After writing the last post, I went to the grocery and bought some roasted chicken and on my way home, at 63rd and May, I thought “if I turn right, I can pick up some white wine to go with this chicken.”  Huh?  Where’d that come from?  Then: “Fuck wine, how about some single malt scotch.”  Shit.  That’s bad.  The first thought, OK, that happens to recovering alcoholics and we learn to just have those thoughts and let them go.  The second thought, the one about scotch, that’s an anomaly.  That’s the kind of drinking thought I only have when really depressed or really celebrating.  That’s a tougher one to explain and let go of.  Hmmmm.  Ate dinner and it was delicious and Sinatra really enjoyed the very tiny sliver of white meat I hand fed him.  Went to Starbucks for a coffee afterwards.  I couldn’t get out of Starbucks fast enough.  A gush of agoraphobia struck me when I took my place in line behind a couple of nondescript people.  Getting into my car, I was hurt, full of rage and nonspecific anxiety, a whole admixture of feelings, and mostly, and oddly, very very lonely, alienated, beyond alone.  I’ve concluded that the discussion about relationships is dredging up some ooookey feelings that I don’t want to feel.  I hate this, but it means I might actually learn something about my authentic self.  More likely, I’ll act out and really offend someone I love and care about and spend my way out of solvency and then hide in my closet until someone comes to help me.  Ya never know, though, do ya?

Nine days from Valentines Day and we’re fussing about relationships.  Coincidence or Irony? 

It’s amusing to me in the extreme that I write these fulminating and incendiary polemics on topics of life and death, war and peace, whatever, and not a leaf stirs in the blogosphere.  I write a few lines off the top of my head about love, though, and I get extended responses from MCARP here, Flibbertigibbet! here and Karmic Ironies here, a hurricane of bloviation on love and relationships.

A few quick notes about the responses …

Nina’s response is interesting to me in that she begins with the proposition that she will never understand men.  Welcome to the club, darlin’, we don’t understand you back.  However, I can do for you what you cannot do for me on that score:  I can say in one sentence the key to understanding men.  If you would understand men, you must completely own and understand that we grow older but not up.  Oh, you may say, I have seen maturity in men.  Balderdash!  Perhaps we’ve made a mature decision about our transportation — a minivan, for example, instead of a two seater sports car.  That is not maturity where relationships are concerned and all you have to do is ask MCARP, a minivan owner.  I have personally made a great many mature judgments as a parent and as an attorney, but I readily admit to immaturity where relationships are concerned. Sorry, Nina, we do not mature.  Whatever act we had when we first began to get hair on our scrotums, we merely polish up that act over the decades.  If we were jocks in our teens, we’re playing tennis in our 30s and golf in our 50s.  If we were writing poems in our teens to get chicks, we are now writing better poetry as a result of our English lit. degree and now we’re writing a novel when we leave our P.R. jobs at the local ad agency.  If we had a hot rod as a 17-year-old, we’re still fooling ourselves into believing that “muscle” on wheels delivers chicks to our side and perhaps we’ve bought a GoldWing just to prove it.  In point of fact, I believe that all those men broke up with you because you are a grownup AND EXPECTED HIM TO BE GROWN UP AS WELL.  It’s the most frightening prospect a man can face.  Don’t you think that there’s a good reason why men waste a year before telling you to shove off while you only wait 6 weeks or 2 months?  Don’t you think there’s a reason why we tell you some bullshit about the interior dramas we’re having while you, grownup as you are, can be simple and honest? It’s not that we think we’re entitled to a Playboy bunny, as you posit, it’s that the desire for a Playboy bunny is an expression of our juvenile and immature attitude towards relationships and women.  No matter our age, when in the company of men, we tell and laugh at jokes about excrement, flatulance and masturbation.  Farts are still funny to 50 year old men because we simply never got any more mature than when we first discovered those phenomena.  And, one last thing about the bitter joke lardass couch potatoes tell about the bunnies (other than mention it’s what they say to torture themselves about all the cultural cues they get about being less than because of their lard ass):  ask yourself how many women you know who are on some perpetual diet, getting their tits implanted and maybe even getting on a treadmill several times a week to tone up that ass.  Are men solely to blame for the Playboy bunny syndrome? 

