How to be a Good Little Orphan I: Like I've got any freakin' idea

We'll drag the streets with the baggage of longing.
-- Beck, "Orphans," Modern Guilt

Why was the bench still warm? Who had been there?

-- They Might Be Giants. "Ana Ng," Lincoln

I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. If you know either of us, you probably already knew that we are adopted, or guessed it.

I resemble the world's largest leprechaun;

Sheree looks like a bit player on The Sopranos.

Growing up, our adoptions were never a secret from us or anyone else. I don't know when I first knew. I always knew. In the I'm OK, You're OK 1970s, adoptees were told to take cheer, because "you weren't expected, you were selected!" More on that in future installments. In 1968, Children's Home and Aid Society couldn't keep white orphan babies on the shelves, especially boys. Even though demand outstripped supply so much that most prospective adoptive parents would have gladly said,"White male hegemony be damned, give us any ol' newborn," I was a spot-on match for my family -- my adoptive family. My mother's red hair and my father's straight-across front teeth garnered them a lot of he-looks-just-like-yous.

I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. Notice the use of the present tense. I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. For me, adoption is perpetually in the present tense -- less like face-painting, more like a tattoo.

In my mid-20s, I went through the typical life events: I graduated from college, I got married, I planned out my life's paths. The older generation of my family began dying off. For a while, I was losing grandparents, great uncles, and aunts at a pretty brisk clip. I suppose that all this death sparked something in my back-brain. It burned at the base of my skull for years before it found language: I'm OK. Somewhere, the woman who gave birth to me needed to know I'm OK -- while there's still time left, if there's still time left. I never gave this much thought while I was growing up, but suddenly I felt that she needed to know that I'm OK.

That's not to say that I didn't think about who my birthparents were. I thought about that often. In bad movies-of-the-week, adopted kids are ever running away from their street-urchin existences to seek out their "real" parents who are always successful and rich. This is ridiculous -- not as ridiculous as that piece-of-shit movie August Rush -- but ridiculous nonetheless.

I often felt presque vu. If you were one of those stuck-up bitches who took French in high school, you may remember that presque vu is French for "almost seen." Presque vu can refer to any one of several of related phenomena:

• feeling that a word is on the tip of your tongue.
• feeling that you are about to come to some grand realization or epiphany.
• feeling that you just missed something or someone important by mere seconds.

This last sense of presque vu pervaded my youth. If I were in a movie theater, sometimes I would get the overwhelming feeling that my birthmother had been in that same theater (or, even, that same seat) for the previous screening. If I walked up to the counter of a fast-food restaurant, I might get the feeling that my birthfather had just gone through the drive through. Hollywood does it all the time - the departing elevator closes just as the arriving elevator opens. The connection is just barely missed. In the mid-1990s, I made the connection.

This is not the story of the process of my reunion with my birthfamily. Suffice it to say that I reunited with my birthfamily about 13 years ago. Reunion. Sometimes people say reuniting with the birthfamily, sometimes people say reunion. There is no good word for it, because it is not a re- anything for me. I was adopted in infancy; I have no old memories of my birthfamily at all.

I was able to find my birthfamily rather quickly and easily through Children's Home and Aid Society -- the agency through which I was adopted:

From L to R: Beck, Cindy, Wendy, Sally, moron choking on estrogen, Barb, and Abbey.

This was taken at Beck's wedding, back before the turn of the century. The twenty-first century, you meanie. Barb is my birthmother (and look, she put me at her right hand...no symbolism there). Beck, Sally, and Abbey are all younger that I am and are technically my full birthsisters. Cindy and Wendy are both older than I am and are technically my half-birthsisters. They all grew up together with my birthparents. I grew up as the older of two; in my birthfamily, I am the third of six. I am my birthmother's only boy. Do I act like an oldest child with the family I grew up with, but act like a middle child with the family I share DNA with?

Not enough data. Don't bother doing the math, it will only make your head hurt. Besides, there's a lot of unusual math around most adoption stories -- and around this adoption most of that math isn't really my story, that's Barb's story. I exist -- the bathroom scale is the only math I need for that, and that math indicates that I am conjoined twins. Beck and Sally are twins, but not conjoined -- which is lucky since their lives are hundreds of miles apart from each other now. My life is only about an hour from my birthmother's life, and the lives of three of my five birthsisters. Still, I had been almost completely out of contact with them over the last five years , and barely in contact with them for five years before that. About six months ago, I re-initiated contact. So far, there have been lots of warm emails exchanged, a couple of letters, a couple of phone calls, birthday cards, and one face-to-face meeting with Beck (who has outed me to the entire InterWeb as her brother by blogging about it).

