A Poem, Since I haven't Posted In A While

 

Adaptive Nighttime Ruminations

After a long day of disabled life,

There should be greater solace

Than looking at the ceiling

And reminding myself that Taylor Swift

Gets morning breath and pit stains.

Mine has been an unfinished miracle.

I’d like to be born again,

Maybe live as a gal who could win.

Instead of half-finished and waiting

For a chance that wasn’t  fresh when I

Might have gotten it, and now might just

Crumble like a dead leaf

In my barely-used ornamental hands.

I’ve had time for my friends to get divorced,

For not getting married “until *everybody* can!1” to

Go from a dare to a decision to one of the thousands of rights that

My email fears could disappear every morning.

With my own  status as Rookie of Some Other Year

(past or future…does it matter? Pretty soon looking forward will hurt like looking back)

Largely unchanged

I Had Another Post Half-Prepared...

 

The sad state of disability advocacy should be evident in the fact that electoral politics, imperfect and compromised as all that seems to be, has often been my one shot at seeing what winning feels like.(There are, of course, advocates who work out of a mixture of passion AND necessity, but I’m not sure I count among their numbers.)
Struggling so hard to get an unhappy result is too much like my real life outside of politics—my mother would hate that I wrote that but she also did tell me to focus on something that affected me today, and I think that qualifies.

There is another timeline where funding campaigns is not like an arms race, where I might have taken more than this moment to tell you, despite “Love on The Spectrum” being contrived in the way all capital-R  Reality is contrived, both telling you  how to feel about everything and making sure everyone depicted is upper-middle class, but still? You root for everyone involved.
Or I might have taken borderline-smug refuge in the Advantages of Incumbency.

Or maybe spent another day on the “Yay! It’s Walz,” half-victory train. Which I am glad about, even in my probable new life as a ground-game agnostic. Not sure I’m giving up every weekend again, though.

This much money in politics has a distorting affect, and that should be a bigger story. Not to be that acquaintance on social-networking to say “Nobody is talking about this!1” because they are.  Just not everyone reads The Nation or Mother Jones, no matter how much I might wish(or, still, after all  this time, dimly imagine a timeline where I might appear in one of them.)