Wow, look at this! It's the second “day off” I've had in a row, but it's not really a day off - I only have to work one shift- but that feels like a day off after weeks upon weeks of working back to back 8 hour shifts. 

So I was getting caught up on emails and such and got the one about my yearly subscription being paid for by an anonymous friend. 

I honestly have no idea who you are, but thank you. After a solid six months of having a steady drip of bad news, this made my day. Literally, it's the first bit of good news I've gotten in…. I can't even remember how long. 

Sometimes it's the simplest thing that makes a difference, and this really brightened my day.

Thank you for thinking of me, whoever you are! 

Apologies in advance for being vague where details are involved- this is all very new to me and I'm just now starting to wrap my brain around it. 

Long story short: the last month or so has been excruciating for me, medically speaking. I had a few serious conditions that all appeared to be unrelated, and I'd more or less given up on ever being or feeling “normal” again. 

Two doctors, one specialist, and one surgery later, the diagnosis was strange but… Kind of comforting. 

All the separate problems I had turned out to be under the same umbrella. I have an autoimmune disease, which likely came to be in my teens, but which was unrecognized until about five years ago. 

It's very surreal. I could make a connection between my chronically bad teeth and my chronic depression but it was abstract and speculative. Now it's real. 

I'm one of the people who've been left behind by the ACA. I don't have insurance and I can't afford to purchase it. But I was incredibly fortunate to have health care professionals who cared and didn't just dismiss me outright. The internist was worried about recurring problem X, but sent me to a specialist for recurring problem Y. They had a long conversation and dug deep into my chart.

Wham! They found the problem, an obscure, only recently discovered autoimmune disease. I have every. Single. Symptom. 

I've written about my mental health issues here before, so I feel comfortable sharing this: before surgery yesterday the surgeon asked if I have depression, suicidal tendencies, and/or substance abuse issues (among other things). I was prepped for surgery so couldn't really respond other than to say “yeah,” but from the corner of my eye I saw my wife's heading nodding up and down so hard I thought she might break her neck. 

The needle entered my skin and the surgery began, and all I could think was “maybe I'll actually survive.” 

And it looks like I will.

What a long, strange trip it's been. 

It’s not as morbid as it sounds, but I love cemeteries. When I was a poor teenager, only a small field and somewhat of a hill separated my trailer park from the largest cemetery in town, and my mom’s side of the family was laid to rest (or had plots already purchased) on the side of the cemetery closest to us.

I used to hike the hill and walk down the path that led to the cemetery, and I had a little spot where I’d sit at night. Perched up there I could see the graves of my great-grandparents, their middle son, and the headstone of where my grandparents would eventually be buried. It was a moment of peace during a very tumultuous time. I never went down into the cemetery, just sat above it looking down.

My grandparents ended up not being buried there. My grandpa always wanted to be cremated, so the plan was that my grandma would be buried holding my grandpa’s ashes. But my grandma always feared being buried alive and that fear got worse as she got older. At some point they decided she would also be cremated, but they kept the plot because they wanted us to have a place to “visit” them, where everyone would know that they were married until death parted them.

I never feared cemeteries because my grandma instilled in me a reverence for them as early as I can remember. To this day there’s nothing I love more than walking through a cemetery on a fall day. It’s peaceful and pretty, and my pace can be whatever I want it to be.

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When I was twelve and my parents announced to us that they would be divorcing, the first person I called was my best friend Amy. In our little group of friends, she was the only one who also had divorced parents, and we were closest among the whole group.

That night my mom got a hotel room for us to stay in while my dad packed some of his belongings and prepared to move out of our house. The hotel has a fantastic swimming pool and game area, so it would keep us all somewhat distracted. It was also just a short walk from Amy’s house, so I met her at her house to tell her about what happened, then we got permission from her mom for her to spend the night with me, and we spent the evening swimming.

When it was time to go to sleep, my mom and sister shared one bed, my brothers another, and Amy and I made a bed on the floor (under the sink, for whatever reason). My mom had to constantly hush us because we were laughing and carrying on, and we finally fell asleep. The next morning we woke up early to swim again, and my mom was furious when she woke up. We had no time to shower, we just had to get in our clothes and get in the car so she could get us to school.