Before our recent afternoon together, I think that the last time I saw Beck was at her wedding. I had been going through some old pics before I saw her, so mentioned that I had recently been looking through pictures from her wedding.

Beck made a very still face. "You were at my wedding?"

Hurray! Her reaction made me incredibly happy. Why? Well, that is a long story...

Next time: more hi-jinx and I will try to fill in some gaps.

How to be a Good Little Orphan: A Primer and Preface

The Coen Brothers made this great movie, Miller's Crossing. For those of you who don't know it, Miller's Crossing is (on the surface) a hard-boiled story about the Irish mob being usurped by the Italian mob in the early days of prohibition. It is full of snappy dialogue like a Dashiell Hammett mystery. As the story-behind-the-story goes, writing the screenplay for Miller's Crossing was kicking Joel and Ethan's butts. The language of Miller's Crossing was a very specific argot, a very specific jargon; it was laborious writing and they were suffering writers' block. They decided to take a break and vent. They vented by writing more, writing something else. They wrote their way through their "issues" by penning a screenplay about a playwright who writes about "the common man," yet is incapable of empathy. This became their their next film, Barton Fink -- unanimous winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991.

If you have ever seen the Coen Brothers, you may have noticed how much they resemble. They are three years separated in age, but seem as wrapped up in each other as twins in an art-house film. I don't have a twin brother. I don't even have a brother. I have a sister, but we don't resemble and we aren't wrapped up in each other. If you wanted to be shitty, you could say that we aren't even related because she's adopted. Well, she is adopted.

I am adopted.

I have spent the last several days composing my first blog entry about being an adoptee. As I exercised my failing touch-typing skills, everything was going well...until it wasn't. See, the adoption community has some very specific jargon. What's worse, this jargon is hotly contested. I, like the Coen Brothers, need to take a break from my laborious writing to vent -- by writing about what I'm writing about. Confused? Me too.

Unlike Barton Fink, I am capable of empathy. I will try to be fair.

First off, when I say adoption, I am only talking about old-fashioned closed adoption -- where the parents-who-raise-the-kid never know the parents-who-make-the-kid, and all of the records are sealed. My adoption was a closed adoption. Many contemporary adoptions are open adoptions -- there is some level of interplay between both sets of parents. Open adoptions can be much more slippery, but don't really apply to me, so I won't attempt to address them here.

There are three parties to any adoption: the parents-who-make-the-kid, the kid, and he parents-who-raise-the-kid (these are my terms, not terms the adoption community readily uses). These three parties are what's known as the adoption triad. At least we can all agree on that.

The Internet is a great place for people in similar situations to find each other. There are lots of Internet resources for the members of the adoption triad (and their extended families and concerned acquaintances and imaginary friends and pets). Most of these forums are, well, forums -- forums that accept input from anyone involved in adoption in any way. There's not much by way of "Parents-Who-Make-The-Kids United" or "The Adopted Kids Club" or "The Fraternal Order of Parents-Who-Raise-The-Kids." The downside of this inclusiveness is that it creates an environment for bitter philosophical Mexican standoffs among people who could all really use some TLC. We cannot even agree upon what to call each other.

About the time I was born, social workers started using a jargon that is now called Positive Adoption Language, or PAL. I think this was an earnest attempt to be more kid-centered. The parents-who-raise-the-kid (and only the parents-who-raise-the-kid) are called the parents, the mother and father -- the informing logic being that they are the only parents that the adopted kid will know while growing up. The parents-who-make-the-kid are referred to as the birthparents, the birthmother and the birthfather. The changing of custody from the parents-who-make-the-kid to the parents-who-raise-the-kid is called placement.

Those who are offended by Positive Adoption Language are usually mothers-who-make-the-kids, or strongly aligned with mothers-who-make-the-kids. These folks may be proponents of the jargon called Honest Adoption Language, or HAL. Much of the terminology used in HAL has been brought back from the era before social workers began using PAL. In HAL, the mother-who-makes-the-kid is referred to as the first mother or the natural mother. The term adoptive parents is used for the parents-who-raise-the-kid. Surrender or loss is used to describe the changing of custody.

I tend to use PAL in everyday life, such as:

My birthparents went through Children's Home and Aid Society to place me with my Mom and Dad.

