Monday Blockage

I have no grand unifying theme this morning, but I do have some things to report.

-My father's mother, my last surviving grandparent, died on Friday. It was a mercy; she was 91 and had been in a nursing home for at least 10 years. She had no idea who anyone was, and she has been in indescribably poor health for a long time. She was a horribly bitter woman, and had every right to be; her birth was preceded by the death of her sister Ruth, who died in infancy at age 2 or so. For much of her life, my grandmother was tormented by her own mother's opinions of how Ruth's behavior would have differed from her own. Her husband, my favored grandfather, died 15 years ago (How I Spent My Thirtieth Birthday). Her great love, my favored grandfather's brother (Grandpa started looking better after her best friend roped in my great-uncle), died about 4 years ago, the last male of his generation in my family's dynastic line.

So this woman had a relatively fucked-up life, essentially through no fault of her own. Sure, people have had far worse lives. But for a non-African American in the 20th Century, this woman had a pretty fucked-up life, although she did in fact produce my father and my uncle, two perfectly fine human beings (although in essence, her mother raised them), leading to another perfectly fine line of human beings such as myself and my brother and The Crown Princes.

The other great story about my grandmother is told of August 9, 1974, the day that Richard Nixon left the Presidency. I was at her home, across town from my mother's parents' (Nana and Papa) home; we always stayed at Mom's parents' house on our visits to the home country (Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, and nearby counties--every time I cross the county line on I-81, these words ring in my head: "Welcome Home, Little Fascist!").

Whoops. Longer story than I anticipated. So I'm dancing around gleefully, because I was, even at age 14, a dedicated agent of Communism in America. "Get out of my house, you little ingrate," snapped my grandmother, sending me on the long walk across town to my less opinionated grandparents, leaving my 9-year-old brother in her care.

Mind you, this is the almost entirely non-German side of the family.

On Thursday, my brother and I will make the long day's journey up there and back to bury my grandmother Miriam. Tim and I would be angling for the epitaph to read, "Ruth Wouldn't Have Died," but there won't be an epitaph--she'll share a names-and-dates-only headstone with my late grandfather. Her name's been on it since July 1990. It used to make for pretty odd visits to the family plot (and still does--the aforementioned great-uncle's widow survives, and her name's sitting there on his headstone awaiting the next funeral).

-In the realm of the slightly less personal, my football team sucks. How's yours?

On Saturday, I woke up more-or-less okay from my wake binge (immediately upon receiving news of a death in the family, I must fill a glass with scotch and ice and drink to Dead Marshalls, telling tales and reciting the begats; Ilse arrived at my home Friday evening to find me just embarked on this process, which lasted for three large drinks on an empty stomach--I drink, I fall down, no problem, right?), and Ilse and I headed off to College Park to pick up a couple of friends and head for the Maryland-West Virginia game. The day was supposed to be nice, and I suppose it was. It would have been nicer had we taken hats and sunscreen, because we really didn't expect a day with a solar index of a babasupermayamayagajillion. Maryland lost, heinously, horribly, stupidly; we were surrounded by gorram hillbillies in blue and yellow in our own gorram football stadium; and we now both look like cooked lobstahs. It was a nice day spent with our friends, though.

-And to the non-personal: Tim Noah of Slate tells us here about Senator Lindsay Graham's predilection for smearing Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It seems the Senator is fond of claiming to any who will listen (Fox News, mostly) that Ms. Justice Ginsburg wants to lower the age of consent to 12. This is a deliberate lie, one that even the most heinous of neo-Nazi liars are loathe to pick up on, as Mr. Noah aptly documents in his piece. Senator Graham's statement, given in the course of the Roberts confirmation hearing:

Well, there are all kind of hearts. There are bleeding hearts and there are hard hearts. And if I wanted to judge Justice Ginsburg on her heart, I might take a hard-hearted view of her and say she's a bleeding heart. She represents the ACLU. She wants the age of consent to be 12. She believes there's a constitutional right to prostitution. What kind of heart is that?

Lindsay Graham has cocksucking lips. He has the cutest little cocksucking lips in the United States Senate, and maybe in the whole Congress, since that cocksucker Bob Bauman was run out of town on a rail and back to the Eastern Shore of my own fine state to suck cocks and tell lies. It is patently obvious that this Jew-hating, race-baiting fungus of a human being is a seriously energetic cocksucker.

Lindsay Graham is also a lying sack of monkey diarrhea. I'd suggest that he be brutally anally sodomized by sailors from naval bases in his state of South Carolina, but the closeted little hypocrite cocksucker would probably enjoy it. He is unfit to serve in the United States Senate and should be run out of town on a rail, although he'd probably like that too.

I don't like theocratic fascist hypocrite liars. Do you?