First of all, I have to give some recognition to Nathan Brown, who is not only a very solid citizen and respected member of the community in which he lives, but is the very first person to buy a copy of my shpotz book. I see him as a kind of role model, since that link wasn't up two hours before he clicked and got in on the action.

I don't want to even get into the whole election. Mostly I would prefer to think it never happened. Enough has been said on this sorry topic, though I will add this, as a personal observation:

I went to the voting place, which was in someone's garage, and when I saw the actual names listed I really felt ill, because I was overcome with a sense that I was living through a terrible moment in history. I don't know that Arnold will be any less venal and self interested than any other politician, and even though nineteen women so far have claimed he groped them, and he praised Hitler and supported Kurt Waldheim after it was shown that he was a former SS officer who oversaw the slaughter of people in unimaginable ways, I don't know if California will change much if he is governor. The fact is his popularity went up by 12% after the Hitler-praising and woman groping stuff came out, and I don't know if too much can be made of that, since it might have been people believing it was dirty tricks by Democrats, although it is incomprehensible to me how they sold that line of nonsense to the public. But the fact that Arnold's dad was early to sign up for the Nazi party and that Arnold has a long public history of being on the wrong side of Nazism, just like he is legendary for ass grabbing all seemed to work out in his favor, just as everyone seemed to think Gray Davis was worth hating, and maybe he was, I can't say for sure, because he just seems like another politician. But for some reason everyone lined up to teach him a lesson and vote in Arnold. And I would also note that Maria Shriver (according to Larry King) calls Seigfried and Roy five times a day. The only explanation, once again, is that the whole world has gone mad.

To get off that topic for a moment:

I did go a kind of interesting house party, which was loaded with successful white people made me feel inadequate.I don't know why I let that get to me, since I am pretty sure I am having a good life and wouldn't want to be like those people, but sometimes, it is hard to be in the middle class, especially when you are hanging around a group of CEOs or owners of companies, especailly when they don't know I am not one of them and are all talking about how they just bought a house or whatever, for millions of dollars. I think that Proust spent a lot of his time felling bad about the same issues, which makes me feel like it's ok, since it elevates me to the level of Proust to be petty and jealous. And while by a poor person's standards I am doing ok, when I hang around people like that I feel bad about myself. In fact I so bad about myself that I went and intalled a motion dectector in an outdoor light, just so I could feel competent, and then it makes me want to do more art to flex the kind of skills I have that I presume they don't.

Broke fast on Yom Kippur with Ryan and Julie, which was nice, and I went to a gay syagogue just to check it out. Tons of gay couples with babies were there, which may be some kind of emerging trend or maybe that is just how it is whith gay jews or something. After services, we went to Eliza's which is supposed to be the best Chinese food in San Francisco. It was sort of interesting, with roasted pomegranate seeds and odd spices. It certainly gave me some interesting hydraulic fecal output the next day. But there was a kind of ambitious architeture to the restaurant, with curvy glass and see through aqua walls and stuff like that.

Then the next night Kirsten came into town and again I went out to dinner, and I'm scheduled to go out again with Sam , who is coming in tonight. I'm not that into all this eating out. Somehow I don't eat as healthily and I too much when I go out,so I always feel like something bad happened afterwards, which has, in a majority of cases.