When I am writing about adoption issues or when I am talking with other members of the adoption triad, I may say adoptive parents for the sake of clarity. When it comes to which words are appropriate and why, do I have strong opinions and hot rhetoric to back those opinions up? Sure do. I'm going to keep my spittle from flying and my fist from shaking, though. I am not willing to have a Mexican standoff -- that is the stuff of Quentin Tarantino movies, and I have been using a Coen Brothers metaphor. I'll only say that I prefer the PAL jargon because it is, "you know, for kids!"

All this double terminology for double genealogy is taxing. For a more detailed comparison of PAL and HAL, Wikipedia is actually pretty good -- today anyway. Follow this link at your own risk. Now take your flunky and dangle.

Next time: more hi-jinx and the post that was supposed to be this post.

The Fall Eating Season III: Fifteen Years! Fifteen Years! She had one of my kids, got me for fifteen years

November sixth was my fiftieth wedding anniversary. Fifteenth. Fifteenth anniversary. Why would I say fiftieth? It doesn't feel like....time isn't dragging...don't feel like we're seventy-five...um....

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November sixth was my fifteenth wedding anniversary. Fifteen years...well, not in a row. That is another story for another time. Shit, my wife reads this blog. She is going to be pissed off that I even alluded to our marriage having its rough patch.

backspace, backspace, backspace.

November sixth was my fifteenth wedding anniversary. We celebrated. Twice.


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November sixth was my fifteenth wedding anniversary. For years now, we have given each other token gifts -- fragrance, or a book, or movie (or two). Our wants are small. We do like to have a nice meal together somewhere. This year, it was at Cafe Borgia, the Chicago southland's famous northern Italian trattoria.

Recently, Cafe Borgia moved from it's digs in the old Lansing House of Pizza location to an airy new building in neighboring Munster, IN. I would love for House of Pizza to go back into the Lansing location, as that was the kick-ass thin crust of my youth. House of Pizza in Hammond, IN, is pretty similar to the old Lansing HoP; but, by the time I bring a pie home from Indianapolis Boulevard, it's cold. There are various Zuni's HoP and Dante's HoP locations around the area, supposedly (I have my doubts) owned by the same family as the old HoP, but the pie is different.

Wedding anniversary? Cafe Borgia? House of Pizza? Sentence fragments? WTF?


I do not know Karen and Mike Jesso, the mom-and-pop of Cafe Borgia. There is a story that goes around town about how they met. The story holds that in their youth, they first met while they were waiting in line at Lansing House of Pizza to pick up their carry-outs. After their marriage, after culinary school, they found that Lansing House of Pizza had closed and that the very place they met was available for lease just as they were about to open their own restaurant. Serendipity! Kismet! Fate! Karma! Interjections meaning luck!

Now the old Lansing House of Pizza is the old Cafe Borgia, and the old Cafe Borgia is empty. The new Cafe Borgia is built across from the Munster dump. Like every dump in America, this is called Mt. Trashmore by the locals. Munster has been developing the area around Mt. Trashmore: exhibit-style veterans memorial, shiny new park, pricey subdivision downwind of the dump, and Cafe Borgia.

We went for lunch. This was our first time at Cafe Borgia since it moved.

There is a fine line between ambiance and pretense. Cafe Borgia treads upon that fine line like Karl Wallenda (Google it, kiddies).

Just inside the front door, appearing at first to be a narrow corridor, the bar juts off at a right angle. The quick peek I gave the bar told me it was fashioned after a club-car in Rat-Pack chic (remember the bar in Phil Smidt's?). We were seated immediately in the main dining room. This new building fosters the impression that it is a converted warehouse -- high clattery ceiling, duct-work to nowhere. The large open kitchen is on the same side as the bar, with a yards-long order-up window that had me worried that Mel Sharples was going to ash his cigarette on my food before passing it to Flo or Alice. Our waitstaff could not have been more attentive if they had chewed our food for us and fed us like nestlings.

The menu was short but varied. The usual Italian suspects were present: pizzas and pastas, chicken vesuvio, risotto, calamari, veal, lamb this, eggplant that. Not-so-usual fare includes: cubanella peppers with four cheeses and marinara, duck ragout and polenta, and a salad of apple and mixed greens with gorgonzola and pine nuts in a raspberry vinaigrette. The daily-specials menu was nearly as long as the regular menu.

We started off with the marinated olives and the baked goat cheese.