When we walked into class we reeked of chlorine, and now that we were back in the real world I was again distraught about the divorce. Some classmates commented about us smelling like a swimming pool, and Amy told them all that the night before we had stayed at my grandparent’s house. They were very rich, she explained, and had an indoor swimming pool. They let us stay up all night eating ice cream and cookies and swimming in the pool. “They’re super rich,” she exclaimed. “And they let us do anything we want whenever we want.”

The classmates believed all of this and spent the day asking more questions about my grandparents, especially if they could spend the night with us next time. I let Amy handle all the questions. She’d add more elaborate details and my classmates would “ooh” and “ahh!” And then she’d just look at me and smile.

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Now, don’t get me wrong, Amy is not all sweetness and light (and do not believe her when she tells you about the time I “locked” her in “a trunk.” It was a hatchback, it was not locked, and it was for her own protection). But we’ve been friends for so long that “friends” doesn’t even really describe it. I often say she’s more like a sister, but even that seems inadequate. If I don’t call her often enough, she leaves me a sad voicemail asking if I really want to divorce her, but she’s not at all like a wife.

She’s kind of like another part of me. I always know when something is wrong with her, even if I haven’t heard from her in a couple of weeks. I just know. And she’s the same with me. My whole life will be falling apart and right as I’m about to start crying, my phone rings.

We can sometimes drive everyone around us crazy (no one seems to appreciate our epic duet of “Making Love Out of Nothing At All,” and they actively avoid any karaoke spot if we’re both together). My wife refuses to ever visit Jackpot, NV with us again, and her husband refuses to ever go to a bar with us. (He will still go to Jackpot, but by the end of the night he will look at a security guard and say, “I do not know that woman” while looking directly at his wife.)

And, yes, there was that instance when we almost got kicked out of a hotel, and the other time when we WERE.

But other than a one-off here and there, we’re mostly pretty mellow.

Anyway, it’s been way too long since we’ve talked. We both have a lot going on and conflicting schedules. But we were finally able to catch up last night. She was telling me about her new job, and how the woman who was training her came out to her. Amy shrugged. The lady explained she had just come out to the office and some other co-workers weren't taking it very well, and Amy said she had nothing to worry about- her BFF is a lesbian.

“How did you react when she came out to you?”

“Um, honestly, I don’t even remember when she did. It didn’t matter.”

This was true, because I have no recollection of it, either. I think I just mentioned it to her while we were driving to a party; I remember her saying “that makes sense,” but then the conversation was pretty much over and nothing ever changed.

Her co-worker was surprised by this and told Amy that I must be very proud to have her as a friend. “Not really,” said Amy. “It’s just that we have so much shit on each other, at this point we argue about who is a better friend because if she ever goes to prison I will be disappointed, but I’ll still bake a shiv into a cake for her if I need to.”

Amy relayed this to me, and I said, “But I won’t bake a shiv into a cake for you. I will visit every week, and I will love you no matter what crime you committed, and I’ll probably even bake you a cake, but I won’t give you a shiv.”

She sighed. “Well, that’s the thing. My love for you is truly unconditional.”

First, the states that don’t count:

I know it's considered almost blasphemous to say on this site, but I've never been a cat person. For one thing, they're not dogs. To paraphrase someone I don't know, dog’s only flaw is that they don't live long enough.

But more than that, I'm allergic to cats. I can walk into a house that has a cat and if it's a clean house, I'll be ok but get just a bit stuffy. If that cat jumps in my lap and I pet him (and I will pet him) I'll spend the rest of the night with swollen eyes, hugging a box of Kleenex and sneezing like mad. 

So when my wife announced back in ‘12 that we were taking in the cat that she used to share with her ex, I was not pleased. I would have flat out said absolutely not but this was a special cat. He had the cat equivalent of Down's syndrome, and my wife's ex left him to her sister to take care of. The sister, classy as always, decided a year later that the cat was just too much trouble, so she was just going to toss him outside and let him fend for himself. 

I was naturally appalled by this so I compromised with Mrs BB: we’ll take the cat in as a foster until we can find him another permanent home with loving parents. 

When my wife's ex brought the cat to us, I realized it would be a tall order. He was a wreck. He couldn't clean himself- just couldn't figure out how to do it- so his hair was matted and mangy and his eyes were weepy with discharge. His bones were somewhat deformed and he could barely walk. When he did walk, he'd get stuck in the carpet because he couldn't retract his claws. 

And he was skittish and shy and didn't seem to want to have much to do with humans, so the idea of rehabilitating him seemed like an insurmountable task. 

