Gollum And The Precious Nomination

Since I had my take on Donald Trump's speech last week, fair's fair and so here's a take on Hillary's acceptance speech this week. 

“I must say, basking in triumph like this is very, very satisfactory. It will only be all the more so in November when we’ve won and I finally get to call myself President Hillary Rodham Clinton. And then rub it in the face of that oompa loompa.

Thank you for your confidence in me. I’ve wanted this for many, many years. Longer than anyone can know. We’re so close to the mountain top. It’s just there, that much closer after all the work we’ve done for years and years and years on end. I’m ready to plant the flag on the top. Which reminds me of the stories about who I was named after. You know, you can go on for years thinking you’re named for Edmund Hillary because of his great triumph in reaching the top of the highest mountain on earth... before you realize you were born a few years too early. Oh well, that’s a detail, and sometimes details are things we overlook.

Where was I? Oh yes, wanting this for many years. The presidency is something I’ve been close to for a long time. And I wanted it. Oh, did I want it. I needed it. I had to have it. It was mine, my own, my precious...

I’m getting carried away with myself again.

My point is when I was growing up I already decided to myself that I wanted to be in the White House. And not just as a First Lady or as a Cabinet member or whatever. As the one person making the big decisions. No, not the court jester. Which reminds me, what’s Carville doing these days?

I wanted to be the President. Not just the President, but the very first woman President.

I wanted to be that trailblazer, showing the way to the future, showing young girls that hey, you too can grow up to be the President of the United States. Eventually. After you’ve married a governor who ends up being President himself. After you’ve done time... in the Senate, people, in the Senate! Not the big house, despite what Chris Christie and the oompa loompa think should happen to me. Honestly, Governor Christie, how do you live with yourself?

Where was I? Right. After time in the Senate. And then Secretary of State.

But before that came my first run at the nomination. Eight years ago.

Of course the party didn’t see things my way eight years ago. Instead they gave it to the President.

They stoles it from us! Nasty filthy little hobbitses, it was ours! Ours! And they stoles it!

Ahem. Sorry about that. I got a little off track.

So everything I did was about getting myself in place for this great day. Well, this great day and the election day, which will be even greater.

Yes, we managed to get through the Sixties. Like Bill, I didn’t inhale. Though it might have been okay in retrospect if I had inhaled. I might have ended up being a bit more mellow and laid back, and well, kind of human in the way I interact with people. Oh well, at least I don’t come across like a complete robot, unlike a certain Republican I won’t mention.

Marco Rubio, I’m looking at you.

So there we were, getting ourselves established, living like the other half lived, or whatever that expression meant. Making our bona fides known and having a daughter we’re so very proud of and all that. And have I mentioned how pleased I am to be a grandmother? It really works well with the focus groups, even if I can’t knit so much as one of those adorable baby socks you see in all the nostalgic magazines about grandmotherhood.

Aren’t babies precious?

My precious, my precious... we wants it!

Oh, there I go again. Bill calls it my Smeagol moment. I kind of drift off into imitations of that character, that’s all. And that’s all they are. Imitations! I am not overly obsessed with the Ring of Sauron and I am not deranged and having conversations with myself all the time. There is no Ring of Sauron, and I’m not obsessed with it.

The Oval Office, on the other hand...

Anyway, I know what the polls say. That I’m one of the most unfavourable candidates in American history. Rest assured, though, that the oompa loompa is even more unlikable than I am. So to the voters out there who haven’t decided, ask yourself this: do you want someone who brings experience and wisdom and the occasional streak of being a bit terribly unlikable in the Oval Office? Do you want someone who’s from time to time been investigated by the FBI like I have? Do you want someone whose party has perpetually asked, are we sure it has to be her?

Or do you want a tiny handed oompa loompa with zero political experience, business disasters, and no social skills?

America, let’s move forward together. We’ve done it before. I’ve done it before, what with forgiving my husband every time he’s gone astray. Which reminds me, to the White House interns of the female persuasion, you won’t have to worry. I’m having Bill fitting with an electro-shock collar that gives him a jolt any time he gets turned on.

Oh, sure, Bill, laugh now, but you won’t be laughing the first time you get shocked.

My fellow Americans, I look forward to serving as your President. I look forward to leading this country forward past all the division and the rancor. I really look forward to sitting in the Oval Office making all the big decisions.

Because it’s mine. Mine! My own! My precious! We needs it! We wants it! It’s ours! Nasty Bernies Sanderses standing in our way! It’s ours!

Ahem... there I go again. Sorry. I get carried away sometimes.

Thank you for your support. To those members of the party who wanted Bernie up here, I will do everything I can to gain your trust, even if I have to name the cranky old guy to my cabinet. To the oompa loompa, I say this: Donald, everyone knows it’s a combover.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I see that Bill’s sniffing around the barely legal daughter of the governor.”

