Open Letter to A Puppy: The King Awaits


http://vintagegoodness.com/2015/06/ My exclamation points.

buy provigil generic online You may have noticed the new frame. Broad planks, low to the floor, stretching well beyond the mattress it holds.

Right now, our old queen perches there, a little island in the middle of a wooden sea. It looks less like a bed and more like a stage waiting for its star.

Tomorrow, if the truck shows, the king arrives. A mattress said to be so wide a man can stretch without fear of paws or tails pushing him to the brink. A mattress meant for space, for comfort, for the kind of sleep poets call “rest.”

But I know you two. You begin the night curled small, courteous as monks. Then dreams arrive, and with them, conquest.

Charlie lengthens across the diagonal like a fencer with a blade. Jadie, sunflower that she is, unfurls petal by petal until she holds half the bed in her bloom.

By morning, I am once again pressed to the rim, clinging like a cliff diver.

And yet, even as I daydream of space, I know better. Kings do not rule here. Packs do. What matters isn’t the width of the mattress but the weight of the bodies that choose to rest beside me.

So yes, pups, tomorrow we may find out what sleep in a king feels like. But tonight, on this undersized queen in an oversized frame, I already know what home feels like.

Love,

The dad on the edge

The Lurch Left


It looks like the world is coming apart at the seams. Gunshots at rallies. Assassinations on campus stages. Political leaders gunned down. Statehouses fighting over maps.

From the outside, it feels like a country slipping.

But the long line of American history shows something else. Across nearly every measure, the nation shifts left. Slowly, unevenly, often bloodily. But always in that direction.

Fifty years ago, interracial marriage was suspect, same-sex marriage unimaginable, marijuana criminal, abortion banned in most states, and the death penalty popular.

Today, public opinion is the opposite on nearly every count. Courts and legislatures may wobble, but the cultural center has moved.

That movement explains the right’s frenzy. It is not strength. It is recoil.

The book bans. The pledges to “take back” bureaucracies. The loyalty tests. The bans on trans health care.

These are not strategies to persuade. They are efforts to halt. When a coalition shrinks, it purges. When a movement grows, it convinces.

Redistricting fits the same mold. In Missouri, Republicans carved up Kansas City. In Texas, they drew maps that diluted minority power even as the state grew younger and more diverse. In North Carolina and Florida, maps were tossed back by courts for being too skewed.

These fights are about time. Gerrymanders stretch the past into the present, warping maps into question marks to preserve power a few more years.

It is the same logic behind voter ID laws and roll purges. The same logic behind state legislatures stripping cities of their authority when cities lean blue. These are not expansions of democracy. They are hedges against it.

Meanwhile, public opinion marches on. More Americans support gay marriage, legal weed, abortion rights, and limits on the death penalty than at any point in modern history. Even where legislatures slam the brakes, voters in Kansas and Ohio swatted them down. In one state after another, ballot measures show citizens saying yes to choice and no to bans.

So the unrest isn’t a new story. It is the sound of the old guard cracking. Violence rises because persuasion fails. Maps contort because the math won’t hold. Platforms radicalize because the center has already gone.

That is the pattern: the country bleeds and rages, then shifts a notch left and keeps moving.

The panic is loud. The trend is quiet. And history is on only one side.