversation about foreign policy with an engineer becomes mired in warnings about all the things that could go wrong. Indecision rules the day.

Being very bright people you might also wonder how come a knowledge of history wouldn't mitigate these occupational instincts. That they would see that it is unrealistic to approach geo-politics with the same expectations of certainty as you would when designing a system of software. But that’s precisely the rub. These very well educated people barely know any history at all. I get the feeling that Generation X’ers I work with get most of their facts from “The John Stewart Show”. They pepper their political opinions with ad-hominids or specious wisecracks laced with cheap irony.

Even living through "interesting" history hasn't made an impact. The lessons of 9/11 only lasted a few months, and then it was business as usual.

Seldom do I see a technological advance that is virtually jaw-dropping. This one fits the bill. It shows a new technology being nursed by Microsoft that spatially relates photographs of the same subject to provide an amazing interactive visual experience.

God knows what the porn industry will do with this.

My language rating, based on a search engine that counts dirty words.

Guess I'm going to have to temper my language around here and start talking like Ma and Pa Kettle. The engine reports that my blog mentioned "breast" one time. Whoops, now I guess now it's twice. Well like the old Woody Allen punchline, "I hear they travel in pairs."

I went over to the site that generates this critical service and entered the URL for the Democratic Underground. I expected the lights to go dim in my office.

Instead I got this:

Well bless my suds, the kiddies have cleaned up their act.

Right.

Courtesy of Ace, the reigning king of right wing potty mouths.

The "buyers from hell" are in the fourth week of doing inspections on our home. Up until now, B2 has driven the whole process of selling the home, but she is ready to have a meltdown, and turned things over to me. That speaks volumes about where she is emotionally, since she has a business degree, law degree, and professional experience dealing in real estate.

In the emails sent between the buyers and the sellers I gleaned a dot com address that suspiciously looked like some family home page. Sure enough it was. Up until then I had vilified these people that were making our life a living hell, but I discovered that the husband is a former military officer and is currently an engineer. Maybe I am being naive, but I always want to give anyone in the service the benefit of the doubt.

The situation is starting to make more sense. The excruciating inspection process is driven by his engineering instincts, and his military background probably makes this real estate deal a test of machismo. Perhaps this guy even served in "Psych Ops". From the dealings with the brokers it wouldn't surprise me.

He does have a weak point thought. The real estate broker of the buyer, who is near a state of exhaustion, conceded the wife has already "mentally moved".

That's leverage. Duty, honor and country are important, but pleasing the wife has to rank very high on his agenda. Maybe I'm deluding myself, but I see an end game to this nonsense.