Mission accomplished!

At last! At last! For 8 long years, we've been keeping our eyes on January 20, 2009. At fucking LAST!


There we are! See? That's us, proving that we were there, all bundled up and sniffly and rosy. Yes, C., I wore the Teletubby hat. Don't I look smashing?

I'm posting a bunch of shots from the crowd now, as I think it's what I'll remember most from this day. And trust me-- my pictures do it no justice at all. The deluge of humanity was, indeed, something to behold... even from my vantage point which was definitely on the fringes of the mix.



The two above shots are of the throngs of people walking down 18th Street towards the National Mall. From sidewalk to sidewalk, we filled the streets. It was easy to forget that all our little tributaries in the onslaught were usually typical, congested, urban corridors as we brazenly marched down the middle.



Here's some folks cheering heartily right after Justice Roberts said, "Congratulations, Mr. President!" Gah! Such communal elation. He could barely get it out of his mouth before we were screaming. You just can't even imagine it if you weren't there.

To give you some bearings, our shivering threesome staked a claim on a little plot of land about midway between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, overlooking the Reflecting Pool. We had a pretty good view of a Jumbo-tron across the pool and we could hear everything on the enormous projection speakers. We stood next to a couple from Chicago who'd been in Grant Park on Election Night of '08. Also squeezed in next to us was a heavily bearded fellow and his wife, both of whom wore loads of Obama paraphernalia, all of it written in Hebrew.




I don't know if these two shots give you any idea of the masses, because you really can't see the thick cluster clotted around the base of the Washington Monument very well, but they just kept coming and coming.

And here we have a small smattering of the crowd attempting to depart. Again, the whole street ahead was filled across its entire breadth. Hooray for community participation!

So, so amazing. Nevermind that the speech was largely platitudinous and that poem was a little (a lot) schlocky and sentimental. Being there would have been worth it no matter what.

Wish you all were here. Bet you do too!

Obamaclypse Approacheth

We residents of DC are deep into preparations to hunker down for the duration of this upcoming weekend. The city officials and oracles alike are predicting somewhere between 4 and 5 million attendants of the inaugural proceedings this upcoming Tuesday. The very earth tembles under the impending stampede. We are so'r afraid.

All of the bridges that connect DC to Virginia will close 36 hours in advance of the ceremony. Most of the Metro stations surrounding the National Mall will be blocked, sentries stationed at every post. Many residential areas will have limited or no street parking, so those of us living in less-than-choice neighborhoods (mine, por ejemplo) are expecting all the overflow DC-resident refugee vehicles to take up our precious few parking spots near our own homes. The Secret Service has demanded reinforcement.

We're all descending upon the grocery stores today and tomorrow, like we would when ice storms were predicted when I was a kid in Nashville. We're parking our cars tonight and not planning on giving up our spots until after this plague of tourism thins and wanes. We're stocking up on toilet paper, kerosene, canned goods. Flashlight batteries. Bottled Water. Mitten warmers. Obama paraphernalia. As our city reinforces its seams against the bursting hordes of locust-like visitors, we residents feel we must maintain our vigilance-- finding that middle ground between welcoming all festive comers and protecting our little city of khaki-panted lobbyists and hoary-headed politicians. We tremble with anticipation. And we are not just a little bit trepidatious.

Some of my friends have committed to holing up for the next 7 days. Wanting no part of the sardine-can Metro cars, nor the no-place-to-pee National Mall, nor the 21 Jumbo-trons placed strategically therein, they are probably the smart ones.

Others of us, however, have committed to being part of the action. My friend Jen and her fiance Charlie have won the bidding war over the prime bit of real estate that is my pull-out sofa for the weekend. With these two stalwart comrades to tow, I plan to be one of the stupid ones.

Tonight, I buy provisions. There will be root vegetables and hearty grains. I will have stores of vegan chili and saffron risotto on hand to staunch our appetites, though we plan on minimizing liquid consumption for the duration of our actual expedition. On the Inaugural Eve, though, there will be beer and wine. There will be coffee and tea. There will be adequate toilet paper. And, of course, tomatoes.

Jen, Charlie and I have already forsaken any attempt to actually see the parade or the real live ceremony. We have charted our course-- roughly 4.4 miles from my doorstep to the Lincoln Memorial Jumbo-tron. Gloved, hatted, scarved, long-underweared, earmuffed, cameraed and empty-bladdered, we will venture forth at dawn on I-Day. Braving the trains will be dependant on our spirit of adventure; if we are timid, yet strong-of-constitution, we'll be hoofing it. Don't doubt how mournful Jen and I will doubtlessly feel as we part with our respective fuck-me shoes for the duration of our trek. But it's true: there is no room for such indulgent excesses in masochism in this venture.

