They came in from the cold and headed straight for the bar. Considering they had a toddler in tow, I figured that they were either ordering food to go or I'd mistaken the child for a dwarf. Again.
The woman was large, John Goodman in the first season of Roseanne large. Big and padded but not huge. The husband was thin, receding, and bespectacled. The child was a child, cute as a button and utterly helpless, at first dazzled by all the lights and people but growing more twitchy by the second, which was reasonable considering that Michigan has an attitude on public tobacco use straight from the mid-50's. Look, when the Irish have to step outside for a cig, it's time to face facts. Anyway, junior's fussing finally reaches the peak of Mt. Mom, who takes the toddler in hand and shoves a crumple of bills to the hubby. The sight of cash brightens the child's face back up for a second and then they are out the door, leaving the hunter to gather the grub.
The bartender spots the husband and takes his food order, which he recited from memory meaning this is something of a regular thing. After he finishes ordering, the bartender asks him if he'd like a drink while they prep the food.
He hesitates in a way that screams, "Of course I'd like a drink. Line them up on the fucking bar like fucking Myrna Loy at the fucking start of fucking Thin Man. I'm a grown man married to the blond Gargantua and there's nothing I can do about it save gnaw my leg off like any other wild animal caught in a fucking trap. I could drink a fucking great lake of booze and she'd still be the blond fucking Gargantua. For fuck's sake, I'll have what Socrates is drinking."
Instead, what he says is, "No...No, I'd better not."
Meanwhile, CNN is on the Iraq Study Group report like a vulture on road kill. Bush has screwed the pooch so severely that he should be brought up on bestiality charges and they've taken to confiscating Cheney's belt and shoelaces every time he enters the undisclosed location just in case he decides to make a hasty exit from the shit smoothie he's blended himself.
Of course Bush fucked up epically, did anyone have a doubt it would go this way? It isn't like they asked about this sort of thing in the half assed job interview that passed for the election of 2000.
Can you imagine if the question had come up in the debates? "What would you do if terrorists struck a major landmark in an American city that resulted in thousands of deaths?" Gore would have put us all in a coma (Yes, he would have. You're thinking of the An Inconvenient Truth Gore. He was nowhere to be seen in the Fall of 2000.) while Bush would have looked helplessly offstage and wet himself, which is essentially what happened anyway.
Crap, if we had one sniff of this nightmare coming down the tracks, McCain would have walked through the South Carolina primary like Sherman marched through fucking Atlanta and now he'd be the one explaining why things are so fucked up right now. But history is generally written backwards and lived forwards, so what did we know? Our biggest worry at the time was how we were going to spend all the money in the surplus and what color jumpsuit we were going to wear when we moved up to the moonbase.
The woman was large, John Goodman in the first season of Roseanne large. Big and padded but not huge. The husband was thin, receding, and bespectacled. The child was a child, cute as a button and utterly helpless, at first dazzled by all the lights and people but growing more twitchy by the second, which was reasonable considering that Michigan has an attitude on public tobacco use straight from the mid-50's. Look, when the Irish have to step outside for a cig, it's time to face facts. Anyway, junior's fussing finally reaches the peak of Mt. Mom, who takes the toddler in hand and shoves a crumple of bills to the hubby. The sight of cash brightens the child's face back up for a second and then they are out the door, leaving the hunter to gather the grub.
The bartender spots the husband and takes his food order, which he recited from memory meaning this is something of a regular thing. After he finishes ordering, the bartender asks him if he'd like a drink while they prep the food.
He hesitates in a way that screams, "Of course I'd like a drink. Line them up on the fucking bar like fucking Myrna Loy at the fucking start of fucking Thin Man. I'm a grown man married to the blond Gargantua and there's nothing I can do about it save gnaw my leg off like any other wild animal caught in a fucking trap. I could drink a fucking great lake of booze and she'd still be the blond fucking Gargantua. For fuck's sake, I'll have what Socrates is drinking."
Instead, what he says is, "No...No, I'd better not."
Meanwhile, CNN is on the Iraq Study Group report like a vulture on road kill. Bush has screwed the pooch so severely that he should be brought up on bestiality charges and they've taken to confiscating Cheney's belt and shoelaces every time he enters the undisclosed location just in case he decides to make a hasty exit from the shit smoothie he's blended himself.
Of course Bush fucked up epically, did anyone have a doubt it would go this way? It isn't like they asked about this sort of thing in the half assed job interview that passed for the election of 2000.
Can you imagine if the question had come up in the debates? "What would you do if terrorists struck a major landmark in an American city that resulted in thousands of deaths?" Gore would have put us all in a coma (Yes, he would have. You're thinking of the An Inconvenient Truth Gore. He was nowhere to be seen in the Fall of 2000.) while Bush would have looked helplessly offstage and wet himself, which is essentially what happened anyway.
Crap, if we had one sniff of this nightmare coming down the tracks, McCain would have walked through the South Carolina primary like Sherman marched through fucking Atlanta and now he'd be the one explaining why things are so fucked up right now. But history is generally written backwards and lived forwards, so what did we know? Our biggest worry at the time was how we were going to spend all the money in the surplus and what color jumpsuit we were going to wear when we moved up to the moonbase.
