I have Libertarian friends who think Ron Paul has a chance at the GOP nomination… My intuition is that they are engaging in wishful thinking. My best guess is Romney will take it, but I’m hoping for Cain, for 2 reasons:

1. It would be kind of awesome to have 2 black candidates for President of the United States; and
2. I like the idea of Obama going up against McCain and then Cain… it would confuse future schoolchildren.

But should my guess prove correct, and Paul lose the Republican nomination, where would that leave him? He’s garnered quite a lot of support in some polls, and that might encourage him enough to consider splitting off again to run as an independent. After all, he is 76 years old, and may not have that many more chances to run (though he’s pretty spry), so he may as well throw it all in the ring for 2012. (Why independent and not Libertarian? He’s already got the Libertarian vote, and independent status might get him a few people who wouldn’t vote strict Libertarian… it’s a safer label.)

I would love this.

It would split the conservative vote between the Republican nominee (let’s say Romney) and Paul, and hand another term to Obama. It’s not that I think Obama is perfect, far from it; he’s too conservative or moderate for my taste, and I don’t like his persisting in these ridiculous wars, failing to revoke the expansion of Presidential powers, re-signing the PATRIOT act, failing to hold banks accountable, and many other weak moves. But I still support him in general, and I think he’s doing a pretty good job under very trying circumstances not of his making. I support Obama’s jobs bill, and raising taxes on millionaires; I even support him raising taxes on me, and I’m solidly middle class. And I think we need another Obama term to see his efforts really bear fruit, and to give the economy a chance to recover.

But that’s not what excites me about the idea of a Ron Paul schism from the GOP. With his seeming popularity among an increasing number of people, and the coming ugly break-up of the Tea Party and Republicans, and similar disillusionment on the left, it might increase the dissatisfaction with our two-party duopoly, and pave the way for voting reform where it is easier for multiple parties to credibly run for President.

The current system is a crock, where no matter if a Republican or a Democrat wins, the Republicans and Democrats win, and both parties have too much incentive to keep this convenient arrangement that neither will work to reform it, and neither will stray too far from the policies of the other. This race to the bottom is driving us away from real issues and further and further to the right (which is not right).

The simple fact of the matter is that a country of over 300,000,000 people must by necessity have more than 2 opinions on any given subject, so 2 parties can’t really represent their views with any degree of accuracy or subtlety. So, as a result, the “national dialog” consists of hand-picked non-topics that are blown out of proportion by the media, because that’s the only thing that the established parties will discuss. We need more diversity of voices in Washington; for that, I appreciate Ron Paul actually having the nerve to say things that push the boundaries of what Republican voters might want to hear (even if I think his particular stances are nonsensical sophistry or cynical manipulations).

And worse yet, this false black-or-white, uncompromising, your-team-vs-my-team bullshit isn’t just wasting our time and money, it’s actively driving a wedge between Americans, radically polarizing us into knee-jerk offense and defense, resulting in a fruitless stalemate. When I talk one-on-one to self-identifying Republicans, and get past the rhetoric to the real issues and real values, I usually find we think fairly similarly… we mostly disagree on execution of those ideas, and on personalities of the politicians; but I know that once we leave that personal, human conversation, the media machine will hammer at us relentlessly until we forget that point of similarity and solidarity. We too easily devolve into slogans and talking points, reaction against the banality of the opposing politicians’ public statements and stances.

We need more than two political parties, to baffle that echo chamber. We need new voices diverging and disagreeing, then coming to compromise, then pushing new ideas into the political arena, and that won’t happen when it’s just two talking heads shouting each other down. But right now, it takes a tremendous effort and a fortune to try to get on the ballot in each state; state-controlled ballot access means that even if a third party could get enough momentum and campaign donations to have a real shot, they blow that money and energy just trying to get on the ballot, while the Democrat and Republican candidates use their money to influence voters directly. This is only one of many reasons why “States’ Rights” advocates are dangerously naive; issues like this, which affect national elections, should be decided at the federal level.