For MCARP, a clarification:  there’s a reason “win” was in quotation marks.  I don’t see relationships as a zero sum game with winners and losers.  I do see that some people make the decision not to get into relationships and that they do so because they believe they maximize their happiness by avoiding the problems of relationships and by achieving and putting a focus on other goals.  In that sense, I believe they “win”.  On the other hand, I believe they are also merely devising another shape and form of the barricades and battlements I mentioned as having myself.  And, while it’s true that I said I think it’s a shell of a life not much better than death, I also said it’s my most likely next strategy.  Until it becomes my strategy, though, I’m with Westika:  better to love and lose than never love at all.  As much as I hate the pain of a failed romance, I also love the high of having someone with whom to share and grow and talk and get fluttery fingertips in the chest over.  From my perspective, my own thinking is so often off the beam that I NEED another person in my life with whom I’m so intimate that I can talk and bounce ideas off and get grounded in reality.  I can’t yet join you because I still hope and believe that there’s someone out there who can put up with my shit, leave me alone and be there (all at the same time, mind you) when I’m flailing about.

For me, and I don’t pretend to speak about humanity or anyone else at all, for me, part of the problem is that I am not just male, I’m human.  I’m a mammal.  I have all these conveniently placed nerve endings in my genitalia.  I have this perfectly servicable hormonal system.  I have this visual brain structure.  My very existence is formidably grounded in the fact of my physical being.  Most of the reason I’m on this planet has to do with survival of the species.  I was bred and had children because that’s what we humans do.  Fortunately or unfortunately, these instincts and physical structures, intelligently designed or evolved as they may be, had the unintended consequence of recreational sex not intended for procreation.  Whatever priority one may place on those facts, those facts cannot be ignored.  They are facts and they exist and they must be dealt with.  I will necessarily, as a fact of life, have some relationship with some women and that cannot be avoided.  I will necessarily, as a fact of life, want to have sex with at least some of them.   I can choose to have only non sexual relationships with women and to be frustrated in my desire to have sex with some woman, but for me that is choosing not to decide.  For me, that is choosing to deny my humanity.  For me, that is choosing gray over all the other vivid colors of life and love.  While I might have a perfectly lovely life in my career, while I might have a terrific set of friends (and I most assuredly do, including MCARP) that I find very comforting, while I might have creative urges towards writing that contributes much to my well being and serenity, to choose not to have any romantic relationship is the choice to cease to be human in that central sphere of human experience.  It is worse than death because in death we also have no relationships, but by making that choice, unlike the dead, we are conscious of the choice and its consequences.  One consequence of avoiding relationships might very well be that my writing is 2 dimensional when describing women, that my career choices sometimes lack balance and that my friendships are crippled by my immaturity with and about women (friends get very tired of hearing about one’s dramas, I suspect). 

Last to weigh in was Westika, our 20-something maven at Karmic Ironies. Ah, how I love you, Jazz.  First, stop with the defensiveness: not only have you already had more relationships than me, but also more complex ones.  In addition, because of that whole “boys grow older, not up” thing, you are also more mature than me.  I take your views very very seriously.

Here, for me, was the “money quote” in your blog post:

But here I am, not giving up, though I made that big decree a couple blogs ago. I love love too much. Whether it ends up sticking in a mutual-trust kind of symbiotic relationship or I end up floating around, happy in myself but willing to experience the pulls and explosions of what happens along the way, I defy the notion of regret. I defy the notion of settling. I defy the notion of making someone suffer for my shortcomings or being myself poisoned by someone else’s inability to notice moments.

Her head is bloody but unbowed, God bless the child.

