Marinating and ruminating

I just took a bath. Not a shower, mind you. A real, honest to goodness bath (okay, no bubbles, other than the self-created kind, but still.)

I am sure that this will rock some of my readers' perceptions of me to their very foundations. The "war hero" (notice the lack of capitalization and the quotes); the hard core--well hard except around the middle; the rough and tumble, eat nails and spit napalm army major took a nice hot bath. After he cooked a nice tuna casserole for dinner.

No, I'm not gay. It's just that I am occasionally in need of a good soak. It helps to just give me quite time, to think, to focus, or to let my mind wander. See where the random synaptic firing takes me. Things occur to me, like this: since my nerves are so screwed up, and often sensation in one area leads to actually feeling it in another, or feeling something completely different elsewhere--imagine pushing your finger into your thigh, and feeling your foot tingle like it is asleep, but only until the pressure on the thigh is released. Same weirdness can apply to temperature. So with nerve sensation being all screwy, couldn't that relate to nerve impulses--electrical impulses--being shot into the brain in ways not originally intended? So overwhelming all of my nerves with warm water could, indeed, overwhelm my brain with activity. Or not.

Another really interesting idea--and if the leadership of the stupid party weren't, well, stupid, I would wonder if this was in the works.

The 18-24 months before an election begins, the candidates start lining up, jockeying, putting together "exploratory committees", etc. All the while, pundits on both sides of the isle simultaneously begin espousing the qualities of, or noting the shortcomings of, the candidates. Millions are spent on polls, press, advertising, pressing flesh, kissing babies, either searching through closets for skeletons, or finding new places to hide the bones.

This election, even before the primaries ended, the stupid party has only one candidate. This begs the question--why hold a national convention, spend millions on an election with only one name on the ballot? Days of back door meetings, smoky rooms, smoking guns, and nights of blustery political speeches and promises, and the poll after poll to figure out which promise, which bread and circus, the public "heard" the best. It isn't really even to choose which person will fill out the other half of the ticket, as most conservatives will likely vote for whoever runs on the mccain ticket, hoping the world's oldest candidate will stroke out sometime after the inaugural ball. Their only other option is to vote for either the pure evil candidate or too inexperienced to be pure evil, but still very evil candidate.

But what if--what if after having the evil party spend millions on mudslinging and digging, on setting up very detailed campaign strategies to defeat the asshat, what if at the national convention a genius move was pulled? What if the delegates were given a whole new set of choices? All new candidates, after the primaries were over? All that money wasted by the DNC, while all of the RNC candidates had dropped out early. Enough for a good show, of course, but only a feint, to get the evil ones to spend more of george soros' cash.

It isn't even deep-level strategery, to be sure. It is something I would expect of the genius Rove, perhaps in coordination with The honorable former SECDEF and the VP.

Hey, a man can dream, right?

--Chuck