Of course, lowering the bar for additional parties to be on the ballot, as difficult as it might be, is only one step. Even when they are there, the best they can do is deflect votes from one of the other candidates, as Nader did from Gore in 2000, and as I hope Paul does from Romney in 2012 (though honestly, I think could just barely live with Romney as President… just not Paul, Cain, Sanctimonious, Perry, or that one lady with the creepy crazy eyes… no, no, the other one).

What we would also need is the ability for people to make real and direct choices in who they want as President (and for Congress)… not simply pick the lesser of two evils, but rank them according to how well that candidate matches their own preferences, how well each candidate represents that voter’s views. This is nothing new… we’re one of the last first-world nations that still uses the first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all ballot system, when what we need is a more sophisticated ranked voting system, where if your first choice of candidate doesn’t have enough votes to win, your vote is counted instead for your next choice, then on down the line, until one candidate is the candidate that the most people can live with. Then, an alternative party candidate might actually stand a chance of winning… and even if they didn’t, it would disrupt the carefully-controlled unequilibrium that the duopoly enjoys, so we could at least hear those new voices.

But could this happen? Could a national referendum on voting reform actually bloom? Well, I can imagine a scenario where it might. Obama is limited to one more term, and I have a feeling that he’s going to be more aggressive during his last term… he has less to lose. So, he could well support such an effort, on the basis that if a Republican wins in 2016, they will try to dismantle his reforms… so he’s better off trying to widen the field, on the chance that a it would yield a less clear “mandate” for destroying what he had built just to score one more point in political pong.

Right now, the duopoly strategy against us is winning: they divide and conquer. It’s a proven principle that we need to apply the in reverse: we need to divide ourselves into many parties, so we can conquer them.

This is just a simple essay on how I see the world, and how I came to that view, the first in a set of posts I’m labeling philosophy. There’s no real point to it, no political or technical agenda… just some reflection and thinking out loud. I’ve never formally studied philosophy, and I’m sure these thoughts are probably not particularly original, but I arrived at them organically through my own life, in what passes for wisdom. Megan, my wife, laughs at me whenever I start a sentence with “I have a theory…”; apparently, I have a lot of theories. I have an active imagination, and I’m very opinionated; I like to try to figure out how the world works.

The way the mind works fascinates me in particular, and my understandings and beliefs about it have changed and evolved significantly through my adult life. I’m recording these thoughts now for the entertainment of some future me.

Many years back, in my late 20s, I came up with a sort of metaphor for how people talk to one another that I called the Third Person. I reckoned that we don’t really talk to each other at all. I have my model of how you think, and act, and feel, and you have your internal model of me. When I talk to you, when I gauge your reaction and adjust what I’m saying or doing, I’m actually judging my own flawed perception of you, of how I guess that you are reacting; you are doing the same with me. In a very real sense, we are each engaging in internal dialogs.

But really, my model of you is much more me than it is you.

Together, your model of me, and my model of you, act as a collective, composite intermediary for our discussion, for all our interactions: the Third Person. An external entity that is a sort of gestalt synthesis of how each of us tries to understand the other. We each talk to the Third Person, and the Third Person tells us the other’s reply.

Usually, we aren’t even really aware that we aren’t actually talking directly to each other; we’re almost completely taken in by the illusion. The Third Person is a skilled translator.

Functionally, that third person is there to help us communicate, but sometimes it can get in the way. I act differently around different people, and I tend to be relatively consistent with any given person or group… much of that is bound up in past interactions, in expectations of behavior (how I expect you to behave, and how I expect you want me to behave). Those expectations can lead to a much more limited personality than either of us have really developed. The Third Person’s personality is often quite different than my personality and your personality. The Third Person can also accentuate and enhance relationships; it can put us into a frame of mind that we don’t normally use in our day-to-day lives; some of my favorite, most inspiring times are getting together with old friends and having a reunion with our Third Person.

(Just for the record, in case this strikes you as solipsistic or schizophrenic, I do believe in an objective reality; by definition, that which we call reality is reality. But I also believe that that reality is mediated in ways we don’t understand.)