For those of us who are older, even if not mature, though, we’ve faced some similar choices.  I will never be an NFL wide receiver.  I will never be an NBA point guard.  I will never be a U.S. Senator or candidate for president of the good old US of A.  I’ve made choices that foreclosed other choices.  When I choose to be with one woman, I’ve also chosen not to be with all the other women in the world.  As we age, we realize that more and more doors shut behind us.  That, and that alone, is what separates us.  You have many many more open doors ahead of you than we do.  We envy the hell out of your youth.

Even in your youth, I think you put your finger on something I tried to get at in my original post.  There is that theoretical possibility that the real me can have a real relationship with a real woman and that both of us can find happiness despite our filters of imaginary men and women that will always lie between us.  I do not think I must be perfect nor even fully mature to achieve this relationship.  I think it’s possible that the real and greatly flawed me can have a nurturing and loving and kind and understanding and sexy love relationship with someone who is also real and therefore flawed, but flawed in a way that fits my rough edges.  Here’s where the movies and fiction and poems get all entangled, I suppose, but it’s also where our hope lies.  I do know some people in long term relationships who seem to have discovered the trick to getting that done successfully.  They are rare, to be sure.  In some ways, it seems like the lottery.  Lots of people buying tickets, a rare few winners.  I give 2 bucks to Bookemdano every week for lottery tickets because I dream about having millions.  I ask women out on dates because maybe I’ll hit that one in 6.5 billion chance that she’s “The One”.  Actually, I don’t believe in soulmates.  I think my odds are better than the one woman in the 3.5 billion women in the world.  There are about 175 million women in the U.S.  I think I could maybe have a good relationship with something like 1.75 million, one percent.  Just guessing, I think I have about a 1 in 100 chance and that my filters for who I will ask out on a date makes my chance with any first date woman about one in 50.  My actual dating experience has been that at least two or three of the 50 women I’ve dated lifetime could have been a good match for a long term relationship and/or marriage.  And, in fact, I had a 30 year marriage, which isn’t bad all in all despite the fact that it ultimately failed.  I think I mostly beat the odds, Fate’s way of playing with my head, without ever hitting that ultimate powerball jackpot.

So, here we all are a few days away from the romance holiday of St. Valentine.  Many of you know that I do something unusual on Feb. 14.  I buy cheap valentines meant for grade schoolers and hand them out indiscriminately in public places on that day.  It’s fun,  surprising and revealing.  This year, however, I have no reservations for dinner and no jewelry being monogramed.   I’ll let you know, Dr. Phil, how that’s working for me when it goes down.

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That, I believe, was an actor’s suicide note.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Could you hold this boulder for a minute?

Chasing Amy

I’m “Chasing Amy” today.  If you haven’t seen the Kevin Smith film, do so.  It’s about a guy who destroys an irreplaceable friendship with a guy he’d known since gradeschool and with whom he’d built an enviable career as well as the love of his life with an absolutely unique woman by having such a terrible idea that only a brilliant man could dream it up.  Afterward, he’s always looking for the one that got away.  It’s a funny and brilliant work.

In a less concrete way, I’m also chasing an Amy.

Except mine doesn’t exist and never did.

(Here, dear reader, I must ask your indulgence.  Here, I must ask you to set aside anything you think you know about my actual lovelife and the actual women I’ve dated and/or loved and/or known in the Biblical sense of the word.  This piece is not about real people in the specific.  This is musing about my reactions to, observations of and interactions with a wide variety of women, including characters from fiction and film.  It’s about women I’ve met, women my sisters and mother know and tell me about and maybe I’ve met them and maybe not.  This is about what I’ve read and seen and heard as much as it is about my own experience.  In fact, this is a singular attempt by me to look at myself and my interactions with women in the abstract, to extract the personalities in order to validate for my own feelings and desires.  Much of what you will read below has nothing so much to do with fact in the observable world as it has to do with trying to get at an insight into my own feelings about the world.  This is as much about my psychohistorical relationship with my imagined maternal figure and my early childhood guilts being reinforced by the Southern Baptist Church upbringing and my strained relationship with my father as it has to do with any reality or particular woman.  If you attempt to analogize to an actual relationship, your conclusions will necessarily be wrong.  For one thing, this is a snapshot of who I am today.  Whoever I was in the actual relationship will bear little resemblence to the man who writes this, having had the actual relationship experience and grown or became mired.)

