Before she was anybody's anything

She was "Mom".

Well something weird has happened to my regular DSL/modem/PC rig at home. “Gone tits up” is such an unpleasant phrase, so let’s just say that if the news is good, a few hours of focused fucking around may set things a-rights and, if not, well digital heaven will have one more angel by sundown on Mother’s Day. My setup has been showing signs of incipient flakiness for a couple of weeks, so a “vintage” machine a pal loaned me as a hedge against this very contingency (always have a Plan B. Me? Shit, I’m working my ay though “Plan J” at this point, but it’s just stuff: nobody died.) came out of the Hammermill paper box this afternoon and we have been getting acquainted.

(It’s a little, um, s-l-o-w and makes a noise like unto a coffee grinder full of rock salt and snakes, but I’m sure a little WD-40 on the H/D platters and it’ll be fine :-)

So I’m just going to say a very happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there in the world (including Bill Clinton’s new madre, which I’d link you to, but this Mac does not seem top be able to resolve the whole Blogger toolbox, so no links, boldface, italics or quote blocks. Jeez, I feel nekkid!) and my mom (who does not know of my secret blogging shame. I just tell her I’m a junkie and she say, “Well, OK, as long as your sure you’re not blogging.”)

No actually she’s a dyed-in-the-wool., Yellow Dog Liberal and can face down the Jihadi Wing of our family with aplomb, good cheer and lemon bars that’ll tempt the Devil into Church on Sunday. She’s unbelievably cool and has gone from Lutheran to generic Protestant to Buddhist over the course of her life. She taught me to cook and to pray and to love reading like my very life. She was a teacher forever, and even ended up with a couple of her former students coming back years later to teach with her.

She’s been poor. Real, no-fucking around, tar-paper shack poor. Her life has had a visible moral arc to it, and that’s certainly one of this things I admire most about her.

I remember the first time I had the guts to tell her a dirty joke. I remember the first time she swore in front of me deliberately. The subject was politics. I remember when she had to come and bail my ass out of jail. When she stood with me on the hardest days of my life, and when she told me flat out I was wrong, and full of shit, and owed so-and-so an apology.

Oh, and she types like machine-gun fire...and sews like Saville Row.

I genuinely can’t imagine having a better mother. I said a couple of posts down “screw pity” when I was talking about the practicality of compassion, but I’d like to add one exception: I pity the man or woman that does not have a good thing going with Mom. Who hate their mother, or can’t stand to be around her, or lost her so long ago that the memory has all but turned to steam and drifted away.

She’s the reason I don’t fear Blacks or Jews or Gays. She’s the reason I can’t stand to see the strong pushing the weak around. Can’t stand people who wrap what it simple moral cowardice backed up with superior firepower in a lot of fancy, rationalizing bullshit. She’s the reason that I’m knocked out by amazing women, and won’t date idiots.

She’s what “Liberal” used to mean, and could mean again.

Well hell this was supposed to be about DSL and a quick, fool -proof way for you who have no patience for the subtle niceties of the current British Political Scene (read: lazy bastards) to get a brilliant approximation of same (truer that true) via DVD (I like my politics to come with a “Pause” button). And I see via this cranky computer that BoBo has decided to show his rosy-red ass again on the subject of Social Security in a manner that suggests that someone has found the emergency gin stash, so there’s bound to be some sport there, and yet here I go yakking on about Mom.

I blame…her.

Love ya, ma.