I’ve always been a reader, mostly fiction (sometimes even literature), and in my teens, reading books by Vonnegut and Brautigan and Robert Anton Wilson really shaped how I saw myself and my place in the world. So, it amused me to call my metaphor the Third Person, after the third-person narrative view; it fit well, since it was an omniscient view of a dialog, outside of any of the speakers.

I didn’t really put the metaphor of the Third Person into praxis in my everyday life… it was just an interesting observation, one of hundreds of thoughts that occurred to me, not a way to lead my life. But it resonated with me, and looking back, it was the first tangible seed of one of my central operational beliefs: mental models. I’ll write about that some other time.

Last week, Megan and I went to the opening ceremony of the first electric vehicle charging station in North Carolina, on the corner of W. Hargett and Dawson in Raleigh.

Megan wrote up a short blog post about it, and we talked about what this might mean for the future of our national infrastructure.

We have a Prius, so if we got an electric car (I like the Nissan Leaf, and not just because they use SVG on their site), we would probably use the hybrid for longer trips, so we could refuel easily. But in 10 years, that might change. Since it takes around half an hour to fully charge modern electric cars using the class 3 charger (the heavy-duty one), and 4-6 hours using a class 2 charger, electric road-trippers will need something to do while they wait. Megan mentions this in her blog:

Would owners of this type of business be motivated to install charging stations as a way to attract customers and hold them captive while their car is charging?

I could see a whole new class of businesses that cater to waiting customers, that charge the charging, so to speak: movie theaters, theme parks, mini-zoos, gaming parlors (multiplayer videogames or casinos or both), strolling gardens… activities that emphasize a more leisurely pace of travel. The return of the roadside attraction!

Here’s to the retro-future!

The theme of last week’s episode of Glee was religion and atheism. To their credit, they approached it playfully and even a bit irreverently, with Billy Joel’s Only The Good Die Young and one character making wishes on a Grilled Cheesus like it’s a djinni bottle. They even revealed that two of the characters on the show were atheists, which is an unusual and maybe even brave move, even if only as a plot device.

So, kudos to Glee for even raising the topic of atheism. It’s a topic that most shows, especially ones that take themselves more seriously, avoid like the plague. They even raised the problem of theodicy: if there really is a loving, merciful, all-powerful God, why is there such profound misery and suffering in this vale of tears? Maybe the lightness of the show in general let them risk pushing some buttons in this apparently very religious country. The episode was timely, too, on the heels of Pew Research Center’s recent U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, where atheists came out on top in knowledge of religion, and the atheist characters in the show certainly had the most eloquent refutations of religious faith.

So… that’s what I liked about it.

(Warning, spoiler alert!)

Here’s what I didn’t like about it.

They punted on the character choices for the atheists, making the two most conflicted, unsympathetic characters the non-believers. One was the openly gay character, Kurt, who is narcissistic, selfish in the extreme, and supercilious. The other was, of course, the malicious and conniving cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester, the show’s over-the-top villain everyone loves to hate. I will concede that these are two of the most entertaining characters, but nevertheless, they paint atheism in a poor light. It perpetuates the myth that atheists are selfish, rude, and immoral… we give to charity, we work hard, we help people in need, we befriend strangers, we believe in the inherent goodness of people (at least many of us do), and we don’t mind that other people have different beliefs than we do.

Oh, wait… I’m talking about Glee. Maybe I should at least try to be entertaining, so I’ll do it Glee-style, with pop-song interludes:

There's nothing so pure
as the kindness of an atheist...
A simple act of unselfishness
that never has to be repaid.
  

Freakwater, Gone to Stay

(As an aside, I didn’t think the music was very strong in this episode, aside from a clever and touching repurposing of the Beatles’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand reflecting Kurt missing his dad. One thing religion usually has going for it is the music, so I would have expected a more engaging set list… they have a few thousand years of material to draw from.)

