corner of things

Had lunch with G. at a Vietnamese sandwich shop on Clement. He'd just returned from London, wanted to tell me about his trip and hear how my summer in San Francisco was going.

He'd been in London when Romney was there. G. shook his head, said 'not too bright.' I said that I didn't like the way Romney walked, that even if I was sympathetic politically I wouldn't vote for a man who walked like that. Small mincing steps, a man at the end of a series of pulled strings.

'I know it's shallow thinking,' I said, 'but is it any shallower than thinking a corporation is an individual or an individual a corporation?' 

G said, 'I sure don't get it! The Right is all about individual rights, wanting the government to get out of their lives etc. etc, and yet they're all against permitting a woman her reproductive rights.'

I asked G. what the reaction was in London to the murders in the Colorado theatre? 'They think we're crazy,' he said.

I told him about reading a front page story in The New York Times, two days after the massacre. The owner of a gun club in Colorado told the reporter that if just one of the people in the theatre had been 'allowed to carry,' the whole disaster might have been averted.

We agreed we didn't even recognize the country we lived in any more, and that we'd have to vote for Obama again. There was really no choice.

Last night I couldn't sleep, but I felt so good I didn't worry about it. It was like I was being bathed in the golden light junkies talk about. I didn't go downstairs and read like I usually do. I stayed in bed, not minding that I was conscious and that ideas were coming at me from out of nowhere at 3 a.m. when I could have been asleep.