I was going to write a little something about slavery reparations, both in the United States and in the world in general. I was going to rant about the stupidity of it, of how, in the true spirit of the thing, the Normans should pay off to the Saxons who should then hand it over to the Celts for being wiped from the face of the earth, minus some long-haired SCA members. I was going to say all this and maybe a bit more, but Mr. Ra and Mr. Lictor have already said it quite lucidly and with a marked lack of profanity. "Horseshit" just isn't in the same league as "fuck", "cunt", or "Tom Green".
I'm not planning to type much about recent events. My fellow Cantistes have done an admirable job of painting a full portrait of human response. I can say that I spent the first 30 minutes in a state of shocked intellectual retreat. I calmly shared with my wife that we were witnessing a defining moment like Watergate, Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, or the Challenger explosion. I understood that such an attack was within the realm of possibility, that in fact such an attack was inevitable. I coolly wondered aloud about how many more attacks we might have to hear about in the coming days. My voice held steady and my eyes were dry until I called my parents.
Now I see a flag hanging from a freeway overpass or I read column like Cindy's or Lictor's or Harlock's and my cynicism burns away in the white heat of emotion. My mind retreats from the memory like a bad dream, but I remember that it is not a dream and my gut aches. I watch folks in Palestinian refugee camps celebrating and I realize that I'm watching the same sort of people who are screaming in the streets of my country for the death of all Muslims. I hear about retaliation and my heart sinks. I hear about everyday folks offering to patrol a mosque's parking lot and I feel much better about where I live.
Luckily, I've had enough around the house to keep me occupied. There's nothing like plumbing to take your mind off of just about anything, up to and including double amputation without anesthetic.
My wife and I have big plans to landscape our front yard (read "weed patch") and redo just about every room in the house (read "victim of 70s style"). Some of this work is going to involve plumbing. A prerequisite for plumbing is being able to turn the water off to your house. Now, I have a wrench that allows me to monkey with the main valve at the curb, but that strikes me as unkosher. I should be able to turn the water off at the valve outside our garage. That was my thinking. My problem was that the valve didn't have a handle. Simple fix. I bought another valve and cannibalized its handle. No dice. The damn valve was frozen. Time for a new valve. I'm usually the sort of guy who will dive into a project like this. Sometimes I'm in over my head, but I usually manage to avert disaster with some extra time and a few visits to the Home Depot around the corner. That's all well and good if it's something like a seldom used electrical outlet that I'm replacing. If something goes wrong, no big deal. Just leave the breaker off and finish the work next week. But now I was looking at the possibility of having no water in the house for the weekend or longer. No showers. No toilets. I knew that in theory I needed to cut the pipe below the valve, thread the remaining pipe, and put the new valve on with a union and a short nipple. But what if I couldn't find a nipple short enough? What if I messed up trying to thread the very short section of remaining pipe? Time to call in the professionals. To make a very long story not so long, I paid the plumber three hours of time to learn that the valve was frozen because water wasn't coming into my house that way. Someone had run a replacement supply line that entered at another wall. I already had a shutoff valve inside the garage. Grrrr. Now all I have to do is replace the broken-up concrete and the electrical ground that had been the useless galvanized supply line. Joy.
So this is me trying to get back to normal. I'm determined to keep fear from poisoning my life. I'm determined to keep the bastards from winning.
Pakeha