Of Knuckle Dragging Halfwits

In this case, the knuckle dragging halfwit is in politics. Meet Jack MacLaren, a Member of Provincial Parliament from Eastern Ontario, one of the Progressive Conservative party members currently in the political wilderness (and rightfully so). Jack is a far right libertarian, with a history of putting his foot in his mouth, acting like an impertinent child throwing tantrums, and general stupidity. Along with Randy Hillier, another far right wingnut from this part of the province, Jack is one half of the two worst MPPs in the provincial legislature. He's been known to pick fights within his own party, let alone other political parties. Jack's been in trouble lately- it started with an event some weeks back that got reported on in the press. At a charity benefit evening, Jack decided to start speaking. Probably the wrong thing to do when you're really dumb and have absolutely no impulse control.

Jack ended up singling out a Member of Parliament, a federal counterpart whose riding is also in this area. She happens to be from the Liberal Party, and she happened to be present that evening- he even pulled her on stage. He made some sexually crude remarks about her and her husband, pretty much aiming at personal humiliation. The audience wasn't that impressed by him, and yet he kept at it. One might be surprised that he got out that evening without getting punched. He certainly would have had it coming. The evening's lowlights made it to the media, became a front page story, and yet another reason not to vote Conservative on any level, particularly with the way Jack dodged the issue, and with the way the Ontario Conservative leader, Patrick Brown, minimized things. 

That wasn't where it ended, mind you. A few days later, Jack was in the news again. It turns out his website was filled with testimonials from constituents singing his praises. The wording of some of those testimonials were suspect. And those "constituents" had fake names and stock photos that had been used before online (including one of an actress). Jack's office claimed names were changed and stock photos were used to protect the privacy of those singing his praises, but that their words were true. 

Then the website was shut, and all of that taken down. Given how much he'd already been lying, needless to say, those testimonials were as much bull as anything else Jack has ever said. He's been busy trying to dodge the media, while Brown started off by giving him meaningless penalties as opposed to permanently kicking the misogynistic twit out of the party like he deserves. Indeed, it seems after days on end of hedging his bets, Brown finally gave Jack a time-out. The hashtag JackMacLarenTestimonials has been going around on Twitter ever since, playing around with the notion of people singing his praises in a totally fictional way. Most of what follows here are memes I've come up with. Enjoy!

And should this fall under his eye, well, Jack... you're an idiot. A moron. A stuck in his ways misogynistic troglodyte. You're the sort of person who's dragging back the progress of the human race. You're an asshole, Jack. You're the sort of oxygen wasting asshole that other assholes look at and say "what an asshole!" Those are probably a lot of big words for a brain so limited as yours, so you're going to need a dictionary.

Middle finger right at you, you despicable pile of crap.

On Rare Occasions I Can Be Serious

It might help to read this first. I wrote that a year ago, and it ties into what I have to say below. I'll be back to more of my usual tomfoolery on the weekend.

Growing up, there were the odd occasions we would take a trip up to cottage country, the area called Muskoka, here in Ontario, sometimes for a few days of vacation, sometimes just for a day’s drive. On one of those trips, we were staying at a campground, and we took a drive over to a scenic tower near the village of Dorset (great place to visit, by the way). It had once served as a fire lookout, but now was open to the public. I must have been ten or eleven, and I had gone up that tower before. Going up this time, however, something went differently.

Halfway up I froze in place, unable to move up the steps. It wasn’t quite the heights that were an issue, so much as it was the sensation that I was going to fall. It was fear, a physical dread of something tangible- if you can call distance, empty air, and the notion of falling tangible- happening to me.

So there I was, frozen, one of my brothers on the stairs with me coaxing me on, and my mother down on the ground wondering what was going on. It might have been that someone would have had to physically help me back down to the ground- I have seen that since on subsequent visits to that tower, that someone just freezes up on the staircase and has to be helped down. The fear was there, and it could have kept me frozen, but I realized on some level that I’d just have to push past it, keep going up those steps despite that fear.

Scenic Tower, Dorset, Ontario

And so I did. I reached the top, to the viewing platform. Then I went down, came back up, went down, and came back up, and so on, until the feeling passed. I was fine at that point, and pushing past it had been the right way to confront a fear. In doing that, the fear vanished; I’ve been up that tower since, particularly when my parents spent several years in the area, many times, so many times that I lost count, and there was never the same problem. I have climbed, and there was never the same issue coming up. Confronting a fear head-on obliterated it.

There are less tangible fears. Things that are more elusive than the standard phobias, for example people scared of heights, snakes, mice, spiders, that sort of thing. I understand these less tangible fears too, but that’s something that I have come to understand through the therapeutic process. I have struggled for some years with depression. It is something I live with each day. I’m one of the one in five people who cope with a mental illness at one point in their lives, and this one can be managed. When I think of something else, something like schizophrenia, which afflicted a friend and requires more drastic and intensive therapy, I consider myself lucky- I don’t even need medication. Most days these days are okay- I’m feeling fine, but every once in awhile I have what I call a black wall kind of day. Or days. Churchill called it his black dog, and I do like that- there are times I’ve envisioned it as a dog, growling at me from the corner of my eye. Still, I’m a climber, so for me, it’s a black wall.