The earliest recollection I have of sexual feeling was as a lad upon seeing a teenaged girl clad in a 1950s black one-piece swimsuit; she wasthe daughter of one of my father’s closest friends.  My first crush was in 6th grade, about age 11.  My first love was age 16, a classmate. 

However, the classmate was not my first real love.  My first real love was an imaginary person, crudely formed by my teenage mind, and projected upon a perky, short blonde.  That classmate, the actual woman, is now very fat, very bitter and very gloomy.  That classmate, the actual woman, is bitter because she didn’t get what she wanted and is gloomy because she didn’t want what she had.  As a result, she comforted herself with food as to the former and defended herself from disappointment with the resulting fat as a barrier against the latter.  I see her from time to time and, mostly, act like I don’t recognize her.  It’s too sad.  I know and understand her grief and pain all too well from far too many perspectives.  I was never more than a brief glimpse in her life story, not even enough for a footnote.  She “doesn’t recognize” me, either, and never has.

My first real love, the imagined one, would never become fat, or addicted in any way.  Unlike my classmate and myself in real life, my first real love, the imagined one, always got what she wanted and always wanted what she had and was never bitter nor gloomy.  Sometimes, perhaps, she would pout, giving forth a moue of fine porportions, a pristine moment of chrystallized preciousness that makes one love her all the more.  Shove 50 pounds of bon bons into her mouth?  Never!  My first real love was a woman who walked off movie screens, toasting a glass of champagne ” Here’s looking at you, kid”.  No sense letting the Nazis drink this bottle, Sam.  A kiss is still a kiss.

Needless to say, she wore a black, one-piece 1950s swimsuit.

Or not.

Here’s where things get a little complicated.  The real classmate went on to date a jock, with whom she fell madly in love, but lost.  She went off to college and got married and had kids.  No wonder she’s gloomy. The classmate I imagined and clothed in my crudely teenaged amalgam of film and fiction went on as well, now as the torch I carried well into my marriage.  The imaginary real love underwent renovations as I dated a busty brunette and a tall slim blonde and a dumpy but brilliant grad student and then, the woman who I would marry.  More real women, imaginary women walking within my projections, and a morphing imaginary woman.

This is about the time drinking started taking over my life and I started stuffing all these emotions about love and sex.  Here’s where my willingness to insight and growth stopped and my obsession with oblivion grew.

Damn, I hate reflection.

That hurt.

Moving on.

I did learn a few things during the subsequent years.  One was that it wasn’t just the imaginary woman I crafted, it was also love itself.  My actual experience of love was very different than what I had — and sometimes still — imagine.  I loved my wife.  I still love my exwife, despite the fact that we never speak.  That admiration and reliance and many other things I experienced, though, simply were not the romantic love that I received and accepted from fiction, television and movies and poems and God knows what other sources.  So, now there’s real love and the love that I imagine that is an alloy of a great many myths.  I have some form of both of these with the real women in my life, the imagined women in my life, and the one imaginary woman who constantly changes with my ideas and feelings appropriate to my age and experience and mental health.

That is further complicated by the several “me”s that populate my world.  There’s the real me, the me that people observe and experience and the me I imagine myself to be.  All three of these guys have all of those different love relationships with all three real and imagined women.

Fucked up stuff, eh?

I don’t think I’m the only one.  In fact, I think I describe a commonplace in our culture’s society.

