Obama

This is just wonderful. Bye bye Neo-Con douchebags.

King of the Kangaroo People

But anything can happen. Do not be surprised if Friday morning's Boston Globe headline reads, "Xeitythotl, King of the Kangaroo People, ascends Glorious Throne of Buv'Tok." Well, that would be pretty fucking crazy, but it doesn't seem as crazy as planes knocking down the World Trade Center or Bush stealing the election. Or Gallagher.

I beg anyone out there with a gun of any kind, if this election is a 269-269 tie, come to my flat and blow my head off. Just do it in a cool way, like Anton Saguro from No Country for Old Men. Not with a bowling pin, like that crazy son of a bitch in There Will Be Blood.

I'm just saying, if you're going to kill me and base how you do it on a movie you saw, pick the method that will, you know, hurt me less. Think of me as a zombie and shoot me in the head.

You know what? Just scratch the whole idea, ok? Buncha fucking rubes, the lot of you.

Election Day Coverage

Earlier today I voted at the Precinct 1 polling place in my town. The crowd was above average for a big election, if memory serves. The kids in the school had a bake sale, which I thought was a clever way to raise money. One had to walk past sticky buns and hot coffee to vote.

This being a predominately white area, there were no lines and I was in and out in fifteen minutes. Reminds me of when I lost my virginity. The picture box reports long lines, and the people waiting in those lines (in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida) are mostly brown or black. I'm one of about 100 people in the whole country that thinks this is a national disgrace. It was just reported that 500 voters in an "almost all African American district" in Virginia were told to come back later, since the electronic voting machines were not working.

This may sound like hyperbole, but (mistake or not) these problems are dangerous. If Obama loses, these "kinks" will be seen very differently by various segments of the population.

Anyway, I'm beating away suicidal thoughts with drugs, the kindness of strangers, and the affection of my love. It has nothing to do with the election. I'm confident about every victory except for Question 3 (dog racing ban). For reasons that are unclear to me, vast numbers of people who wouldn't be caught dead at Wonderland Dog Park are defending dog racing. It's on the same level as cock-fighting, and I've been to Wonderland countless times. Even before I could bet, my father would take my brother and I to the races all the time.

That's how I know that Wonderland is NOT a wonderland. It feels as if it were built on an ancient Indian burial ground, next to a slaughterhouse or rank paper mill. It's the most depressing place on Earth, except for Twin Rivers in Rhode Island. That's because of what I witnessed there...a woman trying repeatedly to get a cash advance on her credit card so she could go back to the slots. I imagine that she is still there now, trying to get that cash advance. But the atmosphere is no better than Wonderland. Despair. Poverty. Terrible food. Animal abuse for fun and prizes. The patrons lurch around like those demons in Jacob's Ladder, and 3/4 of the people are wearing sweatpants.

So Wonderland is a Void, and it needs to be closed. It's fine to be pathetic, I'm all for that, but don't hurt animals or other people when doing it. My brother and I worked on the Grey2K campaign back in, of course, 2000. It failed, which shocked me, then Bush won, which shocked me. Within three years, I was at McLean's Hospital in Belmont literally getting electroshocked. It's been a shocking decade all around.

Tonight, and in the coming days, I'd like to medidate over all the right choices people made, from gay rights to marijuana legalization to the presidency. That would be nice. If McCain wins, I'll just take a deep breath and join the riots if there are any. If not, I'll enjoy watching McCain and Palin take this country right off a cliff, like Thelma and Louise.

Eve of the Vote

It's getting close to midnight and tomorrow is election day. My vote is going to Barack Obama, and the reasons are scattered throughout my posts. Linda and I have supported Obama since the early days of the campaign, when everyone assumed Hillary would get the nod. I genuinely like the man, and feel that he is decent, bright and principled. In all the best ways.

So I'll vote for him. And "No" on Question 1, and "Yes" on the other two questions.

Goodnight, everyone. I've not been in the best of health lately, but hopefully will have some more thoughts in the coming days and new posts.

Studs Terkel

Obituary of Studs Terkel. I thought of him, and will ever think of him, as an artist and political activist. A wonderful man.

CHICAGO — Studs Terkel captured the essence of Chicago in the pages of his best-selling oral histories, chronicling common people and celebrities alike.

Along the way he became an ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Terkel died Friday at age 96.

"He found his home in Chicago and he found it in the gritty aspect of Chicago life," said Russell Lewis, chief historian at the Chicago History Museum. "The ne'er-do-wells, the outcasts, the bums, all these people were people he was curious about. They intrigued him."

Dan Terkell said his father died at home, and described his death as "peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted."

"My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life," Terkell, who spells his name with an extra letter, said in a statement issued through his father's colleague and close friend Thom Clark.

Terkel was a native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its "carbuncles and warts," as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, "Touch and Go." He was a cigar and martini man, white-haired and elegantly rumpled in his trademark red-checkered shirts, an old rebel who never mellowed, never retired, never forgot, and "never met a picket line or petition I didn't like."

"A lot of people feel, 'What can I do, (it's) hopeless,'" Terkel told The Associated Press in 2003. "Well, through all these years there have been the people I'm talking about, whom we call activists ... who give us hope and through them we have hope."

The tougher the subject, the harder Terkel took it on. He put out an oral history collection on race relations in 1992 called "Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About The American Obsession," and, in 1995, "Coming of Age," recollections of men and women 70 and older.

He cared about what divided us, and what united us: death — in his 2001 "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith," and hope, in his 2003 "Hope Dies Last."

Terkel won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for "The Good War," remembrances of World War II; contrasted rich and poor along the same Chicago street in "Division Street: America," 1966; limned the Depression in "Hard Times," 1970; and chronicled how people feel about their jobs in "Working," 1974.

Said Andre Schiffrin, Terkel's longtime editor, publisher and close friend: "He liked to tell the story of an interview with a woman in a public housing unit in Chicago. At the end of the interview, the woman said, `My goodness, I didn't know I felt that way.' That was his genius."

He also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film "Eight Men Out," and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.

Terkel's politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the country suffered from "a national Alzheimer's disease" that made government the perceived enemy.

Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a tailor; his mother, Anna, a seamstress. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis would meet the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of the world.

He got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's beloved trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.

Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, studying philosophy, and also picked up a law degree. But instead of choosing law, he worked briefly in the civil service and then found employment in radio with one of his beloved "alphabet agencies" from the New Deal, the WPA Writers Project.

His early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s. From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of a national TV show, "Studs' Place," a program of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a restaurant) owned by Studs. Some viewers even thought it was a real place and would go looking for it in Chicago.

The McCarthy-era antipathy toward activists cost him his national TV outlet. But his radio interview show flourished, first at WFMT in Chicago and then, through syndication, in many markets.

Alton Miller, an associate dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago and a friend of Terkel's for more than 20 years, said Terkel hoped to live to see Barack Obama elected president.

Obama called Terkel a Chicago institution and national treasure.

"His writings, broadcasts, and interviews shed light on what it meant to be an American in the 20th century," Obama said in a statement Friday night. "He will be deeply missed by all who knew him, all who loved him, and all whose lives were enriched by the American stories he told."

In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted 60 years even though she couldn't get him to dance and always called him Louis, not Studs. "Ida was a far better person than I, that's the reality of it," Terkel later wrote of Ida, who died in 1999.

"She had a certain empathy I lack. And she was more politically active than I. ... Did she play a tremendous role in my life? Yeah, you could say so."