For the first couple of weeks we had him, he hid behind the TV/entertainment center and only came out to eat and (if it was a good day) use the litter box. He'd let Mrs BB pet him and love on him for a bit, then retreat back to his hiding spot. He was reclusive and I was ok with that because as long as he stayed in his little corner of the room I only sneezed a couple times a day. I wasn’t happy (to say the least) about him relieving himself in that corner by the TV, but I understood he was scared, so I gritted my teeth, cleaned the carpet a few times a day, and accepted that this was a special cat.

Then one day I fell ill with the flu. My wife made me a bed on the living room floor before she went to work, making sure plenty of fluids and medicines were within arms reach for me. I was dozing in and out, and each time I semi-woke up, Ricky had moved a little further from his corner.

Snooooze… Here's Ricky right beneath the TV.

Snooze…. Here's Ricky between the TV and the mattress on the floor…..

Snoooooze, here's Ricky with the upper part of his body on the mattress…..

Snoooooze, what the…!!!???? Why is Ricky laying here next me?

A-choo! 

He crawled up on my chest that night, stared into my eyes, and “purred” at me. I put that in quotation marks because, like everything Ricky did, it wasn’t really a purr, it was just a strange sound coming from his throat.

From that day on, Ricky was constantly attached to me. It was difficult because I didn’t want to love the little guy but how could I not? I was still allergic, so every lovefest we had set my eyes and nose a’blazing, and he insisted on having at least two lovefests a day. I bought pet wipes in bulk so I could clean Ricky since he couldn’t clean himself,and I brushed him every day, sometimes a few times a day. I even got him to trust the litter box.

We lived in a rather large house when we took him in, and the haul from the litter box, or to where we kept his food and water, was a 45 minute trek for him. Tap, tap, tap, his paws would sound on the floor, then lie down, catch his breath. Then tap, tap, tap, lie down, catch his breath. And then he’d finally get make the journey from his litter box to the couch in 45 minutes.

After a few months, it took him seconds.

I remember the night it took him ten minutes to get from his litter box in the hallway to the couch. “Babe!” I exclaimed to my wife, “Ricky cleared the fifteen minute mark!”

And so it went. Ricky made small but progressive steps, and we delighted in all of it. Pretty soon he was strolling through the house like a champ; not necessarily swiftly like you’d expect from a cat, but steadily and with purpose, and with no need to take a break.

One day Ricky ran when he heard his food being scooped up into his dish. That little fucker RAN! It was a weird, sideways, kinda drunken run, but he ran nonetheless. Just another mark of his progress. Mrs BB was out of town when we crossed that milestone so I recorded it for her. We were both so excited, like parents of a child who had just taken his first step.

He continued to make progress. He used his litter box regularly, although he’d use it, get halfway down the hall, then make a pathetic attempt to cover his waste. Ten feet away from the litter box, Ricky would stop, give one of his mangled purrs, then start kicking his hind legs behind him as though he was doing something important.

Despite my allergies, I fell head over heels in love with this cat. At night he’d crawl up on my chest (I could write a novel about how long it took him to figure out how to get up on the couch) and purr as I wiped him down with wipes and loved on him. He’d rest his head on my chest while I did that, then sporadically lift his head to look into my eyes. But, still, his coordination was off, so his head would sway back and forth, and it was like having a little drunk cat on my belly, swaying back and forth, declaring “I love you. I really, really love you.”

One day back in ‘14, I was on the phone while Ricky was using his litter box, and the person I was talking to was going on about something and I interrupted: “Ricky’s covering his poop! In the litter box! He’s actually doing it right!” I beamed with pride the rest of the day.

He almost turned into a halfway real cat, all persnickety and such. But not quite, and my admiration for him grew in leaps and bounds.

That is what my coworker said to me the day after Trump officially became the face of the Republican Party, and this is interesting beyond the #NeverTrump movement and can be very instructive if we let it be.

It goes like this: my coworker is quite active in the Republican Party. He’s run for office, he donates, he phonebanks, he knocks on doors. He knows all of the other Republicans in town (there aren’t many of them here) and he truly believes in what the party is supposed to stand for. I, of course, heartily disagree with him about what his party stands for being a good thing, but he knows I’m a liberal and I know he’s a conservative and we both really like each other regardless of that.

