I attended voter protection training earlier tonight at the U of M Law School. It felt really weird to be sitting in the same room and in the exact same spot I occupied for Con Law and Employment Law. I’ll confess to having a few nostalgic pangs as I sat there. For all the times I may gripe about law school, it was three of the most exciting and intellectually charged three years of my life. Which reminds me, I felt kind of sorry for the guy leading the training tonight. The room was filled with maybe 60-70 attorneys and law students who kept peppering the poor man with questions and hypotheticals to the point where you could tell he was getting flustered. This is what happens when you convene a roomful of attorneys; we get all Socratic Method on your sorry ass. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to Tuesday and playing a small role in the election.
Sitting in a a warehouse somewhere is an iPod Photo with my name on it. I wonder how much I can get for my old one on eBay. More than a C-note, you think?

This election is becoming positively bizarre. You have ads featuring wolves. Ads featuring ostriches. Trekkies for Kerry. I’m at the point where I want to turn off the television, shove my computer in a closet, and spend the next ten days in a North Woods cabin reading overwrought, epic novels (anything by James Michener should do) and smoking my way through a very large bag of pot. Anyone care to join me?
Through the magic of BitTorrent, I downloaded the first episode in a BBC documentary called The Power of Nightmares. It compares two groups, American neoconservatives and radical Muslims, and each group’s brand of fear-mongering. If the first episode is any indication, the series should be a compelling portrait of how these two groups unwittingly provide fodder for each other’s ideologies. Let me know if you need a link for the torrent.

News just broke that Jesse Ventura, our previous governor with a penchant for feather boas, has endorsed Kerry after initially declining to endorse anyone. It was a weird endorsement (Ventura had a proxy speak for him), but whatever. This might be enough to convince a few fence-sitters who voted for Ventura in 1998. Every little bit helps. Another former Minnesota governor, Republican Elmer Anderson, also endorsed Kerry. Then there’s American Conservative magazine, that leftist rag and another Kerry endorser. At this rate, the only people endorsing Bush will be Pat Robertson and Toby Keith.
I’ve concluded that writing sex scenes is hard. It’s hard work. Honestly, I don’t know how people make a living writing romance novels and erotica. I just finished the first sex scene in my book and I can’t tell you how many hours I wasted staring at the screen, trying not to sound like a frequent poster on alt.sex.stories. I kept asking myself “Does this sound real, or am I subconsciously writing Jenna Jameson’s next script?” Maybe that’s the difference. Romance and erotica dwell in a universe where the usual rules of human behavior don’t apply. You can have your characters exploring orifices with little or no set-up. General fiction asks for more believability, for the reader to be able to nod her head and say, “Sure, I can buy that.” I’m not sure if I buy it yet.

I was at a reception most of the evening for the Minneapolis Mayor’s Advisory Committee on People with Disabilities, so tonight’s entry will be short. With the Red Sox looking World Series-bound, I’m beginning to think that some justice remains in this world.
John Kerry will be in downtown Minneapolis tomorrow and yours truly will be there in an effort to score another shameless photo op. Will the wheelchair work its mojo again? Stay tuned…

Oh, for crying out loud. Early voting began in Florida and they’re already having some problems at polling stations in South Florida, a traditionally strong Democratic region. The national media needs to start covering this story now. We cannot afford to allow these kinds of problems go unnoticed until Election Day or afterwards. If Governor Bush and his allies are trying to suppress votes, they’re being awfully transparent about it. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, Republican operatives tried to relocate 63 polling places that were originally in predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Philadelphia; an effort that failed once the local media exposed it.
I am taking Election Day off. Ron Suskind’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine was enough to push me over the edge. A Bush aide said the following to the author of the article:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’
I can’t begin to deconstruct all the Orwellian and Kafkaesque overtones in this statement. An administration that perpetuates such delusions of grandeur within its ranks is a threat to the people it claims to serve. This nonsense about the “reality-based community” is indicative of a president whose own tenuous grip on reality is spreading amongst his advisors like a virus. Both Republicans and Democrats can see that. And I can either sit here and write about it or I can try to do my small part to change our collective reality.
Oh, and by the way…GO SOX! Great win tonight.