Another weak point is that both the atheists tell how they lost their faith: they saw bad things in the world that a merciful God wouldn’t allow, personal tragedy, theodicy in miniature:

I won't believe in heaven and hell,
no saints, no sinners, no Devil as well.
No pearly gates, no thorny crown.
You're always letting us humans down:
The wars you bring; the babes you drown;
Those lost at sea and never found.
And it's the same the whole world 'round.
The hurt I see helps to compound
that Father, Son and Holy Ghost
is just somebody's unholy hoax,
And if you're up there you'd perceive
that my heart's here upon my sleeve.
If there's one thing I don't believe in,
it's you... dear God.
 

XTC, Dear God

But frankly, theodicy is a bit trite. Theodicy is just about the least risky argument against belief in a god, since it’s so easy to fall back on the safe, standard religious refutation: “God works in mysterious ways” (as if that really addressed it). But even if it were a stronger argument, it’s not relevant. I’ve only rarely heard any atheist actually cite that as the reason they stopped believing in God… it’s just a chestnut that gets rolled out in debates, only a conflict to someone who believes in God; to me, atheism is a positive world-view that matches what we know of the world, not a negation of a paradox. Finally… theodicy is just not very interesting or original as a plot device; it doesn’t go anywhere, doesn’t say much about the characters, and doesn’t open any new doors, though they use it as a weak humanization of the coach.

I don’t know why the show’s producers made the choices they did. Maybe it truly reflects the views of the writers; fair enough, that’s what morality plays do. Maybe they were pandering to what they perceived as their demographic. Maybe it was a cynical and simple calculation on the trouble they’d encounter if they took a bolder stand… boycotting, condemnation, and so forth. But for a show whose cast and audience is made up of iconoclasts, misfits, and outcasts, it struck a wrong note with me. About 9% of Americans don’t believe in God… and that’s just those willing to stand up and be counted; I suspect the real numbers are probably closer to Canada’s 19–30% non-believers, but it’s not easy for everyone to go against the grain. I don’t know how many of them watch Glee, but maybe the producers should take that into consideration.

Finally, at the end of the show, while neither of the atheists completely recants, they reverse their previous positions and “open their minds”, while all the other characters continue on as they have been with faith intact. If this show had been about homosexuality or ethnicity, or even another religion (with the possible exception of Islam), there’s no way they would have ended the show they way they did, with the two dissenting characters disabused of their wrong-headed notions, and made to see the moral value of go-along-to-get-along. Can you even imagine a modern TV show where two black characters come around to believe they really are inferior to whites—and it’s portrayed as a virtue? Or where two Mormons or Catholic or Jews are convinced they are wrong and turn Baptist? But to be fair, the big difference is that, unlike atheism, neither homosexuality nor ethnicity is a choice. And most people probably don’t consider religion—or lack of religion—to be a choice. Maybe that’s the problem.

Or maybe I should just keep quiet, and let religious extremists (be they Christian, Jewish, or Muslim) dictate terms about the entire national dialog, where any mention of atheism has to be cast as a point of controversy, while those same extremist groups get special rights, like not paying taxes, stopping science and history from being taught in schools, and justifying violence and war. I don’t think religion has any monopoly on morality.

I’m not ready to make nice,
I’m not ready to back down.
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round.
It’s too late to make it right —
I probably wouldn’t if I could,
‘cause I’m mad as hell,
and can’t bring myself
to do what it is you think I should.
 

Dixie Chicks, Not Ready To Make Nice

And here I am, falling myself for the classic “angry atheist” stereotype. But really, I’m not angry… I just enjoy a good argument. I’m actually a fairly happy guy, with a great job where I help folks through improving the Web and get to travel a lot, good friends, good health, and a wonderful fiance. I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid major tragedy in my life, and I’m not an atheist because something bad has happened to me, but because I think the world is beautiful and fascinating and intricate and too complicated to dismiss with a creation myth that was dreamed up millennia ago, and if people are flawed, it’s because we are the children of this world, not because of some original sin we can’t rise above.

Alice, the world
is full of ugly things
that you can't change;
pretend it's not that way...
that's my idea of faith.
You can blow it off,
and say there's good
in nearly everyone;
just give them all a chance.
  