So I was interested in hearing his opinion on the topic of his primary, but I didn’t want to bring it up because while he never explicitly told me who he was supporting, I know him well enough to know that he wasn’t a Trump kind of guy, and I knew it would be a sore spot for him. I figured I’d wait a couple weeks before bringing up the topic, but he ended up bringing it up himself, and this is the conversation that followed:

Republican coworker: I can’t believe what the party just did. I just can’t believe it.

Me: Y’know, as a Democrat I should be quite happy with what your party just did because it makes it so easy for us-

RCW: Well, there’s that, too-

Me: But I am absolutely horrified that this is a thing that’s happening.

RCW: You and me both. And I won’t vote for him. I absolutely won’t. And I won’t vote for any downticket candidate who doesn’t strongly disavow him and everything about him.

Me: Yeah, I’ve heard and read a lot of Republicans who say the same thing, but I don’t take it for granted because come October, you’ll all be focused on the general election and most of you will come home, so I’m going to work my ass off to make sure he absolutely cannot win.

RCW: No, that won’t happen this year, it will not happen. I can’t speak for anyone else but speaking for myself, I will never, ever cast a vote for that man.

Me: [with a skeptical look] C’mon, you’re not going to let Hillary win this thing.

RCW: Yes, yes I will. Look, there are four types of voters. There’s the left- people like you, there’s the right- people like me, and then there are the moderate or independents who lean left, and then those who lean right. Who does he bring together? Not the left, or the moderates or independents, but a fraction of the right and a fraction of the lean right.

Me: But he also won, like, every demographic in your party, including moderates and conservatives, religious and not-so-religious, rich and poor. He kind of mopped the floor with all of them.

RCW: Yes, but the base, the people like me who aren’t into this Tea Party crap, who don’t believe in populism, have rejected him. Everything he’s proposed would take more than an act of Congress and no one is going to go along for the ride. So he wins with people who think Obama is a dictator and those people are a problem for our party, and we’ll just embolden them if he wins.

Me: Okay. So, a lot of people are saying that by accepting him as the nominee, the Republican Party just openly stated that they’re putting party before country. And you’re saying that you’re doing the same, just in the opposite direction, that the only way to save your party is to stop Trump?

RCW: I’m doing both. I want to save the party from what it’s become, but I also think he’d be terrible for the country, and that’s more important to me than the party.

Me: He would bring a lot of chaos, and a country in chaos is a really bad thing because it reverberates throughout the world. That’s why he terrifies me: the racism and xenophobia and every other disgusting thing about him is enough to make me hate him, but the chaos that would ensue if he was president would be more than what this country can handle.

RCW: Chaos- that’s a good point. [Laughs] Here I’m thinking about the disaster he’d be for our party but you’re right, he’d bring chaos to a global scale.

Me: Yeah, I feel bad for republicans like you. I mean, I obviously reject everything you stand for but I would like to see a more moderated and civilized Republican Party. So, just so you know, like I said, as  Democrat I am kind of happy you did this, but as an American and citizen of the world, I’m humiliated, because I still don’t think that as Democrats we have this thing in the bag, and as a citizen that terrifies me.

RCW: As far as I’m concerned, you’ve already won this election. We blew our best chance at taking back the White House, but I think it will make our party stronger.

Me: Really? How so?

RCW: Because we’re a divided party right now, but when Hillary wins the election we’re going to unify again, and we’ll get the two groups of people- the conservatives and lean republican indies- to turn out again, and probably a lot of the lean Democrat voters, and we’ll make her a one term president. I’m willing to give her four years in the White House if it means we get a good chunk of voters back. But I’m not willing to let Trump define our party.

Me: Huh. That’s actually not a bad idea. Your party is usually the “win at all costs” crowd no matter what, but playing the long game with this election isn’t a terrible idea. But I still don’t believe you’ll stay home in November.

RCW: [Laughs] You just watch.

At this point I started getting ready to leave, and as I was leaving I told him, “hey, if it makes you feel any better, I wasn’t in love with any of my candidates, either.”

“It doesn’t make me feel any better, but let’s talk again in 2020 and see who feels better then.”

For obvious reasons, this is not something I disclose often (although I’ve made a few comments about it), but I am was friends with one of the threeper people. Y’all Qaeda. VanillaIsis. I had no idea she was involved with that group but it didn’t surprise me that she was. When the last rounds of arrests were made, I woke up to the news that the father of her children had been arrested. I laughed, and said “I had no idea she was a member of VanillaIsis.”

