I don't get it... (Warning: Adult language)

So, I thought we'd get a break after trans-person Caitlyn Jenner came out and things cooled down. Well, that didn't happen. Evidently now the issue is where people can use the bathroom.

I'm going to start out with I don't care. If there are stalls and not urinals in the bathroom knock yourselves out. I don't care. Shut the door and piss or crap away. Not my problem. I'm going to do the same and don't care who's next door to me expelling waste. There are those who can't seem to stop the ideas of sex from springing to mind whenever discussions of waste spewing out of their bodies is brought up though and they're full of "OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" right now that if a trans-person is in the stall next to their Little Billy or Little Mary then some harm will come to the kids and for that reason alone the trans need to go use... I guess their own, third bathroom.

Issues of why waste removal and sex with kids leap to mind whenever the topic of voiding ones bladder or butt aside, the issue is clear to me as one of comfort. The people against it aren't comfortable with trans-people. That's fine. I don't care.

Truth time: I'm not comfortable either. I get pronoun-confused. I want to ask inappropriate questions. I just plain don't GET it.

Doesn't matter. There are a lot of things I don't get.

I don't get Uggs. I don't get dreadlocks. I don't get how anyone can watch Big Brother, or professional wrestling, or Dance Moms. I don't get liking tofu. I don't get the why anyone would choose dark meat over white meat when there are wings and breasts RIGHT there why would you pick up a thigh? Gross!

There are a lot of things I don't get. That's MY problem. It's not their problem. If nobody else is actually hurt by something then it's not my problem and my opinion isn't one that matters. I don't have to get it. I don't have to like it. I don't have to understand it. I don't have to approve of it. In the case of trans-people. I don't get it. But, to me, it doesn't matter. Their sense of self, their identity, the things they do to their body are no more my business than if they get a tattoo. It's their body. It's their life. It's THEIR business. It doesn't affect or impact me in the slightest unless they're a friend and I have to pay attention to pronouns and I fuck it up.

They want to live their lives. I want to live my life. There's probably something about my life they don't get. I don't want people who just don't understand me, to be able to tell me I can't do a thing because it's not their thing. That's not how this works. That's not how ANY of this works.

I'm not a SJW (Social Justice Warrior). I'm a guy who thinks we should pull our noses out of other people's asses and let them live their lives.

Quit clutching your pearls and screaming to "think of the children" because honestly... I'm taking a crap here, and thinking of kids while doing that appears to be the purview of those who are bitching so much about it all and I just don't get that either.

September 11, 2001 — Ten years later

It was 2008 that I wrote a post entitled Mourning Has To End At Some Point regarding the attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001. I think it still stands up 3 years later.
That title brings the imagery of a funeral to the date that has come to be one thing only, the day we were attacked.
My Facebook stream is filled with posts that end with, “We Will Never Forget.” A week a year we remember it publicly, putting ashes in our hair and memorializing the things that happened today 10 years ago. This post isn’t about today. There is an awful lot of stuff out there about today. We all mourn, memorialize, and remember in our own way. I get that and I don’t make any judgement on any of that. The attacks we as a country suffered were something that everybody experienced in their own way.
But.
The weeks after the attacks the country was shocked, stunned, and came together in a catharsis of grief, shock, and anger expressed as a brief period of ultra-patriotism, pride, and outrage.
After the funereal meats were put away, the dishes cleared, and the flowers wilted we, as a country, not specifically you and me, but all of us, began to do what so often happens after a funeral. The death here was the death of a period of growth, optimism, wide-eyed innocence about our own invulnerability… after the immediacy of the funeral was over we split up… we fractured like a family after a funeral of a wealthy patriarch who had no will.
People on the left and right of the political spectrum took the eagle as their totem and began to beat everybody else with how they were the real Americans, the real inheritors of the standard erected by those three emergency responders on ground zero in what is now an iconic image of that day. I choose that image as the image for the post, not the image of the towers burning as DrudgeReport.com did. The optimism of those men raising our flag, all of our flag, on that day, in the clouds of dust and smoke… that image is one of hope, of fighting on, of us saying “NO!” to everything the terrorists were trying to say. That’s the image I hold in my mind 10 years later.
Sadly, the eagles, the American Eagle that each side claims as their own has turned into a vulture picking on the bones of who we were before.  They no longer think of us collectively, but in an US vs THEM way that is akin to one side of a family insisting on the dining room set because Uncle Sam promised it to them, or so they say while the other side insists they’d been told the same thing. The family that is our country is tearing itself apart in a way the terrorists couldn’t by tearing down buildings and killing people. The family that is our country is allowing those who represent us, to scrabble for the scraps of the legacy of the world before we were attacked at the expense of the other side of the aisle. There can be no victory, we are told, unless the other side loses. There can be no progress in any direction if the direction isn’t to the left or to the right, depending on who is doing the talking.
Enough of the sides. If we don’t exist as a family, together, even when we disagree with each other, we don’t exist, period. Benjamin Franklin said it years ago when he said, “We must hang together, gentlemen…else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.” We’re facing that choice today as a country. As we tear apart our country ourselves, 10 years after the terrorists tried to do it TO us we have to make up our minds to exist as a country, and sometimes we will have to not win at the expense of everyone else on the playing field. There are times, in a family when we have to let someone else have the dining room set because the family is worth more than the dining room self is to us.
So, today, 10 years later, I’d like to remind people not that the buildings fell, but that the other iconic image of that was of our flag being raised… of 3 men saying the buildings fell but we’re still here, one nation, one country, one huge group of people with disparate ideas but one flag and one hope, that tomorrow is better than today, and we’re willing to do what we can to make it that way… even if it means, sometimes, letting someone else having the dining room set.