Ben Folds Five, Alice Childress

I don’t think this episode of Glee is part of a big conspiracy against atheism, and I recognize that the producers or writers of Glee at least tried. I’m not going to call for some boycott or jihad… I’ll keep watching and enjoying the show, and hope that they are a little braver or more original if the topic arises again. I just wish they’d made different choices for this episode. We atheists value patience, and rationality, and forgiveness, and we are in it for the long haul.

But I'm not sad, I'm just disappointed
And I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed

And you're not lost, you're just misdirected.
And we're not going, oh, nowhere...
 

The Frames, Disappointed

Today has been a good day for launches! In my last post, I mentioned the successful launch of the W3C Audio Incubator Group, which I’ve been working on for a few weeks.

The second launch is a bit more visceral. When I realized that there would only be a few more space shuttle launches, Megan and I decided that we would try to see one if we could. This occurred to me about a month ago, but I wasn’t sure we could fit it into our schedule. But this week, Megan had to cancel a long biketrip, and that opened up a spot for us to drive down. So, we drove ten and a half hours to Cape Canaveral, slept a few hours in a cheap hotel, and got up early (for us, 8:00 AM is really early) to drive to Jetty Park, which was already crowded by the time we got there.

But we still landed a good spot right on the waterfront across from the launch site. A few low clouds threatened the launch early on, but it cleared up by early afternoon. A passing Korean car cargo ship gave us a little anxiety, fearing it might block the view, but it cleared in plenty of time.

Finally, the countdown blared out of someone’s radio, and the whole waterfront chimed in. 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…

We were pretty far away, but the rocket flame was impressively bright in person, and when the sound reached us, we could almost feel it. This is the final flight of the Atlantis, which makes me a bit sad. I’m ambivalent about retiring the shuttles… single-launch rockets are probably a cheaper option… still, it’s drawing to the end of an era, and I hope we keep pushing forward. Gauss-gun launch rails, anyone?

So, it was a successful launch, which makes me glad. Definitely worth the trip.

We did come away from it with reddened, painfully sensitive skin. I assert that this is rocketburn, not sunburn. Need a higher Rocket Protection Factor next time.

Last night I saw a 12-minute short film by an old friend, Michael Babbitt, playing at his local church.  Years back, Michael was foolhardy enough to let me be an extra in some of the plays put on by the Open Door Theatre company, which he co-founded, and in which he acted and directed.  Seeing him again really threw my mind back to the turn of the century.

My first stage appearance was as the Majordomo (butler) in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the original play by Christopher Hampton on which the movie Dangerous Liaisons was based.  As a side note, when I was in my early 20s, I bore a remarkable resemblance to a young John Malkovitch (who starred in said movie)… I say remarkable, because people remarked on it all the time, once even in a small cafe in southern France when I was hitchhiking around Europe.  The production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses was directed by Rob Kramer.  I supplied my own costume, since for some reason I have a tux with tails.  We ran for 3 weekends in September 2001 at the Carrboro ArtsCenter… attendance was down because of the September 11 terrorism, and everyone was numb.

My next and last role was was Curio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (or What You Will), in which I had a staggering 4 lines (I spoke a few sentence in the previous play as well).  We opened January 2nd, 2002 and ran for 3 weeks (including on Twelfth Night itself, the fifth or sixth of January (there is apparently some confusion, but we played both nights).  I recall having to practice on New Year’s Eve, then rushing down to the coast to celebrate with my girlfriend and some mutual friends at a beach house.  Michael directed this one, and it was set in a sort of dystopian future.  I supplied my costume for this one as well, a white bunnysuit I’d picked up from when I worked as a greenhouse grower, where we used them when spraying fungicides.