Once we set out, we have no idea where we'll pee. We have no idea how we'll procure sustenance and libations. We have no idea how long we'll be standing, nor how long we'll be cold. We don't even know if we'll make it home by nightfall.

But we are a brave band, and true, my fair readers. And true. We will make our pilgrimage and we will survive it and, at the end, we will have seen the first non-white person ascend to this nation's highest office. And we will have celebrated the long-awaited termination of this land's era of the shit-for-brains Prince of the Malapropism, the age of the empire-thirsty Czar of Preemptive Warfare, the time of the Natural Resource Wastrel.

Blessed be.

Keep us in your thoughts and hearts, my friends. Buoy us with your well-wishing.

We will attempt to send you dispatches from the field. However, as resources and wireless service are limited, we can make no promises.

Over and out.

I don't support gay marriage either.

What?

Because I'm a girl with some hot girl-on-girl philandering in her past, it may surprise some folks that I don't really have any particular investment in the legality of gay marriage.

But allow me to clarify: I don't support hetero marriage either.

On a personal level, I've got no real love for the institution. Or, at least, not for it's standard, heteronormative, monogamous, government-approved incarnation. The heteros have done a pretty good job of ruining it. And even if they hadn't, companionate cohabitation breeds familiarity and comfort. Familiarity and comfort are anathema to hot eroticism. That's not just an opinion-- that just the way biology works. Now, I happen to like hot eroticism and tend to value it above the safety of the marital bed. I'm not saying that my preference is the only valid one, by any means-- or even that I'll still hold it 5 years from now, one year from now, 2 days from now--but I do so love the riskiness of sex when affections are still at stake.

Beyond that, I am not particularly predisposed to enter into an agreement wherein I submit to someone else's constant surveillance, and in turn, am supposed to act as the Fidelity Police for that other person. Am I immune to jealousy? Well, no. But I recognize that my jealousies stem from my own insecurities and have little to do with how much my partner(s) love me. So, would it be the end of the world if my partners had sex with other people? No. Would it spell the end of the relationship if I had sex with someone other than my primary partner? I hope it wouldn't. Admittedly, espousing a preference for nonmonogamy is scary. A surprising number of boys turn tail and run when I confess that I don't think monogamy is a necessary ingredient in the recipe for a happy relationship. As a result, standing by that belief is proving to be something of a risk unto itself.

But my inclination toward polyamory isn't the reason I'm anti-marriage.

When I was busy being a big ol' homo, Michelle, my ex, wanted to "marry" me. Since we broke up, she went on to "marry" someone else. Throughout our 5 years together, I was reluctant to "marry" her for a whole bunch of reasons. Not the least of which is that most days, I didn't trust myself to not run after the first moving object with a cock who crossed my path. And the one after that. And the one after that. In essence, there were real, relationship-specific reasons I didn't want to "marry" her.

But more than those reasons, I feel like that whole "commitment ceremony" shebang is a consolation prize. Commitments between gay people are not recognized by their community in the same way that hetero marriages are. The government does not grant the same privileges upon those who happen to fall in love with those of their same gender. No property rights. No power of attorney. No tax breaks. No hospital visits. None of the financial gain that is to be had via the civil institution of marriage. How cute that the gays are still allowed to throw parties, though, right? Yay. Parties make it all better. Except they don't. So, in this way, our government has reduced the romantic idea of marrying for love to nothing more than a financial arrangement.

The thing that's always mystified me about the whole marriage-is-sacred crowd is how they don't recognize that denying a portion of the population access to benefits associated with marriage actually cheapens the thing they claim to hold so dear. Seriously. That's what they're doing. If you believe that marriage should be between two people who love each other, who the fuck cares what happens to the house when one member of the couple dies? Why is it so un-sacred to let the surviving lover continue to live in said house? Or reap the profits if it sells? The important thing in a marriage is L-U-V. Right? Right??

So, while in a homo relationship, I resented the hell out of the fact that I couldn't file my taxes jointly with Michelle. I was in love with her. Marriage-proponents claim to prize love above all. Why was my love for her less worthy of tax rebates than it might have been if I'd fallen in love with someone with a dick?

Every time Michelle would bring up the marriage thing, I'd get so fired up that I quickly found myself unable to think about "marrying" her without "finger-quoting." Any "marriage" we had would have been a sham because it wouldn't ever be legally recognized. And I didn't want to participate any anything that was less than authentic. Poor thing-- eventually, she did drop it.