There are ways to deal with it, to push back against it, to tell it to go away. I’ve learned that through therapy.  The right kind of music helps (I recommend Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Fourth Movement, which is pure joy, or Duke Ellington’s Take the A-Train). So does recognizing the signs that it’s there, that it’s becoming a problem- you can consciously tell yourself to push it away. Being among friends helps. So does being out in nature. To learn these things though took time, a lot of working through issues, and the right person to talk to. I think of how far gone I was back when I was at my worst, and that’s what scares me: the idea of ever going back to that dark point of my life again. It’s a less tangible fear than if you have a fear of beetles or mistletoe or ravenous cannibalistic groundhogs (hey, it’s me, I can’t be completely serious), but a fear nonetheless.

 I have made enough progress though that this feeling is not something that makes me freeze up. It has required the resolve to never let myself fall that far again. It’s also required me to put up boundaries and make decisions about what I can tolerate. The two sisters who were responsible for much of what I’ve gone through have never changed, and never will. I made the decision that my emotional well being, something that I’d allowed to get shredded to pieces keeping my mouth shut all to keep them appeased, had to come first. They were not worth the cost, and I will never again allow them to bring their toxic abuse back into my life. Setting those boundaries had to be done, and I’ve never regretted it. I’m not going back to that dark place in my life.

Here’s the odd thing, and I could only see it in retrospect. Coming like that when it happened, having this all come apart on me and falling apart.... it had to happen sooner or later, and in a strange way I’m grateful for it. I needed to hit rock bottom, to come apart in that dark, bad place, to be so tangled up in depression... to see that I needed help. Too often we tend to think of therapists and counsellors as professionals only needed by crazy people. That’s not the case. Most of the time they’re who we turn to because we need help sorting through a problem in our lives, something we have to deal with. And they’re professionally trained, objective, and able to ask the right questions to get us through those things. I got lucky- the rapport with mine was good right from the beginning, but if it’s not working with one, you can always move on to another therapist or counsellor.

We deal with stresses, turmoil, and struggles in our lives, and they can seem overwhelming. They can seem impossible, and it feels like no one understands. We might even feel that there’s no way out, and we’re just drowning in that situation (believe me, I understand how it feels to be drowning in depression). One of the many things I’ve learned along the road is that it’s not a sign of weakness to ask for help. It’s a sign of strength to recognize we can’t do everything on our own, and that there are times we need help. Reaching out and accepting that is a show of strength. 

And in the end we'll be the better for it.

Five Thousand Feet Up Mount Calamity

Some business before the mayhem as expected. Go on over to Beishir Books or to Norma's Blogger page, and have a peek at an excerpt from a hilarious work in progress she's calling Sucker Punched. And let her know what you think.

Now then, to the chaos at hand...

"It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves." ~ Edmund Hillary

"Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory." ~ Ed Viesturs

"For a climber, saying that you are stopping by Everest is like saying you're stopping by to see God." ~ Roland Smith

"Every mountain is within reach if you just keep climbing." ~ Barry Finlay

"If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.”  ~ George Mallory

"Life's a little like mountaineering- never look down." ~ Edmund Hillary

"He had a head start on me, but it didn't matter. I had the experience, the equipment, the knowledge of these mountains. He had a pair of loafers, designer clothes, no climbing gear, and no idea what he was doing. It was fear that drove him up Mount Calamity. Fear, and the slowly dawning knowledge that I wasn't the Lars Ulrich he thought I was, and that I was annoyed. Honestly, what was it with these entertainment reporters, constantly mistaking me for that heavy metal guy? That Lars looked like he's been hit in the face by an ugly stick too many times. No matter. I knew the mountain, and there was no place on its slopes that Entertainment Tonight reporter could hide from me. Sooner or later, I'd be throttling that waste of space Rodrigo Perez." ~ RCMP Inspector Lars Ulrich

For those who might not know, I'm a rock climber. I've been doing it since I got a taste for it climbing Rattlesnake Point on the Niagara Escarpment when I was a kid- without equipment, experience, or a fellow climber (yes, I know that's stupid now). Needless to say, it did open up my taste for it. Most of that's been done in the eastern parts of the continent, up whatever convenient rock face presented itself. It's something that I've enjoyed doing- though I have yet to have gone this season. With the passing of my mother (four months ago today), I don't really trust myself right now on a climb, and that's not good for other climbers. It'll come back when it comes back.

I can say that we climb because the mountain's there (like the ill-fated George Mallory once said). We climb for the sheer joy of the experience. And we climb because if we couldn't, we'd have to find some other foolish way to fill our spare time. It wouldn't be nearly as much fun though.

So I thought today that I'd give you some images to amuse or shock yourself with (depending on your tolerance for heights). Enjoy, and do tell if the prospect of mountain climbing excites you or chills your nerves...

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