Saturday

January 27, 2001

Mom and Babe cross a road in Addo Elephant Park, 1997.

[Because I'm sorting through old photos in my useless effort to clean this place up. Because I can.]

I woke up today and said to myself, "It's 7:30." And it was. Darn near. How does one do that?

I did some errands. Haircut. My barber, Jane, is going to sell the shop and retire and move and get married. I hate finding someone new to cut my hair. She'll be here a few more months, but it is still upsetting. Isn't it funny how we hate change and yet embrace it.? It's inevitable anyway.

���

The Dems have announced that if the dimpled ballots they wanted counted had been counted then Gore would be president.

It's so funny. Don't they see that you could challenge such 'intentions' in polling station after polling station? The Republicans can't be blamed for accepting the result, even fighting in the courts against counting ballots that weren't properly punched and the other side's efforts to count the votes that pleased them.

Sure, Al got more votes nationwide. Sure, but for Nader, he would probably have won anyway. If you used a different system, he would have. If the Dems hadn't rousted out a bunch of indifferent Black voters, they might not have carried Florida even in their minds (and most of ours). Isn't it nice that they can identify their constituency by the color of their skin and their economic level? Or can they? But they did, according to one news report, roust out some poor blacks who had never voted for anything. In any case, it has more the whiff of chaos than thievery!

One thing I think is funny is people saying that George 'stole the election.' Sure, there were lots of weird things. But I don't think there is much evidence that George or his supporters tampered with ballots or threw them out. There is that evidence from old LBJ campaigns in our state and Kennedy's results in Illinois. Apparently.

My sympathy for Gore ended when he lost his own state, really. I never really felt any for Bush. I figured he'd be president, it was the Republicans turn to bungle that office. I don't necessarily vote based on sympathy, of course. Tax cuts sound good to me, I'll admit.

But let's be honest, shall we? Politician (who can get elected) = some kind of scum. It's just a fact. They have different limits in different areas, but they, um, have to take the road most traveled by scum bags at some point. Not everyone will have oral sex in the Oval office and lie about it. But there is gonna be some little thing hiding around that they (or the zillion people who had to REALLY get behind them) did that's really kind of low. Or illegal. Or doesn't meet your moral standards. I don't think less of Clinton because of Monica. I just think far less of all politicians than most everyone else seems to do. However, fellow on-line journal writer, Rob (see bottom of page for the campaign update), is running in 2004. Oh, sure, he's tainted by something about midget prejudice and a few journal awards, but you could do worse. In fact, we almost always do!

���

I went to the dead mall to the Beall's to look at kid's clothes. Surely they would be less designer-conscious than Foley's. Nope. Ridiculous. Came home and surfed the WEB for kid's clothes. Ridiculous prices. Think I'll send the dad and mom some money and they can go out and find what's appropriate and reasonably priced. If it exists. Thrift stores?

I do a few tasks. Reviewing old pictures on disk that I used to get before I had either a scanner or a digital camera. Seattle Film Works would send slides, floppies and prints for one price. The upside was that I could, theoretically, make polaroid transfers, put pix on the WEB and show them around. The downside was a lot of stuff piling up. Slides, floppies, negatives, prints. And, of course, I don't know where anything is if I wanted it.

I remember how thrilling it was to see Mom and Baby elephant in the game park, crossing the road in front of our tour vehicle. And the thrill of seeing all the other elephants. Pictures are nice vehicles for triggering memory. But so are journals:

"We came to a watering hole that had sixty or seventy elephants.... Babies and grownups alike were getting submerged, going head over heels. One baby got stuck in the mud and had to have a push from a bigger one."

The trip down nostalgia lane also continues with the souvenir box. I found the journal from my very first trip to Europe. 1972. Six days into the trip and I'd spent $107. I was riding the train on a Eurailpass but that included several hotels, lots of meals, beers, sodas and a guided bus tour to Neuschwanstein. I must have been keeping meticulous records in another book. I had purchased some maps and a German-English dictionary. Everything was new to me: the language, the people, the trains:

"I got up early and caught a train at 7:18 for Berchetesgaden. On the train (which had corridor type arrangement instead of compartments like the others), I sat with a German couple. He worked crosswords in a 'girlie' magazine. Had crosswords, definitions with arrows instead of the black squares and a naked girl on every page."