I think this commonplace is the source of much misery.  I think the “gaps” between the real people, the imagined people and the imaginary person, the “gaps” between love and imagined love and imaginary love as well as the gaps between the real individual, the perceived individual and the imaginary individual all cause a very great many of us guilt, hurt, loss, pain, discouragement, angst.

Clearly, if the real us could have some real love with a real person, that would be a good thing.  I think this rarely happens.

Worse, I think that even when it IS HAPPENING, we’re so busy putting the other overlays of imaginary and mythic thinking/feeling on top of what is actually happening to our real selves and our real loves, we don’t recognize it and can be just as unhappy with the “gaps” as when our real selves are out of sync with our real others.

In other words, I think that when the real you finds the real them and has real love, we are just as apt to fuck it up and be unhappy with the relationship.

At the very least, I think this is what I do and have done.  I’ll leave you and the rest of American culture out of it.  I’m already doing all the projecting and transferrence I can handle. 

My morphing imaginary love object looks more and more like a Playboy bunny.  However, the real me never asks out a woman who looks like a Playboy bunny.  Such women really really frighten me.  However, just as $30 million would make me more handsome, 140 IQ points makes you more beautiful.  This causes a problem.  I don’t so much date women who I find attractive as I date women who are attracted to me; I find my attraction later.

This is not to say that I have not dated some very attractive women.  I think most of them would admit, however, that they are not Playboy bunny material.  As time goes on, I project and transfer more and more beauty from my imaginary love onto the imaginary woman I’m dating and experiencing.  Thus, the women I date tend to become more beautiful the longer I date them.  If they dump me, they become a veritable Venus on the halfshell rising from the sea.

As my self esteem gets lower or depression sets in, I tend not to ask anyone out.  Since this is nearly always the case, I tend to date only women who really want to date me.  I tend, at those times, to date only women who are SO interested in dating me that they are willing to storm the barricades of my obtuseness, climb the battlements of my defenses, slash and burn their way through my inner barriers to intimacy and finally grab me by the penis and shout in my ear over the screaming of my scared six year old inner boy: “fuck me, you ignorant jerk!” .

Kind of makes you just tingle with the thought of asking me “How’s that working for you?”.  Supress your inner Dr. Phil, please.  This is MY blog and it’s about ME and all y’all can just shut yore mouth.

The imagined real women I’ve dated all know this feeling of me being the boulder they had to push, Sisyphus like, up a hill, over and over, fruitlessly.

When my self esteem is stronger, it’s even worse. 

My self esteem tends to get stronger when I’m actually already dating someone.  Since this is nearly always someone who has cleaned the stables along with Hercules, I’m feeling pretty good about myself because someone was willing to go through all that trouble to hook up with me and my imaginary lives, all of which I imagine are transparent to everyone who sees me.

The trouble here is that my self esteem doesn’t seem to want to linger at fair, middling, good, excellent or superior.  My self esteem doesn’t seem to even slow down at those points.  I tend to go from “shit” all the way to “godlike” in a fiery arc.  As I get more comfortable in my dating experience, and especially as my sexual desires begin to be met, I grow much more confident.  As in: “no man can compete with me and even married women want me.” as in “rich, witty and irresistable to ALL women.”  As in even Playboy bunnies no longer scare me.  Well, maybe not quite that far.

I have a vague recollection of one and maybe two women in my life complaining of this, but nothing important, I’m sure.

Here’s another bit of the trouble.  As I get more and more confident and have this sense of godlike invincibility and irresistability, that becomes more true.  There are women out there who like confident, smiling, happy men.  Imagine.  They become the woman who is willing to smash through barricades.  Even the obstacle of the other woman already in my life.  That other woman always seems a little surprised that a woman would do just as she just did TO THE SAME MAN.

But I am not that SAME MAN.  I’m the confident and irascable high self esteem John, not the depressed and feel like shit guy they rescued.

I’m no longer interested in being endlessly fascinated by their every dyspeptic pronouncement. 

