Winter                                                                 Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

The big day has arrived.  Kate’s last shift.  She’s off right now getting her nails done–her constant scrubbing in and out of rooms made fancy nails silly–and her toes, since she wears sandals almost all year round.  This way she’s dolled up for tonight and for the next week in Colorado.

Back a bit I bought a print by a Minnesota artist, Mike Elko.  It hangs to the right of this computer and looking at it right now triggered a major aha.  The print is the faux cover of a magazine, Practical Paranoia.  It features a cartoon woman with sixties hairdo and clothing, a tear trickling down her face and this copy next to her:  He keeps saying, “If you question me, then the terrorists have won!”  Is all of this really necessary or is he just trying to make me crazy?  I live in…

NEVER ENDING  TERROR!

A Bush era piece, I bought it in part as a lest we forget, a cautionary tale about government gone loony.  As I looked at it right now, I realized a huge difference, a huge positive difference between the Bush and the Obama eras.  We don’t feel this way anymore.  There is no longer the Cheney–Rumsfeld–Bolton–Wolfowitz–Kristol nexus, a sort of demented nerve ganglia that twitched and pulsed cries of alarm at every shadow.  Obama has calmed us as a nation while continuing to actively pursue terrorists, and a sober analysis of the Bush methods.