Congratulations to President Elect Obama

Without saying where I stand on who I voted for this election I have to say that I think it's a really big deal that Barack Obama was just elected President of the United States. In the lifetimes so many people who read this blog we've had race riots in this country, discrimination, real bigotry, and a real belief, even five years ago, that there wouldn't be a black president in our lifetimes.

Now, his being black, or half black, maybe being half is worse if you ask some people, shouldn't be a reason for someone to vote for him. I don't know. I was raised by a couple who wouldn't, and didn't, and don't, raise racist kids. We weren't brought up that way and while I'd be stupid to say I am color blind, I'm not, I don't think I was brought up to make decisions about people based on race. But I am glad, as an American, that my country has, in my lifetime, elected a non-white guy president.

I hope the next four years are good ones. I hope we're not tested really soon and get to enjoy the idea of an America that has really begun to heal in earnest from a disease we trully began recovering from during the civil rights movement.

Good night all. I'm closing with a quote we'll probably hear a lot over the next few days.

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

 Martin Luther King

As an aside... in the days since I accidentally posted this on the wrong blog (danger of having two I guess) I've been surprised at the number of watermelon and other off color jokes I've gotten about the new president. I don't know which is worse, that people see this historic election as a good time to fuel the fires of racism, or that they think I'm the type of person that thinks it's funny. I'll be the first to admit I'm not a fan of a lot of stuff Obama wants to do. I've no clue how he plans on paying for healthcare, but I haven't fully supported everything a president did in all the time I've been voting.

What I liked about the Obama campaign, and what I continue to like about it is that its message of hope contrasted quite nicely with the fear, danger, doom, paranoia life we've been subjected to. That sort of low grade chronic stress was in no way improving my life, health, or happiness. It may be that we go singing and dancing to the death of Rome but by gum we haven't tried that yet and this whole war on terrah thing with us spying on ourselves, ignoring constitutional freedoms of our own citizens, and screeching about how doomed we all are that 'they' are out to get us... that didn't work and arguably made my life, health, and happiness worse. Torture people. We are America and we don't do that. Seriously. We have to draw the line somewhere or we're not worth defending.

So, post-election I'm more excited about an Obama win than I was pre-election. Change is scary. He'll make bad decisions, and he'll make mistakes, and he'll do things I don't agree with. So did Bush. So did Clinton. If we held out for perfect I'd have to be president and quite frankly... I wouldn't take the job.

Congratulations to President Elect Obama

Without saying where I stand on who I voted for this election I have to say that I think it's a really big deal that Barack Obama was just elected President of the United States. In the lifetimes so many people who read this blog we've had race riots in this country, discrimination, real bigotry, and a real belief, even five years ago, that there wouldn't be a black president in our lifetimes.

Now, his being black, or half black, maybe being half is worse if you ask some people, shouldn't be a reason for someone to vote for him? I don't know. I was raised by a couple who wouldn't, and didn't, and don't, raise racist kids. We weren't brought up that way and while I'd be stupid to say I am color blind, I'm not, I don't think I was brought up to make decisions about people based on race. But I am glad, as an American, that my country has, in my lifetime, elected a non-white guy president.

I hope the next four years are good ones. I hope we're not tested really soon and get to enjoy the idea of an America that has really begun to heal in earnest from a disease we trully began recovering from during the civil rights movement.

Good night all. I'm closing with a quote we'll probably hear a lot over the next few days.

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

 Martin Luther King