Before and after my brief stint on the boards, I helped the troupe out in various ways, selling tickets and concessions in the lobby for performances, and doing other odd jobs.  My connection was Michael, who I’d met a few years before at a used bookstore, and who I played RPGs with.  Oddly enough, Michael and I had both lived in Columbia, Missouri at the same time years before, and had several mutual friends, but never met until we both moved to Chapel Hill.  Michael gave me my first lesson in coding HTML, back in the last decade of the last century, but he’s since moved on to physical therapy.  Probably a healthier choice…

So, it was interesting seeing Michael transition from acting and directing plays to producing and directing short films.  At the premiere, I saw a few other theater folks I’d met through Open Door, and had not seen for many years, which was a real pleasure.  Dante Walker, a monstrous hulk with a wicked scar on his face, whose appearance is belied by his humble and gentle character (he should be on TV, he’s a good actor).  Caroline, the stage manager.  Krista, Michael’s wife and rock. Melissa Lozoff, an actress with a magician husband, who starred in the short film.  But when I looked around for our friend Anthony, the theater company’s dramaturg and another gaming buddy, I didn’t see him; Michael announced that he was in the hospital, having just been diagnosed with cancer.  That was a bitter moment.  Anthony is a clever guy and a good person, and I’ll have to go see him in the hospital.

So strange how we lose touch with friends, how we all follow our separate paths, and how things all get tangled up in our lives and in our minds.  How do years go by, and things change so much, in what seems so short a time?

For the Fouth of July, America’s Independence Day, here’s a poem by Oscar Wilde, from 1881:

Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,—
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea,—
And give my rage a brother——! Liberty!
For this sake only do thy dissonant cries
Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings
By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades
Rob nations of their rights inviolate
And I remain unmoved—and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some things.

Last year, I noticed that my blog had lost all its styling… I was busy with other things at the time, preparing for my presentation at WWW2008 (and my subsequent vacation in China), juggling cats, and so forth, so I didn’t really fret about it. I thought it was probably just my host temporarily flaking out.

But when I futzed around with it, I noticed that if I changed themes, the styling came back. Hmmm. But again, didn’t think much of it. Well, it had been hacked, and hacked good. I rebuilt the theme from scratch, and that seemed to fix it (the hacker had injected some hundreds of fascinating links inside the header and footer templates). But for some reason, nobody could leave comments anymore, and some of my posts had disappeared. Days turned into weeks turned into months… and Google let me know that my site was still hacked in some mysterious manner that honestly doesn’t interest me much, but which had a pragmatic downside: they removed my site from their index. Simple fix, they said: just uninstall your site and start from scratch.

For a while, I just put my excess energy into my twits (other people may have “tweets”, but mine are so inane I think “twits” is more appropriate). But I had a hankering to blog again, so I finally put a few uninterrupted minutes together and un- and re-installed my blog software, exporting and importing my history. Maybe this will fix it? Only the Shadow knows…

But at least comments seem to work again, and over the next few weeks, I may play around with new themes and other adjustments.

What a fine day! Most importantly, of course, America has a new President, a man of dignity and intellect, who selects his appointments on the merit of the candidate. And if that weren’t enough, Megan and I were there to bear witness (along with two million of our closest friends) to this historic event.

We were active during the campaign, canvassing and donating, and obsessively reading Electoral-Vote and FiveThirtyEight. So, since we live relatively close to DC, we thought we would come up to see whatever we could of it. We didn’t plan anything at all, but we got pretty lucky, I have to say!

First,  an old college roommate, Dave, got back in touch with me via Facebook a few months ago; we said we’d try to get together soon.  We missed each other I was in town last month, but we talked on the phone, and he offered us a place to stay if we were in town for the Inauguration, which we were considering then.  We decided at the last minute to take a day off and take him up on his offer, and he’s been an incredibly gracious host, waking up early to drive us to the metro station, and picking us back up.