They, on their part, are interested in doing the rescue thing and I no longer need rescue.  They are interested in fixing up a good, used car.  Now, I’m a bright shiney sports car that needs no fixing, that wants to fly over the curves and hug the road at high and thrilling speeds.

All these aggressive women out there want me, why is it that the main love in my life at the moment seems to be waning?  She wanted me more than I wanted to be left alone and now that I’m even better than I was when she first wanted me, she wants me less, not more. 

If there just weren’t those other women out there.  That’s the problem.  The solution?  Me.  I must quit flirting.  I’m not flirting, I’m just being happy and confident.  You’re flirting.  No.  THEY are flirting, not me.  I ignore all that.  No, you’re flirting.  Fuck this, I’ll go flirt.  Why not?  I’m already paying the price. 

And, the relationship breaks down.  As the relationship breaks down, my self esteem shatters.  Again, no lingering slide down through superior, excellent, good, middling, fair, poor.  From godlike to shit.

And, just to help that along.  The one dumping me, chasing me away with impossible demands, parting friends, whatever, gives that just a little shove.  Here’s the plans for fixing you I once held;  You have the following deficits I was going to shore up;  you will never learn and all chance you ever had for happiness is disappearing as I turn my back and disappear into the distance.

If there’s a sucker born every minute, there are two codependents born in the same time period.  A new one comes to smash my barricades and I start over the same pattern.

And new imaginary “me”, a new imaginary woman and a new imagined woman is born along with a new and imaginary love.

And, here’s what bores me.

I’ve been here before.  I know all this stuff.  Today isn’t the first day I’ve had these ideas and feelings and analysis.  I go here often. To no avail.  I’ve described a friend of mine as someone who knows everything and understands nothing.  This is stuff I know, but my understanding, intellectual and not emotional understanding, does not lead to any change.  I don’t emotionally “own” this insight.  My understanding is intellectual alone. If I did understand this on other levels, I’d change the pattern.  I’d decide that doing the same thing over and over and getting the same result over and over was tedious and self destructive and that it was time to do something different and get a changed and more advantageous result.  I’ve tried thinking myself into a new way of acting and that’s not working for me.

I simply don’t know how else to proceed.

All the other ways of going about the business of love and relationships, no matter how they may differ, seem to have very similar if not identical results.

One of the more successful methods, different from mine, that I observe is to refuse to have a real love and/or relationship.  I know several people who don’t date at all and don’t want to.  They have their imaginary self, imagined love and their memories.  That’s it.  They never have the rush of a new relationship and a new sex partner nor the high of feeling confident and fulfilled, but they never suffer the fiery hell of a relationship in flux and shambles, leading to a pit of burning lost love excrement up to one’s nose. They “win” by not playing.  In my opinion, they have put life on hold and in my opinion this is a fate worse than death.  It’s also the option I believe I am most likely to choose.

Another method I observe is the “put up with shit and settle for what you get” method.  This mainly consists of living in a grey shell of a life with a partner you no longer care for, but believe is about as good as you’ll be able to do so what the hell.  Ugh. Can we say “marriage” boys and girls?  Sure you can.  I believe most marriages spend a certain amount of time in this place, if not always.  This is not a likely choice for me, but I don’t rule it out.

In the face of all the evidence that this is radically impossible, I believe there is a theoretical situation in which a real woman can share real love with the real me.  I believe the obstacles to this situation are as follows:  I don’t know the real me and I don’t know real love and I don’t know any real women.

So, as counterpart to the post of a few days ago in which I imagined how women of differing ages dump the men in their life, here’s men over the decades:

I want to fuck your mom.   (20s)

I want to fuck your younger sister. (30s)

I want to fuck your daughter. (40s)

For every beautiful babe out there, there’s some guy tired of taking her shit. (50s)

I told you I was bored.

Read all about it in a memoir by Michael Tolkin here.

