This will be the last post on my birthday celebrations (which are extensive here at the Snakepit Inc.), but you can still donate money for broadband if you wish. I blog via telephone! The button is in the right column, and everybody who gives gets good snake magic as a reward. It can be used to slither away from any awkward situation without bad consequences.
My very first blogpost was this one:
I am echidne of the snakes, a minor Greek goddess. You don't have to believe in me. Most days I don't believe in me, and most days I don't believe in any 'you' out there either.
It is the time for darkness. Today's blog will reflect that.
On politics, or the manner in which we decide on our common concerns: We don't seem to have common concerns. What you hate, I need to survive and vice versa. I hear that some states are becoming ever more Republican, other ever more Democrat. I hear that this means we are getting more polarized: on one side the damned liberals, on the other the funnymentalists. No middle ground can be yielded. I feel very lonely sometimes.
Then, at other times, I feel as if the two main parties here are nothing but Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Where's the actual difference? Like in chocolate brownies with and without nuts? Or in donations by the oil industry and the trial lawyers?
This paradox is real, of course, and yet it isn't. Each party is captive to its basic constituency: for the Republicans the business wallets and the fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament; for the Democrats the business wallets and the political correctness (whatever that might mean; nobody else seems to care what it means, so I won't define it either).
When election time approaches, the parties start oozing, imperceptibly at first, towards the center. This oozing speeds up, the topics suddenly stop being extremist nightmare proposals, and, lo and behold, by the date of election the remaining candidates look so similar that I'd swear they have been cloned. After the election, of course, back come the extremists and another round of the merry-go-round resumes.
Which shows a) that I am a melancholic and b) a politically moderate goddess. It also shows that I blogged politics from day one even though I didn't think I was doing so.
Hank, my chocolate Labrador retriever who has cancer, is doing fairly well. Her palliative radiation has helped. Yesterday we were wrestling and she got a really mean headbump into my jaw which is now all sorts of lovely colors. Henrietta, my black-and-white pointer, is writing a long thesis provisionally entitled The Liberation Of Dogs And Butt Biting Refined. She is as revolutionary as she always was and age has done nothing to relieve it. So I am hopeful for my own future.
This blog will have another year, I have decided. By then I should be a household word in this country and most of the rest of the world, too.