Next, we decided to eat at Ben’s Chili Bowl last night.  We stumbled on this place a few years ago when I was doing some consulting up in DC (for a special-needs school and the Navy Criminal Investigative Services, two great tastes that taste great together).  I love vegetarian chili, and this place does it up right (as you might surmise from the name)… and it has that great diner feel.  I had seen on the news that Obama had eaten here a week or two ago, and apparently Bill Cosby did as well.  But I was not prepared for the lines… we waited in line for two hours to get in, the line stretching back into the alley and cops directing nearby traffic!  But we had nothing else to do that night, and we stuck with it on a whim.  And it paid off in a really unexpected way.  A guy came in (I don’t know exactly who) who was handing out free tickets to the Inauguration.  We hadn’t event tried to get tickets before, since we knew how in demand they were.  But I approached him and asked him for a pair… he was surprised we came up from North Carolina without them, but handed them over with a smile.  As it turned out, they were not just to the general admission area, but to the Blue Gate into a section of the White House lawn.

Our luck took a slight tumble, when we first took a wrong turn out of the subway station, then after we found our way back to the right gate, we got shunted into what turned out not to be the “blue” line, but just a “blue” line.  We stood in that line for a frigid hour and a half, barely moving, until we finally ended up in what was actually the line for the gate… about 50 people wide and several hundred deep… and which we could have entered directly, rather than wading through a mere tributary.  By the time we go up to the security gates (and it was a real crush at points), and then on to the viewing area, the garden wall was already lined with people sitting along it, and the stairs up were packed.  Megan is less assertive than I am, and wanted to stay were we could catch an occasional glimpse of the jumbotron.  But I could glimpse large gaps in the crowd on the other side, so I took us to a “breach” in the wall… a knot of people climbing over a narrow section where nobody was sitting.  Once we were over the wall, there was actually quite a lot of space open… the stairs were just a bottleneck nobody was willing to move away from.

In the spot we ended up, we couldn’t really see the screens, but we could see, in the distance, the rostrum itself, with the tiny but visible figures of the people.  A little surprisingly, the crowd booed when Bush came out, and serenaded him with “Na, na, na, na… hey, hey, hey, goodbye.”  We listened the Aretha Franklin with respect and joy, and to Perlman and Ma with quiet reflection.  And we saw Obama take his oath of office, and give his grave but hopeful and poetic speech… saw it with our own eyes.

After most of the crowd had left, we were able to actually go up near the lectern, and take photos.  Colin Powell was giving an interview about fifteen feet away (and 20 feet up).  We saw Bush board his helicopter on the screen, and watched it rise over the White House and disappear into the distance.  Megan said she felt a surge of emotion as it flew away; I just waved goodbye.

Leaving the grounds, we wandered though chaotic streets to the Air & Space Museum, which we’d heard was open.  It was… and it held hundreds of people getting out of the cold, sitting and lying and sleeping and eating.  It was a strange sight.  We looked around a bit, rested, used the toilets, and then took off to find our way to a Metro station.  L’Enfant was packed, so we went down to a further one and got on with little wait.  We enjoyed an Indian dinner, gushing with other patrons, and then hit the trains again.

Back at Dave’s place, we watched the news coverage, and found out just how fortunate we’d been to get in at all, much more as close as we were.  We watched the oaths and speeches again, this time with close ups.  It was a remarkable trip!  We came up here with very little idea of exactly what we would do, and stumbled into a great Inaugural experience.

Megan and I travel back to my hometown of Jefferson City, Missouri every year, at least at Christmas and sometimes in the summer when we can, to see my family; most of them still live within an hour or so of where we grew up.  Xmas get-togethers are always fun… with a family my size (I’m the youngest of twelve), we have to rent a hall, and the adults do a playing-card white elephant gift exchange (the kids do an open Kris Kringle).

Since Megan is in graduate school this year, and has a longer break than when she is working, and I can work from anywhere I have a Tube connection, we decided to make it a little longer than usual.  En route, we visited a couple of friends and a few cities.

First stop was Maryland, where we stayed with my friend and former housemate Ben.  Sadly, he can still kick my ass at Worms, our favorite Dreamcast game.

