Kimberly Steele

 

Hi Everyone, this post is likely it for this week -- I'm trying to finish a song project and I'll be pouring lots of effort into it Wednesday, when I usually put out a new post. Thanks for reading and please respect my no-profanity rules in the comments.

I have had more close friendships end due to my own choice than the other way around. In most of the cases, I was responsible for both the breakup and at least in part for the conflict that led to the breakup. In only one case did I feel completely innocent. Unlike the others, I never crap-talked this friend, I didn't enchant a guy she was obsessed with, and I was never so much as rude to her though she did not return the favor. She had an irritating habit of telling me I looked tired that I don't miss -- though I blew it off, this seemed to be a form of concern-trolling meant to inform me I was looking my chronological age and not youthful and fresh as we women are supposed to look at all times. She was often kind and considerate, but when the going got rough in her life, she turned out to be a bitter lunatic, obsessed with what she could not have. In her case, the holy grail was a biological child. She spent the second half of our decade-long friendship convinced that she deserved a healthy, perfect baby of her own genetic extraction. As an adoptee who was abandoned by my natural mother at ten days old despite being physically and mentally unblemished, it struck me as odd that she saw adoption as a vastly distant second best to procreation. Somewhere near the end, she found Jesus at the local McBox church -- during our last meeting she insisted she was finally content in life because of her newfound religion. My BS detector started ringing; she was raised agnostic atheist. The friendship came to a screeching halt when I asked, "What if Jesus doesn't have it in His plan for you to conceive?" You could almost hear the snap of the friendship breaking. Despite the pointed nature of my question, I still don't think I did anything wrong.

In a similar vein, I don't feel I wronged my vegan friends when I ended my vegan meetup group of ten years in August. Like my baby-obsessed former pal, vegans and vegetarians have become lunatics about their own holy grail, which is the toppling of the legally elected 45th president of the United States by any means necessary. They began this psychotic break in 2015, when Donald Trump went from fading reality TV show star to leader of the Executive Branch. Though my former friends accuse me of being a Trump fetishist, he has elicited no more than a "meh" from me in his entire presidential journey. I think he's done as good of a job as a person could do given the situation, but unlike them, I wouldn't take his job if it were handed to me on a silver platter, for all the power it would grant me.

I'm intellectually honest: Trump is a weird blowhard. He looks funny with his orange skin and puffy combover. He's also apparently quite competent at being President. He got in the way of foreign powers like China and Russia without goading them into firefights and he also got in the way of domestic terrorists like BLM and Antifa. He did not start any new wars. He's OK in my book. "Oh yeah, he seems OK" is the highest compliment I can give a president as a staid, born and bred, non-city dwelling Midwesterner. Make of that what you will. I am not excited about Trump. He elicits no passion from me one way or the other. I think he is OK, that is all.

Don't tell the other vegetarians, though. Former friends of mine foam at the mouth at the mention of Trump's name, their higher instincts thrown overboard in favor of Pavlovian hate porn gleefully propagated in every byte of mainstream media chatter. Between Facebook, Twitter, and CNN, their lives are one long, solid dog whistle, a teakettle of piss left on a dung-encrusted stove that never stops boiling over. My husband warned me that saying "All lives matter" got Jessica Doty Whitaker, the 24 year old Indiana mother of a three year old boy, fatally shot in the face. Recently, when I put out a sign letting my students know I would not force them to wear a mask inside my business, an adult piano student of a certain age confronted me, citing the governor's authority to deal with me for breaking the mask mandate. When I retorted with "The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land," she got so mad, she quit the lessons she had been taking for over two years. She was not mature about the matter. She ghosted me and did not pay for the half month she was present before our political disagreement. I was far more irritated by the ghosting than the money. People who are older than I am should know better than to act in such a rude and uncouth manner, especially over such trivia as politics. I just hope she finds a teacher in political agreement with whom to resume her lessons, because she was finally beginning to make real progress. I would hate to see two years of work, both mine and hers, wasted!

I am 47. Never did I think I would see a day when a despised Hollywood elite was more interested in cheering on BLM communism than making money in their chosen crafts of acting, directing, and film production, but here we are. Never did I suspect the Left would become the party of censorship. Never did I think people who marched for an end to the war in Vietnam would stump for an all out warmonger who put hundreds of thousands of black people in prison while his own son smoked crack cocaine with the groomed 14 year old daughter of his own dead brother. I didn't expect Donald Trump to be president in the first place and I'm more shocked to see that he's not half-bad at it. I'm done being surprised.

I would like to see a collective return to the old fashioned notions of civility and decorum. This means I would like to see a world where people don't shout in each other's faces or ghost their piano teachers because they are politically disgruntled. I'd like to see a world where Americans wear proper clothes in public spaces instead of open-toed Birkenstocks, shorts, sweatpants complete with sweat stains, and pajamas.  I'd like to see a general disavowal of calling people the eff word and the C word and a return to more literary yet devastating insults.  I'm entitled to my pipe dreams, I suppose. There are life lessons here that are being learned, that much is obvious. I pray we don't need a civil war to figure them out.