don’t bother reading this.

Hello, is it me you’re looking for?

Friday night, I had just parked illegally in front of the Luce, and who should we run into at the door but Yuri, who was in the middle of a giant freakout over just having bought a very expensive painting, and was going to get a slice and a beer to calm his nerves. So he joined us for dinner, and we assured him he had done the right thing, despite not being able to afford it. He runs a gallery, he doesn’t make stupid decisions, and he knows good art.

Dinner was entertaining, to say the least. Luce was crazy with the folks at the bar yelling over the baseball game. Yuri was shouting, ‘I’m a Canadian cracker!’ Josh was, well… not Josh! Something changed! And operation:jl was declared a resounding, unexpected success, only about a year too late. But, hey! We got free dessert out of the deal.

Saturday morning, I drove over to Homie’s and we washed the hell out of Chico. We pressure-washed and deodorized and scrubbed the rims and stopped just short of waxing the engine (we did pressure-wash the engine, but not the alternator! I pay attention in autoshop). The lil rig is now a wonder to behold, the sun all glinting off the giant dent in the backend. Don’t worry, that’ll be fixed soon enough, as soon as that construction company pays me for my silence for the repairs.

We went to brunch and I realized it’s probably the last time this year I’ll be sitting out front of French Meadow. It’s fall. The trees have all changed. It’s fucking freezing in the morning. Sigh.

At the Y, I was having some issues. See, I haven’t watched TV in a long, long time. I don’t read the news. The two magazines I read are Fitness and ReadyMade, both safely devoid of current events. I’ve battled with guilt over my social responsibility to be informed, as a college-educated and fairly aware individual. However, I’ve chosen my mental health, and I don’t think I’m wrong about that. Last time I paid attention to the news, we had an evil, exploitative, self-serving asshole as president, we were in a war against people using weapons we supplied them, we were losing our jobs to workers whom our companies felt justified paying tiny portions of our incomes to, and we were becoming buried in a national debt so large that mathematicians were having to invent new terms to describe it. Since nothing has changed, I haven’t felt the need to check in.

At the Y, it’s hard to avoid the TVs, so I tend to stare blankly at them (as I was trained so early on in my youth). I wasn’t down with football or golf or even the national poker tour, so I watched a rerun of the presidential debate on CNN. And that was a mistake. At one point I looked down and it said my heartrate was 68. That should’ve had a one in front of it, so I figured I’d probably suffered heart failure from rage.

Did you ever notice that our choices are, and always have been, pretty much the same guy? They’re both old, rich, white, and Christian; one is just a little more Cheney-blowing-cokehead. For a system based on the separation of church and state, they sure devote a lot of wordspace to morals instead of ethics. But they’re both full-on in their support of capitalism. Not democracy. And they can’t coexist.

It’s funny that we’re supposed to support the economy two ways: buying, and investing. We buy things with credit, since we don’t make as much as we used to, and because one must have more than one’s neighbors. We go further into debt. And we invest, but our investments average 10-15% return in a good year, whereas we’re paying 15-22% on our debt. So by investing, we’re actually losing money. If you have consumer debt, it’s useless to invest. And the likelihood that you have consumer debt is practically a guarantee.

The only ones who really get rich nowadays are banks and corporations. Who elects the president? Citicorp does. Exxon does. Even little old Wal-Mart. It doesn’t matter much to them which party wins, because they’re both firmly on the side of the corporation. Unfortunately, that’s the exact opposite side of the American people. In order for capitalism to function, it’s essential to maintain as large a lower class as possible. Poor people feed the machine.

Anyway, it’s sad that our electoral system is now based on voting for the opponent of the guy least qualified to be President. But yes, I’ll be voting on November 2. I consider it my duty to cancel out W’s vote for himself.

So after the Y, I went to Lake Calhoun and walked for the first time since the 3day. (The miles in SF didn’t count, because they were like tourist-walking or something.) The ankle didn’t bother me at all; the hip did, but I still managed 4.5mph. It was so good to be out in the sun moving fast again. I missed the lake a lot. And soon it’ll be way too cold to walk there.

I spent a lot of the rest of the time this weekend cleaning and finishing up the travel journal. So here it is: my trip to San Francisco, a story with too many words and not enough pictures.

Laters.
Jenni