The ball didn’t roll in.  It came to rest on the lip of the green, no more than an inch from the water and, probably, the end of Freddy’s career.

There is no logical reason the ball stayed in play.  It just shouldn’t have stopped.  It couldn’t have stopped.  The gathering crowds stood in awe, stared, and watched what should have been a double bogey turn into a par-3 and then Fred Couples’ first Master’s win.  After a life devoted to remembering it, he found his authentic swing and won the grandest award offered in his sport.

Shortly after the game was over, before he’d left the course, a local reporter grabbed him and asked him, “Fred, what will you remember most about this day?”  Freddy turned to glance over his shoulder to his wife, turned back to the reporter, gave a little wink to the camera and said one word.

“Tonight.”

©2010 Whiskey in My Sippy Cup : A Mediocre Mom Blog. All Rights Reserved. Information on licensing and permissions regarding all copyrighted content can be found here. I will seriously hunt you down and spank your ass if you scrape my site. Not the good spanking, either.

By Audre Lorde, who keeps saving my life over and over again:

For Each of You

Be who you are and will be
learn to cherish
that boisterous Black Angel that drives you
up one day and down another
protecting the place where your power rises
running like hot blood
from the same source as your pain.

When you are hungry
learn to eat
whatever sustains you
until morning
but do not be misled by details
simply because you live them.

Do not let your head deny
your hands
any memory of what passes through them
nor your eyes     nor your heart
everything can be used
except what is wasteful
(you will need to remember this
when you are accused of destruction).
Even when they are dangerous
examine the heart of those machines
which you hate
before you discard them
but do not mourn their lack of power
lest you be condemned
to relive them.

If you never learn to hate
you will never be lonely
enough     to love easily
nor will you always be brave
although it does not grow any easier.

Do not pretend to convenient beliefs
even when they are righteous
you will never be able to defend your city
while shouting

Remember     our sun
is not the most noteworthy star
only the nearest.

Respect whatever pain you bring back
from your dreaming
but do not look for new gods
in the sea
nor in any part of a rainbow.

Each time you love
love as deeply
as if it were
forever
only nothing is
eternal.

Speak proudly to your children
where ever you may find them
tell them
you are the offspring of slaves
and your mother was
a princess
in darkness.

Your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.
-President Barack Obama; Jan 20, 2009.

©2010 Whiskey in My Sippy Cup : A Mediocre Mom Blog. All Rights Reserved. Information on licensing and permissions regarding all copyrighted content can be found here. I will seriously hunt you down and spank your ass if you scrape my site. Not the good spanking, either.

Well, I had completely forgotten until just a few minutes ago.

Which means I feel like I’ve been caught with my pants down, which – while a bit of a turn on, truth be told – means I suck.  Seriously suck, given the guest blogging your lovely hostess did for me back in the days of my now defunct blog The World Wide Rant.

So, since I’ve nary a post prepared, perhaps I’ll just throw out some bullet points of interest, if only to me:

• Hey, you know all those great handmade items you like to buy for your kids because they’re not full of Chinese lead? Kiss them goodbye on February 10, 2009.

• For lunch today, I made a turkey curry and for dinner beef carbonnade. Yum!

• The Republican National Committee is a gift that keeps on giving. I can’t believe I voted for these yahoos as often as I did. I don’t do drugs, but I think someone could hold up my voting record as evidence to the contrary.

• Another of my youthful dreams crushed. Yeah, I know, it’s real mommy blog material. I mean, it’s not like she took a picture of herself wearing just Crocs boots or anything.

OK, I’m tapped out.

What’s on your mind?

And, are you losing weight? You look fabulous!

©2010 Whiskey in My Sippy Cup : A Mediocre Mom Blog. All Rights Reserved. Information on licensing and permissions regarding all copyrighted content can be found here. I will seriously hunt you down and spank your ass if you scrape my site. Not the good spanking, either.