Then on to Pittsburgh, my first time there, to visit my high-school friend Jello (not her real name, and more innocent than it sounds), who just recently returned Stateside after years of teaching English in Japan and traveling the world.  She lives in Little Italy, and we shopped around in old Italian groceries (delicious Amaretti cookies!), and drove around the city visiting a few sites.  Our last night there, we visited the Warhol museum (he’s from Pittsburgh).  I’m not a huge Warhol fan, but the museum is very good… we started at the top floor, and they have a Ronco/Popeil/advertising exhibit that establishes the context for Warhol’s emergence.  It was nostalgic for me, seeing a lot of those old products and advertisements… they even had a Veg-o-Matic like we had when I was growing up!  The other floors featured various selections from Warhol’s works (I didn’t know that he had TV shows, or that he founded Interview magazine), and it was all well done.  I appreciate him more now, in the same way I appreciate Simulationist art from the 80s (which, frankly, he probably inspired); he clearly influenced American pop culture.  I was a little disappointed that the bathrooms didn’t carry over any Warhol themes… maybe different primary colored water in all the toilets, or life-sized pictures of people on toilets pasted on the stall walls.

The next day, we drove three hours to Columbus, Ohio.  Having grown up in an obscure state capitol, I have a fascination with them, and eventually I’d like to visit all the state capitols.  We visited the capitol building there (quite nice), taunted some Scientologists a bit (at a local Scientology Org) while looking for a veggie-dog stand, and stumbled on an absolutely delicious vegan restaurant, Dragonfly Neo-V, where they grow their own ingredients in a small stacked garden out back.  Next time we’re in the area, we will definitely take time to make a stop there.

Then on to Indianapolis, Indiana, where we stayed the night with a friendly soul we met through Couch Surfing, the Internet Age’s answer to hitchhiking.  Karla was also a Vonnegut fan (and a voracious reader with a great bookshelf), and she showed us Vonnegut’s childhood home; it’s not preserved at all, and is rented out and in poor repair, sadly.  We also wen to the capitol building (closed, unfortunately) and a war memorial, and the children’s museum where they had a Chihuly hanging tower.  The weather was hellishly cold, with a sub-zero wind chill, but we had a good time anyway.

Then it was on to Jeff City, where we stayed a week and a half.  Through the magic of Facebook (that horrible but useful site), we met up with some of my old high-school cohorts (many of whom I even remembered, and all of whom I was glad to see, and some of whom are now Megan’s Facebook friends… oh, Facebook…). We played board games with my friend Seth, and had pitched dart-gun battles.

In addition to all the normal family-and-friends stuff, my sister Cynthia and I arranged to interview my mom about family history.  We used Garage Band’s podcast feature, for all the geeks out there… just set it on a TV tray in front of her while we asked her questions; it seemed to work fine.  She told us about the cultural climate back when she was young (she was born in 1921), about her family and my dad’s, about the Depression and the War and the family fire, about her job as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse (the last throes of that part of history, dying out as rural kids were more and more being shipped into town to go to school, the final steps toward American urbanization), about how she met our Dad, and all the places she’d lived, and how they had bought a parcel of land in the early 50s from a farmer on the edge of town who was auctioning off his farmland as lots (the beginnings of suburbanization), and about how Dad (a WWII veteran) left the service just in time to avoid going to Korea, and about all Dad’s jobs.  I wish we’d been able to do this with my dad.

And that farmer who sold his land, the land that I grew up on, that all my siblings had lived on, with the woods and the trails and the secret forts and rope swings… that farmer’s yellow house still stands, I’ve passed it by car and on foot hundreds of times, and never knew.  Who will know a hundred years from now?  To whom will it mean anything at all?

Leaving town with the Prius loaded down with another scad of books from my earlier days, stored now in Seth’s basement (his grandfather’s old shoe repair shop) until I can haul them back home, we drove to Megan’s uncle and aunt’s.  (No thanks to Google Maps, which steered us wrong again and again in a way that seems to have gotten worse.)  We stayed there over the weekend, and her uncle gave me a glassblowing lesson (that’s his trade); I made a horrible little shot glass, with his help.  It’s ugly, but it worked well enough to drink moonshine from the next day when it had annealed.  I doubt I would ever be any good at it, but it was fun to try, and I’d like to try again.

And home.