At first she was fairly reasonable and sensible about the situation. She was mad at him for getting arrested over something stupid, so I had a decent amount of sympathy for her. But then she started getting involved with his case and surrounding herself with the terrorists that he palled around with and…. it went downhill quickly, and our friendship has suffered because of it.

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You know the drill:

Yep, if there were a prob, she’d know.

Except there is a problem, and it’s a big one. An increasingly small number of Americans claim that their rights are being infringed whenever we speak of common sense gun control measures. And they are particularly aggrieved that they, as responsible gun owners, are being targeted in some nefarious way.

But here’s the thing:

If you oppose common sense* and practical proposals, you are not responsible.

You’re not a responsible gun owner. Period.

You’re not a responsible American, and you’re not a responsible human being.

The same way I couldn’t claim to be a responsible drinker as I lash out at anyone who suggests that maybe a 13 year old shouldn’t get drunk, you can’t claim you’re a responsible gun owner while saying that people on the No Fly List should be able to purchase an AR-15.

I can’t say I’m a responsible driver if I say that people who are legally blind should not have their license revoked.

And I can’t say I’m a responsible drinker, or a responsible driver, if I fight against DUI laws.

So you don’t get to say you’re a responsible gun owner if you don’t even respect your guns enough to know what an awesome responsibility it is to own a gun.

Now, I am not anti-gun. Many, many people I know own guns. And you know what? They mirror the rest of the U.S: Nine out of ten believe that there is no rational reason for, nor inherent right to, owning an AR-15. One out of ten believe that the simple fact that someone even has that opinion is an infringement of their rights.

My uncle is a responsible gun owner. He owns several guns and they’re all for hunting purposes. Several years ago he bought a new safe because his was a bit too small, and he didn't feel that it was locking properly enough to be truly secure. He had a hunting trip planned, got all loaded up and ready to go, then went to retrieve his guns from his safe and…. could not remember the combination to unlock it.

He tried calling the guy he bought it from. There was no answer so he left a message, went back downstairs and had a beer while he fiddled with the combo again. Nothing. So he went upstairs, watched the news, had another beer. As he cracked open his third one, the previous owner returned his call. The previous owner stayed on the phone with him while he opened the safe, then walked him through the instructions on how to change to combo. He wrote the instructions down along with the new combination and finished his third beer.

And since he had a few beers, he locked the safe again and decided to postpone hunting until the next day. When his wife got home he sheepishly explained why he wasn’t hunting as planned. They had a laugh about it and my uncle told her he was going to leave the instructions/combo for the safe on the fridge so it didn’t happen again. She (who owns half of the guns in the house), rolled her eyes and reminded him that there was no point in having a safe if the instructions for opening it were in plain sight. So they hid the paper in an undisclosed location and my uncle went hunting the next day.

My uncle believes that the people who own AR-15s and the like are exactly the type of people who should not. It troubles him that the most ardent 2nd Amendment people seem to be the most unhinged and paranoid. Like, what could possibly go wrong when a paranoid conspiracy theorist has a gun that can kill dozens of people in seconds?

(My uncle is not the only gun owner I know and love who takes this attitude, but I find that the story about his safe is instructive.)

He believes that because he is an actual responsible gun owner. He understands what responsibility means- and part of that is having respect for what you are responsible for. What’s wrong with waiting periods and background checks? We all know when hunting season starts, so purchase a gun before the day you need it. You’re legit, right? Because the only reason you’d be pissed about the waiting period is because A) you need the gun immediately which is a scary prospect, or B) you know you’re not going to pass the background check. 

This is why responsible gun owners support these things.

And this is why anyone who feels guns should flow more freely to anyone who wants them is exactly as responsible as someone who sits at a bonfire and proposes that gasoline would make this whole thing better.

So, we had a new guy start at work. He’s an okay guy but a little bit overly… enthusiastic, I think, is the word.

I’ll just be completely honest and say that he annoys me- he likes to talk a lot and I’m not into that. At all. And since we work with the public all day and have to put on happy faces (something I haven’t done in years- I’ve spent the last decade and a half working alone in a cubicle), I crave moments of silence. I have to make small talk with people all day long and it exhausts me.

This guy (I’ll call him Mac [and all other names have been changed to protect the guilty/innocent]), is on my last nerve. And it only slightly has to do with what I’m about to tell you.

