A Strange Land

He is sitting the by himself in the bar at McCormick and Schmick’s. This is okay, I eat by myself in restaurants all the time and I am female. Yes, it is harder for us then for you others, but another matter that. There he is. “Yes, sir, we do have a one and a half pound lobster.  Our last one for the evening.” So, he works his way through two plates of assorted other appetizers and at last it arrives, the lobster, shining in its slightly luminescent red glory. Is he awed; slightly worshipful, humbled by the feast laid before him? No, the fool is on his cell phone. So he lays into the lovely thing, this piece of nirvana, one handed, the other hand occupied with clutching his cell phone to the cheek he is determined to stuff.

Now lobster should not, cannot be gobbled down one handedly, distractedly while nattering away on a cell phone. Lobster is to be savored, eaten slowly, bite by bite, to lovingly dip each morsel in drawn butter and then slowly savor its delicate taste and texture. Delighting in its sweetness and licking ones lips. Hmm…. maybe licking someone else’s lips, but I digress. Here before me is my unsolicited dining companion, the result of an unhappy conjunction of circumstance.  He is trying ineffectually to detach the tail meat, which he cannot do without a knife and fork, two hands and a chunk of focus. The best he can do is to roll the tail meat as if it were spaghetti into a huge ball on his fork, then he holds down the shell with the elbow of the cell phone hand and jerks the mass of tail meat away from the shell.

Okay, dip and nibble I think, that could work, but I have forgotten who I am dealing with here and I watch shocked as he shoves he whole ball of tail into his mouth. He is perplexed, what to do? Too much to chew, can’t swallow, worse, can’t talk! Alas, he is forced to hang up the cell phone and attempt to sort the situation out.

Consummate foolishness and a sad waste of a lovely lobster.

Sitting around in a hotel room, as I seem to be doing quite a lot of these days, and attempting to avoid doing whatever it was that I should have been doing, having also sacrificed my laptop to the young male member of the family, there was naught to do but watch CNN on TV. Repeatedly, endlessly. Thus, on a segment which I believe was called “Keeping Them Honest”, a worthy effort I am sure, however ineffective, I came across “The God Vote”. It appears, at least to their own pundits, that the democrats have finally gotten their act together and decided that they are not simply going to cede the God Vote to the Republicans. After all, they are good god-fearing people themselves, why should they just sit back and let the Republicans be the only ones making hay in those fields.

It turns out that recent polls indicate that most Americans are of the God-fearing type and if not God-fearing then at least God-conversant. Apparently the exact blend of percentages, which God, worshiped in what particular way, by how many, varies across the country, but it remains clear that upwards of seventy-five percent of us like to hear about God from our politicians. We like to hear that they look to a higher source for their inspiration and motivation. This appears to be true everywhere, but California, where the Godless heathens live. Who would have thought? Apparently Bush is on the right track, letting himself be guided by God. There are even those who feel that Bush doesn’t refer to God enough, that he should do it more often.

By this point I was pretty nauseated. I had always thought that my relationship to a God, assuming I could figure out which and why in the first place, was sort of a personal thing. I thought it a private matter between myself and whatever, whomever, but the best is yet to come. The parting segment is a short video of Hillary Clinton quoting the bible at a campaign speech. I had to turn the segment off before they could run it again. It was bad enough that I had to think that she had sacrificed the last shreds of her integrity to do this, to please the handlers and consultants who told her that this was what America wants in a president, but further, she doesn’t do it well. It comes across as an act and a bad one at that. And I had such high hopes for the woman.

Who knows, maybe it plays well outside of the land of the heathens.