But that's still not the reason I'm anti-marriage.

The fact of the matter is that marriage is a rite of the church. It has been since its inception. In its history, marriage is nothing if not a manifestation of religion... a manifestation of religion that happens to have been co-opted by the state.

I don't participate in any particular religion. True enough, I've cobbled together my ethical center from a number of sources-- yogic philosophy, assorted pagan rituals, some Zen thinking, and yes, even basic Judeo-Christian humanist tenets. But I do not subscribe to any one set of rules as might be set forth by any one particular religious organization. And as that's the case, I don't give a flying fuck how the church wants to define marriage. They could say that marriage consists of a man's commitment to his own personal toenail hygiene and I'd be fine with that. It doesn't affect me, so why would I have a opinion?

I do, however, participate in my civilization. The government of my civilization has established an institution that they, too, call marriage-- and that institution is exclusionary of a certain subset of the population. And any legal institution that is exclusionary of a certain subset of the population creates, by its very nature, a second class of citizens. And creating a second class of citizens is nothing if not unconstitutional.

The government has given itself a stake in marriage, claiming that stable couplehood promotes stability in the civilization. Personally, I think that's a dubious claim. We've got sky-high divorce rates. We've got people marrying multiple times in a lifetime. And for a culture that claims to hold monogamy in high regard, we've got an awful lot of folks fucking around outside their primary relationships (some statistics say nonmonogamy affects upwards of 80% of American couples). Now, nonmonogamy doesn't have to spell the end of the relationship, but because so many couples sink into the monogamous model of relationships without questioning how well it functions in a practical world, such dalliances are often equated with betrayal. My point here is that interpersonal relationships don't often follow rules. And they're idiosyncratic. ... and the government wants to regulate that kinda circus...because... why?

But, ok, the reality is that government does regulate interpersonal relationships for the purpose of social stability. Though I think that's a cock-eyed project, it's a fact of American life with which I must contend. Fine. I'll deal.

As many problems as I personally have with the notion of marriage, I do not think that the problem is marriage itself. Now, I know this isn't a new stance, or even a novel opinion, but honestly-- why don't we just let the fucking churches have their goddamn word? Our constitution dictates that we observe a separation of church and state. That said, it makes sense to me that the church thinks they have some stake in this issue when we use the same word for a civil union as we do for a religious union, even though, by the doctrine of separation of church and state, it shouldn't.

So, why don't we just make up a new term for the civil unions-- all civil unions: homo, hetero, or otherwise... and then grant their availability to all citizens?

The argument for or against gay marriage is and always has been a semantics argument. I don't see why we don't just let the religions win that argument and protect their vocabulary. However, in its refusal to see this issue as the semantics debate that it is, our government is refusing to grant equal rights to all its citizens. And that's crap.

On Tuesday, state constitutional bans will be on the ballots in California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas. This damn thing's already been voted down once in Arizona, but apparently, it's been tweaked and is now back on the ballot. And this, from the New York Times:

Several gay friends and wealthy gay donors to Senator Barack Obama have asked him over the years why, as a matter of logic and fairness, he opposes same-sex marriage even though he has condemned old miscegenation laws that would have barred his black father from marrying his white mother.

The difference, Mr. Obama has told them, is religion.

As a Christian — he is a member of the United Church of Christ — Mr. Obama believes that marriage is a sacred union, a blessing from God, and one that is intended for a man and a woman exclusively, according to these supporters and Obama campaign advisers. While he does not favor laws that ban same-sex marriage, and has said he is “open to the possibility” that his views may be “misguided,” he does not support it and is not inclined to fight for it, his advisers say.

Even my man Obama is still hung up on the word "marriage." And he makes no bones about the fact that his is a religion-generated hang-up.

But you know what? You're not allowed to govern on the basis of our religious beliefs, particularly when those beliefs disadvantage portions of one's constituency. Obama does oppose the constitutional bans on "gay marriage" -- which is a good thing. Because if these silly and, frankly, discriminatory bans pass, it'll get a lot harder to make the argument that our civil codes are actually egalitarian in spirit and law. But for my life, I do not see why we can't just remove the word "marriage" from every civil contract and call it a day. It's such an easy solution.

So, I say, let the church continue to marry people who are not me. Let the government, if it must meddle intimate levels of social ordering, grant its civil unions to any takers. I'm still not sure I'll ever be one of those takers. But you never know.