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It has been 4 years (!) since I lived in Boise (minus the couple of months I lived there last year before the world’s biggest idiot totaled my car). I miss it a lot. I miss commuting to work by bike or bus (although I can walk to work since leaving Southern Idaho). I miss stopping at a local restaurant on my way home from work and having a micro-brew beer; I miss going to the Boise Co-Op and getting fresh, reasonably priced, delicious food. I miss gay bars and authentic Basque food and Art in the Park and BeerFest and every other event that fills our parks through the summer. I miss almost everything about being in an urban environment. 

But the thing I miss the most right now about that urban environment is ANONYMITY.

We did a brief stint in Southern Idaho (which is about as appealing as genital warts- and between you and me if I had the option to move back or contract an STD… well, I’d stay where I am right now), and now we’re in Central Idaho, which is absolutely beautiful and a cozy place to live a few months of the year.

But it’s also really crowded during the Summer and Winter months. My mother-in-law manages a hotel here, so we always have requests from family and friends to visit with a discount (because most working people can’t afford a weekend here without a deep discount) and besides that, it’s just a tourist trap. People come from literally all over the world to stay here for a week or two to either ski (in the Winter) or hike/mountain bike (in the Summer). We get a reprieve from late March/Early April to about July 4th (the locals call it “slack”) and post-Labor Day to pre-Thanksgiving. Other than that, this town of 3,000 suddenly swells to up to 40,000, with all the headaches that influx of people brings.

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Ninety-six years ago today, this happened:

The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex. It was ratified on August 18, 1920. Until the 1910s, most states disenfranchised women. The amendment was the culmination of the women's suffrage movement in the United States, which fought at both state and national levels to achieve the vote. It effectively overruled Minor v. Happersett, in which a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give women the right to vote.

Many things have shaped who I am politically, but nothing has ever had more of an impact on me than reading Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. (If you haven’t read that book, I command you to do so now! The PBS documentary was good, but the book is astounding.)

I was, very fittingly, 19 years old when I read that book and, put very simply, it radicalized me. The person who turned the first page of that book was a shifty, directionless, disaffected, and hopeless young lady. The person who clung to very last word of the very last page was a focused, passionate, dedicated woman. It would take several posts to describe how drastically different the 20 year old me was from the 18 year old me, and I like to think that it’s pretty damn cool that it was my nineteenth year when I learned about the nineteenth amendment and shifted from dogmatic and confusing Idaho political mainstream to the far left.

More on that after the fold but first, a word from our sponsors!

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I’m in a bad habit of bashing my hometown, especially online. Before income inequality became a thing most people acknowledged, I felt it acutely during Junior High, where my friends and I were very poor, but going to the junior high where most of the rich kids went. We called it prep school, even though it wasn’t, and we really hated the preps.

(Remember the lunch lady that was fired for paying for needy student's lunch? That didn’t happen at my school, but at the school that we had the largest rivalry with, and the school that I wanted to transfer to because it had fewer preps.)

To be fair, when I was less than a year old my very young parents bought a house in a “sprawl” area, and it was a largely homogeneous neighborhood right out of Leave it to Beaver, so I had a pretty beautiful childhood up until the age of nine when we moved. But the memories from ages nine to sixteen are the ones that stick with me, and for that reason I’ve always hated my hometown.

More on that but first, a word from our sponsors:

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So, as some of you may know, my wife works at (and now actually manages) a hotel. We’ll call her B, because that’s what I do. Most of the housekeepers at the hotel are immigrants, and very few of them can speak English. This sometimes causes some problems, but usually everything runs smoothly.

Yesterday was a day when the language barrier caused a big problem.

One of the housekeepers, I’ll call her Sophia, came to B in the middle of the day looking absolutely awful. B couldn’t make out most of what Sophia was saying, but the basic gist was that she felt sick and needed to go home. B didn’t think much of this but was a little worried because Sophia was acting so weird and never calls in or goes home sick.

About an hour later, another housekeeper came to the office in a panic. “Emergency! Emergency!” B followed the housekeeper downstairs where another housekeeper, we’ll call her Betty, was incredibly sick. She was drenched in sweat, pale as a ghost, and speaking gibberish. B only knew she was speaking gibberish because she asked the housekeeping manager, Marta, to translate, and she responded “I don’t know! No sense! No sense!”

B called 911, directed Marta to (VERY CAREFULLY) go check out the last room Sophia and Betty cleaned (they had been working together) and look for anything suspicious. Then she took Betty’s blood pressure while they waited for the EMTs. It was crazy low, and Betty was now just sobbing and praying.