• Marinated olives were a great appetizer: starting off a meal in a classy joint by spittin' out pits, ptooey. The lightness of Cafe Borgia's favored olive oil cannot be overemphasized. Other places, an appetizer of marinated olives looks and tastes like an unchopped version of the olive salad in a nice muffuletta; Cafe Borgia's olive marinade did not overwhelm, so that the different flavors of the different olives (kalamata, cerignola, galega, and castelvetrano) were distinct.
• Goat cheese was served as something of an Italian version of brie en brioche. Baked to gooey bliss in a thin pastry crust and surrounded by marinara, the goat cheese was the kind of good that makes me roll my eyes and smile as I chew. On rounds of the warm house bread, or by the forkful, we couldn't leave it alone until it was gone.

The herb and raspberry tea was strangely appealing. Even though a small carafe of tea was left on our table for self-service, not a sip was taken that was not immediately refilled by the staff. If the service at Phil Smidt's ever really was the way Dad bragged that it was, it would not have beaten this.

Our main courses came just as we were finishing the last bites of out appetizers. I ordered the pork scallopine limone. My wife, a pecso vegetarian, had an ultra-thin (Roman-style) pizza off of the daily-specials menu.

• My pork scallopine limone consisted of thin triangles of pork tenderloin that had been sauteed in olive oil with garlic, artichokes, mushrooms, and lemon. A lot of lemon. A lot a lot a lot of lemon. I love intensely sharp acidic flavors, so I was pretty okay with this, but this is not for everyone. This extreme acidity, however, was only evident in the pork, so I think it must have been marinated in a strongly acidic solution. As much lemon as I like, this was a little much even for me. I would have liked to cut the sour a bit with a little salt. Here is where the pretentiousness of this wonderful trattoria comes in. There are no salt-and-pepper shakers on the tables. Of course, ask and ye shall receive -- as the service is beyond reproach. The pretense is that the chef knows just the right balance of seasonings, all seasonings -- even salt and black pepper -- so no possible correction should be necessary. There's the tiniest of social stigmas attached to asking for the salt and the pepper you pissy little cretin...No soup for you! I have already given more space to this than it deserves. The only other thing I'll say on the subject is that the alleged Italian Christopher Columbus braved the uncharted Atlantic to bring back black pepper from India but found America instead, so maybe an Italian restaurant in America should consider having some black pepper -- and its longtime companion, salt -- on every table, like every other restaurant (see my blog entry The Fall Eating Season I: ...and since Columbus discovered India in the Dominican Republic, we use precious cinnamon to make elephant ears. for more on the spice trade). I digress. I do not think I was ever told what my side dishes were, but they appeared to be a large-grained couscous in a tomato sauce and some grilled green beans of the spindliest variety in the world. Both were unexpected, unusual, and excellent.
• The daily pizza was a Roman-style ultra-thin crust with eggplant, arugula, and cherry tomatoes. This was large enough to feed two and somehow tasted alive...almost like is sparked when eaten. I assume that this was because of the exceptional freshness of the produce used. This was the greatest pleasure in a dinner of many pleasures.

With no empty space in our stomachs and half of a pizza to take home, we still managed to share a desert and have coffee. The coffee came with real cream and real sugar. I might be tempted to burst into a tirade here about the waitstaff not supplying artificial sweeteners with the coffee, like my earlier tirade about salt, but this is different: anyone who is willing to eat even half of a high-calorie dessert and then worry about the 16 calories in one teaspoon of sugar, well, that person is a nut. Great coffee. If you aren't hungry, just stop by for coffee. Great coffee. Thick and strong, not even the slightest bit bitter. I usually drink my coffee straight black, but when it is really excellent coffee, I like to add just a drop of cream and about half a spoonful of sugar to really bring out the complex flavor. Who's being pretentious now? It's me, bitches.

If you take a ball of white chocolate mousse with pistachios, wrap it with chocolate cake, slice off one half, and serve it -- apparently, that is called zucotto. The zucotto was plated with a pool of chocolate sauce and a pool of raspberry sauce. This was a lot of wonderful competing textures and flavors. This was the fireworks after the home run.

If it sounds like I had a foodgasm at Cafe Borgia...well, a gentleman does not kiss and tell. Outside of a brief lemony leg-cramp, this was the consummate anniversary dinner -- food I loved at a restaurant I loved with the woman I loved...love...the woman I love.

Yeah, yeah. Awwww, right back at you.

Next time: more hi-jinx, and how to be a good little orphan.

The Fall Eating Season II: Candy, Candy, Candy -- I can't let you go.