I do protest, I never injured thee,
But love thee better than thou canst devise,
Till thou shalt know the reason of my love:
And so, good Capulet,
which name I tender as dearly as my own,
be satisfied.

You know what happened next? Tybalt, blinded by self-righteous rage, killed innocent Mercutio. And then Romeo caught up with him later, put a sword through him and tossed him in a fountain.

And everyone lost.

Why?  Because Tybalt got it into his head that the status quo could never change, that the way things were are the way things should always be.  He chose to ignore everyone around him and go right on ahead hating blindly, without reason.  And that person always ends up with blood on his hands.

Proposition 8 passed in California.   They passed similar amendments in Arizona, Arkansas and Florida, too. The very day we finally make one large step in the direction of progress, we take what is certainly the largest step backwards I’ve had to witness in my lifetime.  I am at a loss for (kind) words.  I don’t even understand how this got put in front of the voters in the first place.  Do we really legislate basic human rights based on popular consensus?  Last time I checked, family was a basic human right.  Maybe I was wrong.

Either way, I will await the results of the court appeals that have been filed, and I will channel the excessive amount of unmitigated outrage I feel towards a 52% of Californians, Arizonas and Floridians into something tangible.  If I lived in California, I could do this:

And you can bet your ass, I would be, kids in tow and all.  But I don’t live there, and I think part of my unbelievable levels of anger right now are coming from the feeling of helplessness, that feeling that they’ve got us by the balls.  I hate that feeling, don’t you?  Well, the more I thought about, the more I realized that I could do something, that I should do something, that I HAVE to do something.  So I’m doing something.

I’m boycotting California, Arizona, Arkansas and Florida.

Ultimately, what it comes down to, for me, is that these states saw fit to remove any veiled semblance of the separation of church and state.  They let the mormon hierarchy the catholic hierarchy and those Focus on the Family (censored) buy their way into politics.  Which is fine, if those organizations want to give up their tax exemptions and play ball, but since they want to have their cake and eat it, too, and those states let them, they can, well, they can fuck off and die for all I care.

I’ve been tossing this around for a few days.  I felt like maybe it was just as wrong to say, “Hey!  Let’s punish a whole group of people for the choices of a few!”  But I can’t think of anything else I can do.  I can write strongly worded blog entries, I can scream at the CNN website, or I can put my damn money where my mouth is.  I can say No Means NO.  I can tell those states, who’s revenue comes primarily from tourism, that this tree hugging liberal fag-hag thinks what they’ve done is morally reprehensible and politically unconscionable.

So there will be no trips to Disneyland or Disneyworld for us, there will be no drives to the Grand Canyon, there will be produce bought from any of those states.  I’ll shop locally, I’ll be happy with the little beaches I have right here.  I’ll keep checking this list to see if there are any specific organizations I can boycott.

I have no allusions that little old me could even put a dent in the budgets of these states, but maybe if enough of us do it, and if enough of us talk about it, and enough of us fight for it, maybe they’ll notice.  Maybe they’ll hear us.  Maybe they’ll see that what they’ve done is wrong, that it hurts people, that it shouldn’t be legal.  And maybe they’ll take it back.  Either way, I won’t have sat idle and watched my friends hurt.  I’ll have done something.  It’s like some other dirty hippie once said:

And if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in
singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out?  They may think it’s an
organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said
fifty people a day walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and
walking out? And friends, they may thinks it’s a movement.

And that’s what it is.

(Photo stolen from the FlickR set of Greg Starr.  I totally asked first.)

©2010 Whiskey in My Sippy Cup : A Mediocre Mom Blog. All Rights Reserved. Information on licensing and permissions regarding all copyrighted content can be found here. I will seriously hunt you down and spank your ass if you scrape my site. Not the good spanking, either.

©2010 Whiskey in My Sippy Cup : A Mediocre Mom Blog. All Rights Reserved. Information on licensing and permissions regarding all copyrighted content can be found here. I will seriously hunt you down and spank your ass if you scrape my site. Not the good spanking, either.