Finally the EMTs arrived. One of them was bilingual and able to ask Betty questions. At one point, Sophia pointed at a shelf. The EMT walked over to said shelf and picked up a can of chocolates. Looking it over, his face changed. “Oh, honey,” he said to Sophia. “You’re high as a kite!”

He handed the can to my wife. It was clearly marked “Medical Marijuana,” but neither Sophia nor Betty read English well enough to make out THAT distinction, so they finished almost the entire can.  A guest had left it behind in their room and the housekeepers thought they were just eating some sweets.

Sophia came back to work today but says she feels very sleepy. Betty called in and my wife was more than okay with that, after having her own experience with edible marijuana a few years ago.

And Marta is reminding all of the housekeepers that when a guest leaves something behind, it goes to the lost and found. Even if it’s just a can of chocolates.

Sitting in my hotel room, drinking coffee, playing online.

The sounds of a mild argument from what sounds like the room above me start escalating, then fade into the background.

Suddenly it’s not an argument anymore; there are blood-curdling screams coming from the room. I  go out into the hallway and realize it’s the people next to me.

I  head towards the front desk and a few doors down a woman exits her room with her phone in her hand, staring in the direction of where the fight is coming from. “I was on my way to the front desk,” I tell her. “I thought it was upstairs until I got out here and realized it was next door. I’m going to have them call the police.”

She frowned. “I’ve already called the front desk. They don’t seem to care.”

Screams fill the air between us. “He’s going to kill her.”

We look at each other, look back towards the door where the screams and bangs are coming from. She says “this happened before, a couple weeks ago, he beat the shit out of her and got arrested. I was the only one who called the cops. Everyone keeps telling me to mind my business. I can’t.”

I nod. “I grew up in a house where this sort of thing happened. I don’t take it lightly.”

Our eye contact tells the story between us. “Same,” she says.

Another scream fills the hallway.

“don’t do this, please don’t do this, you know you don’t have to baby, please stop….”

I get to the front desk. “The man in 222 is killing his wife or girlfriend. You need to call the police. Now.”

The front desk agent nods. “Yeah, I got another complaint about that-”

“Call the fucking police right now.”

“Oh, okay. I have no problem doing that. I can do that.”

“Then why didn’t you when you got the first call or heard the screams?”

He plays with his phone for a second, then speaks meekly into it, “I’d like to report a domestic disturbance.”

I head back to my room but stop at 222, where the beating is taking place, and stand outside the door. She is telling him that it’s okay. It’s okay, she’ll never do it again, and she’s sorry she made him do it.

I want to stick around for the police so I can tell them how violent it was, but I also can’t stick around because I think I can’t breathe.

Howdy, folks! How’ve you all been? Me? Oh, I’m okay. Fascism, schmascism, just SSDD, amirite?

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No, this isn’t about someone bringing me fat stacks of cash in exchange for some dirty deed, but if you’ve got a suitcase full of Benjamins that you need to drop, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

More on this in a moment, but first let’s hear from our sponsors who swear they are non-profit and have impeccable hygiene:

Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!

When we go live, it’ll be 97 hours.

More on this in a second, but first a note from our always timely sponsors:

Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!

There was a diary on the rec list this morning titled Trump Quietly Handed Early Defeat on Trade. I don’t have a (ahem) beef with that post, but it was a little light on details and many people in the comments section had more questions than answers. Meanwhile, I was just geeking out on the topic, doing my best to explain what I could.

So I figured I’d kill time by explaining more in depth what happened and why it happened, and a bit more on the trade policies at play here.

(Please note that some of the links I might provide will discuss different types of milk and milk product and many of them will have different abbreviations and/or descriptors. That’s somewhat important, but not important enough to for me to go into detail about here. For the purpose of this discussion, just think of it all as milk product. If you’re not exporting it, it’s not a critical distinction.)

I don't know about the the rest of you, but I’m all trumped out. I spent a good month after the election actively avoiding news, and I only dip my toe in here and there on occasion. I just have to preserve what’s left of my sanity, you know?

But when I do check the news, it’s all the same. Trump, Russia, Syria, Comey, Trump, Russia, deportations, Trump, Russia, OMG I can’t believe I voted for this guy, and coming up next on the news at 5, another tale about the sad sack who voted for Trump but didn’t expect THIS.

Sigh.

So tonight, we’ll focus on other news.

Right after a word from our sponsors who are most certainly getting CNN breaking news alerts as I type:

Here at Top Comments we strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!