I love Halloween. I love my wife. My wife loves Halloween more than I love Halloween. I love my wife more than I love Halloween.

What does all of this mean?

My wife is a Halloweenie. It is her thing, her thang. All-year round -- every day is Halloween. Mostly, I find it uber-cool to be married to an old-school goth (albeit a closet-goth for her roles as homemaker, librarian, and room parent). Occasionally, I feel the bats and cats and rats and skulls are all staring at me, trying to psych me out.

What does all of this mean?

In 1992, Halloween was my holiday. I was a graduate student at Southern Illinois University -- where Halloween was celebrated with much drinking and burning of cars.

In 1993, Halloween was our holiday. We were still in Carbondale. We were finalizing our wedding arrangements -- the Interfaith Center, the cake from Cristaudo's, the reception at Fiddler's (gone, but not forgotten), the honeymoon on Miami Beach. A week later, we were married on a snowy Saturday afternoon. A week after that, I was in the hospital for three days with Legionnaire's disease. A week after that, we were on Miami Beach for only fifteen minutes on only one day of our week-long honeymoon while the Legionnaire's disease kept me in bed (in the wrong sense for OUR HONEYMOON).

In 2008, Halloween was her holiday, and has been for years. Not that her version of Halloween is substantially different from my version of Halloween -- but, as far as I am concerned, the day is all hers. I love Halloween, but it's her thang.

I'm contented just to be a patron of the art she creates with Beistle cutouts, plastic skeletons, and monster fur. I still have an important role in the festivities:

I am the candyman.

(If you think that means I want to do something unspeakable to Virginia Madsen...um, well....)

It is my job to pass out candy to the kiddies every year. It is not as simple as it may seem:

• Who? Without even factoring in the weather, some years we get fewer than thirty kids, other years we have had over 150. My first thought is to just say no to the high-school kids with no costume and a used Wal-Mart bag; then, I think of starting November with a busted-out picture window. There are people who drive vans up to our house, let a dozen kids out on the side-street, have those kids trick-or-treat our front door, try to trick-or-treat our side door, then leave the neighborhood.
• What? Chocolate, that's what...and not motherfucking Tootsie Rolls either, you cheap bastard. If you are only giving out a piece or two per trick-or-treater, please please PLEASE make it all name-brand chocolate. If you give more candy than that, mix it up with non-chocolate. I know Skittles are just as expensive as Snickers, but to a nine-year-old Skittles are as much a filler-candy as Double Bubble...or Tootsie Rolls, you cheap bastard. Given the unpredictable number of trick-or-treaters we may have, we make sure there is enough chocolate for 200 really hungry kids.
• When? In broad daylight...nowadays. Check out my blog entry, "I think Barack Obama is avoiding me..." for more on daytime trick-or-treating.
• Where? My front door. I live on a corner. Every year, kids go to my front door, then go to my side door. For some reason, some kids only go to my side door. My house is a slab house of less than 1,100 square feet. My side door is in the breezeway connecting the house to the garage, but it is obvious to anyone close enough to the side door to ring the bell that this breezeway doubles as an ersatz junk-filled basement.Also, I would have thought that the large obvious sign on the side door saying "Please use front door" might help. It gets a little harried trying to answer both doorbells at the same time -- my fat candy-snitching ass huffing and puffing back-and-forth through the kitchen.
• Why? Just before my Druidic ancestor were ransacked by my Viking ancestors, they did something with an oak tree and Stonehenge I think, so now we give kids candy on Halloween. Hey, it's all I've got. That is at least as convincing as the story about the stepson of a Jewish carpenter who was horribly tortured to death in public, so now every year a rabbit hides hard-boiled eggs.

I estimate that I saw about 125 trick-or-treaters this year. We had enough candy for 200 kids. We had (yes, HAD) a lot of leftover candy. The largest hole in my face is just the right size for Fun Size candy bars. Additionally, we always shop the after-Halloween markdowns. Here's a tip: every year one of the big discounters completely screws up and buys way too much of something good. This year, that was Target. So, here are my two favorites -- my 2008 Favorite Halloween Candy, and my 2008 Favorite Post-Halloween Markdown Candy. Drum-roll, please (no Tootsie Rolls, you cheap bastard):

2008 Favorite Halloween Candy:Nestlé Crunch Caramel

This is a newish variation on an old favorite. It's like a Nestlé Crunch Bar with a Cadbury Caramello on top of it. This is a great texture pairing that work against logic. Like thin-crust pizza with extra cheese, Nestlé Crunch Caramel pairs the crispiest of the crispy with the gooiest of the gooey. The Fun Size bars are not exact miniatures of the full-size bars: the Crunch Bar to Caramello proportions are different, better (I think) in the Fun Size.

