Poem for Saturday

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
By James Wright

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

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"Storm Front, Part One" review at TrekToday. Forget the Xindi, there are evil alien Nazis on Enterprise now! And I was up till one in the morning getting this fucker posted, after writing three articles yesterday due to an AWOL editor again. And I am not giving away my entire fucking weekend to the site.

Yeah, so I watched the debate while trying to review -- I am sure this did no good for my perceptions of either the debate or the episode, though it sure did put the evil alien Nazis in perspective. Not to mention Bush's refusal to admit that he'd made any mistakes larger than a couple of appointments (who could he mean? Colin Powell and anyone who's disagreed with him in the past few years?) I really hate being struck by how painfully stupid so many voters are. I could never run for president; I couldn't resist saying, "Why in fuck do you believe your personal beliefs are more important than the Constitutional rights of several million people?" to some of them.

Older son's bus was an hour late yesterday, had dinner with my parents and am being forced to put in an appearance tonight for dessert to visit old friends of theirs whom I barely know, with whom I have nothing in common, and in the meantime there's Hebrew school carpools and soccer carpools and maybe, if we can manage it, we'll find some time to do something as a family this afternoon, but who knows whether or not that will happen. , , and other people to whom I owe packages, I am really sorry but I never made it to the post office last week. Wish I could say I was going today but fat fucking chance of that. Yeah, I know I owe people letters and phone calls and all those things, but given that I got less than six hours sleep last night and I still don't have a single hour today that I expect to be able to call my own, it's going to have to wait, again.

Sorry, it has not been a good couple of days. And, you know, when that happens over big crises I can be sort of philosophical about it, but when it's just the usual, I need a job that either pays me for seven days a week or gives me the weekends off, I need a fucking hour to myself that isn't spent in a car with a child waiting for a bus to arrive, I need a life.