Money Quote:

IS NO ONE GOING TO SAY that Robert Altman was a great pothead? Let me, then. Robert Altman was a great pothead. In the war on drugs, he won. To look at his work without thinking about marijuana’s specific gifts and poisons . . . umm . . . specific . . . What was I saying? Oh. Right. Altman. Robert Altman. I met him, did I tell you that already?

I read and laughed at the whole thing.  Tolkin is a screenwriter who did “The Player” with Altman.

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By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007, at 3:04 PM ET

“And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I’m sorry it’s the case, and I’ll work hard to try to elevate it.”— Speaking on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007.

Click here to hear audio of Bush’s comments. The Bushism is at 19:21.

From Slate Magazine online

I didn’t stop reading political blogs even after I knew I should.

http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/

Here is the text delivered by Zbigniew Brzezinski to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning:

It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:

1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America’s global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America’s moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.

2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying regional tensions.

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

If you aren’t reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog, linked above, you should.  He’s an interesting guy.  Gay, conservative and struggling to be a Roman Catholic.  (frag., I know I know) … i’m listening to the Everley Brothers and watching Sinatra play with a cloth mouse.  I’ve got a file and tax materials on my desk to work on.  The snow is pretty from my little enclave’s window.  I should be happy as a clam in sauce, but I somehow feel like the lobster who says to himself:  my, the water’s getting so nice and Toasty!

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From Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo blog, linked here. 

An analysis released today by the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the administration has vastly underestimated the actual number of extra troops that will be deployed to Iraq under the president’s “surge” plan.

The administration’s estimate of approximately 21,000 extra troops only counts combat units, according to the analysis, and because combat units require support forces, the actual number of additional troops who will be in Iraq will likely exceed 35,000.

From the analysis (you can read it here):

To reflect some of the uncertainty about the number of support troops, CBO developed its estimates on the basis of two alternative assumptions. In one scenario, CBO assumed that additional support troops would be deployed in the same proportion to combat troops that currently exists in Iraq. That approach would require about 28,000 support troops in addition to the 20,000 combat troops—a total of 48,000. CBO also presents an alternative scenario that would include a smaller number of support personnel—about 3,000 per combat brigade—totaling about 15,000 support personnel and bringing the total additional forces to about 35,000. [emphasis mine]

The analysis, which estimated the cost of the president’s plan “from $9 billion to $13 billion for a four-month deployment and from $20 billion to $27 billion for a 12-month deployment,” was sent to House Committee on the Budget Chairman John Spratt (D-SC) today.

I’m just going to have to stop reading the news and the blogs.  This makes me so angry and I feel so powerless.  Even after winning last fall’s elections, the Congress can’t figure out how to stop this madness?  Do you think it would do any good if I wrote a polite letter to Mary Fallon?  Not so much, I’m thinking.

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From the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune:

WASHINGTON – Comedian and radio talk show host Al Franken has begun calling Democratic members of Congress and prominent DFLers to tell them he will definitely challenge Republican Sen. Norm Coleman in 2008, the Star Tribune learned Wednesday.

On Monday, Franken announced that he is quitting his radio show on Feb. 14, and he told his audience that they’d be the first to know of his decision. But Franken has been working the phones, telling his political friends he’s ready to declare his candidacy.

Franken made calls to at least two members of the Minnesota congressional delegation in Washington and one member of the Legislature to break the news. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity, not wanting to be identified as pre-empting Franken’s announcement.

“From his voice to my ears, he’s running,” said one House member, who relayed the remark via his press secretary.

Supply your own punchline.

He coulda been senator, but he kept turning left at Minneapolis and never got to St. Paul.

No Joke?

Building on his success in the radio business, no doubt.

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From Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Best-selling author and columnist Molly Ivins, the sharp-witted liberal who skewered the political establishment and referred to President Bush as “Shrub,” died Wednesday after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 62.

 

It’s a sad day.  She was an American icon, a Will Rogers-esque political commentator, and — back in the day — she and Ann Richards tore up Austin.  Maybe they’re both able to drink, joke and smoke in heaven just like the old times.  I hope so.