2008 Favorite Post-Halloween Markdown Candy3 Musketeers Mint

This is another newish variation on an old favorite. The whipped mint nougat dipped in dark chocolate is even better frozen and cracked like you might do to a Charleston Chew. Target was selling bags of 18 in their Halloween clearance for $1.14, while they were selling the same size bars with earlier expiration dates in the 8-bar packs for $1.29. Mint and dark chocolate sound pretty Christmas-y to me. WARNING: if you ever get heartburn at all, mint and dark chocolate together might just be your kryptonite.

Next Time: More hi-jinks, fifteen years of wedded bliss (not in a row), and more of the Fall Eating Season.

I think Barack Obama is avoiding me...

I voted today. If you know me, it will not surprise you that I voted for this guy:

Barack Obama.

He was "my guy" from the start. I voted for him for US Senate, and I voted for him for President of the US of A. Over the last few years, that is...not both today. I realize that the motto in Chicagoland is "Vote early and vote often," but I only voted for this guy once today.

On May 2, 2008, Barack Obama came to my neighborhood. In the heat of the primary season, he held a town-hall meeting and gave a speech in Munster, IN at Munster Steel -- 3 miles from my house. I could not attend. I was not on the approved list. Although I was a high school friend of Lansing Mayor Dan Podgorski, I have no clout. Lansing takes "municipal home rule" so seriously that local officials do not run as Democrats or Republicans but instead have their own fake made-up parties. I cannot keep straight if Mayor Pod's Community Action Party more closely aligns with Democrats or Republicans, so he may not have any real clout for me to exploit with my non-existent clout. I have heard it said that a local politician is someone whose deepest darkest secrets keep them from seeking higher office -- so maybe I do have some clout after all, Dan. Still, I live close enough to have walked to Barack, but I was not invited to attend.

On Halloween 2008, Barack Obama came to my neighborhood again:

I got five pieces of candy!

I got a chocolate bar!

I got a quarter!

I got Barack!

Wicker Memorial Park in Highland, IN is also 3 miles from my home. My daughter plays in this park regularly. Mid-week last week, the Obama-Biden campaign announced that they would be holding an event in Wicker Memorial Park on Halloween night starting at 6:00 PM. No costumes allowed.

Local Trick-or-Treat hours were from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM. The retired busybodies who set such rules have ruined Trick-or-Treat by scheduling it to start just after they finish their Early Bird Specials -- you know, so they can be in bed by 7:45 on Halloween...on the first, they've got to be at the bank by six in the morning to cash that Social Security check. The extension of Daylight Savings Time has double-ruined Trick-or-Treat by putting this already-too-early event into what any reasonable person would think of as the noonday sun.

Now, 3 miles from my front door is an historic event -- Obama's "closing argument" for the presidency. I should go. My wife should go. My daughter should go. By some estimates, 40,000 people did go. Even if I didn't support Obama, even if my O-baby's Obama O-Mama didn't support Obama, we should attend this historic event in our neighborhood -- an historic event starting just before it gets dark enough to make Trick-or-Treating the least bit fun (or even tolerable for those poor kiddies under twenty pounds of monster fur on a seventy-something degree Halloween).

Not only would we all have to de-costume and de-makeup before we could possibly go, but given the parking options, we would have to walk half of the distance to the rally. To make it there by 6:00, we would have to start getting ready by about 4:00 PM -- so, no Trick-or-Treat at all. Not only would my daughter not get to Trick-or-Treat in her non-Charlie-Brown ghost costume, but we would not be able to pass out the twelve hundred dollars worth of candy we have to buy every year because some years we get twenty kids and other years we get fifteen thousand. Plus, I wouldn't be able to tell if my house was being egged by the candy-less neighbor kids, or by the guy down the block with the McCain-Palin sign in his lawn.

So I ignored the call of history-in-the-making.

At the last moment, the Obama-Biden campaign moved the rally forward to 7:30 PM.

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Fuckers.

And now, some shameless grandstanding in pun form:

• GObama! Yes we can! For More Years of the Bush Agenda? No we McCain't.
• Biden's opponent is Palin comparison.

Next time: More hi-jinx, and the next event of the Fall Eating Season.