Now, if someone would be willing to voluntarily wash that mound of pots & pans in the sink, that would be great, gang! (Thanking you in advance, whoever you are!)

The bread came out great; it's beer bread -- so why wouldn't it? I want to eat the entire loaf, like, now, all by myself! But I won't. I'll focus less on the bread and more on the soup, which is vegetarian squash soup, and organic, to boot.

Okay. Michael Crichton has passed, due to cancer. That was sad. I didn't know he was sick and/or even mortal. Maxim Jakubowski had a nice piece about it in the Guardian today.

Michael Moore had a very uplifting thought to ponder re: Obama's win Tuesday night. I quote him in part:

"...today we celebrate this triumph of decency over personal attack, of peace over war, of intelligence over a belief that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs just 6,000 years ago. What will it be like to have a smart president? Science, banished for eight years, will return. Imagine supporting our country's greatest minds as they seek to cure illness, discover new forms of energy, and work to save the planet. I know, pinch me.

"We may, just possibly, also see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment and creativity. The arts and the artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths..."

Okay, not that any President is ever perfect. It's just the promise of change that is so refreshing, isn't it gang? Conservatives (racists?) around my neck of the woods insist Obama is going to turn our country Socialist. Who knows at this point? But are they saying they prefer Fascism over Socialism? Probably! In all the sad, honest truth of it.

At this point, all I am praying for is for that inexplicable war in Iraq to be over (don't really know what to think about Afghanistan), and for Obama to not be killed. 

Now a word about the artist as the enemy... In case you don't know me personally, it might come as a surprise to you to learn that I have one of those Irish tempers. I can go from zero to plate throwing in 60 seconds. Mike, the ex love of my life, happened to be at the polling place at that wee bonnie hour when I was voting on Tuesday morning (6:40 AM). He did come to my assistance rather gallantly when they were denying me my right to vote, but he also very patiently pointed out to the poll workers, "Do you know you're getting her really pissed off? I'd watch that, if I were you." Everyone started to look really worried, but I knew it wasn't their fault that this was happening to me. So I tried my 115% best to not totally lose it in the polling place.

After all, what the fuck are you going to accomplish at that point, right? After everything we've all been through for the past 8 years that the media has refused to acknowledge...

For those of you who don't know what voter caging is, this is from Wikipedia: "Voter caging is a form of voter suppression... Typically what will happen is a party will send out non-forwardable, first class mail to voters or particular voters they want to target. They will compile a list of all the voters where they've had their mail come back undelivered, this list is called a caging list. In some cases mail can be returned at a rate of 1 in every 15 letters sent out, this was shown in Ohio this year when the Board of Elections had 600,000 letters of confirmation returned as undeliverable. The party will use caging lists created by themselves or from the Board of Elections to purge voters off the voting rolls. When the voter turns out to vote, they will be challenged and forced to cast provisionally but because they are not on the voting rolls their provisional ballot is not counted. Even if the provisional ballots are cast, because they don't count for 7-10 days, they are essentially irrelevant unless there is a recount."

Many of you loyal readers of this lofty blog know what I've gone through just dealing with my yard for the last two years of living in Ohio, so you know as well as I do that I haven't moved anywhere. In fact, I'm a 5 minute walk from where I vote and my driver's license had the correct address printed right on it.

However, as Mike pointed out when we were leaving the polling place and I was so angry that I was crying, he said, "You know, you probably shouldn't be blogging about Bush being guilty of war crimes, Marilyn."

But it comes down to that, right? The most awesome election in our history, and my vote once again didn't count because I'm not willing to keep my mouth shut about things that we shouldn't keep our mouths shut about in this country.

It is so easy to know which side of the line I'm on, isn't it, gang? Remember me in October of 2006, testifying in  ACLU vs. Ashcroft in Federal Court in Philadelphia? Fighting for the rights of pornographers everywhere??? (And an interview with my mom appearing on nerve.com!) Crap. You are face to face with them at that point; you're in Federal Court and they're reading your work out loud.

Some of you may recall that I've also had situations with alleged pedophiles circulating my work "underground," as it were. That was a ticket to FBI's-ville in a nano-second. That was very refreshing.

What I don't usually talk about, since I want this blog to be less about day-to-day angsting in my private world, is that my market has been squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed over the last 7 years until most of the money for literary erotica has pretty much evaporated. I went from supporting myself with my art, to really having to scrape together enough to get by. These days, I eat: peanut butter, spaghetti, soup, cereal, fruit, salad. That's it. The same darn menu every day. Thank god, though, that we're still exploiting a bunch of people somewhere and so coffee is dirt cheap. But, seriously; I can't even buy wine! My raison d'etre! 

But I still write -- feverishly, as I am wont to say. And people are still reading what I write -- THANK YOU, GOD. Although I barely get paid for much of what they read. (And, yes, more and more cats still find their way into my world! Remember that poor old black cat who got killed by a car right in front of my house at the start of the summer? Another one who looks exactly like him appeared in my backyard at the end of the summer, and it looks like he's here to stay, gang. He's gorgeous.) However, I also thank my friends overseas this year who have enthusiastically bought some of my work recently and EUROS turn into fantastic dollars these days! Yay!

Well, so. Even though my vote didn't count, Obama still won and I am idealistic enough to hope that my market will open up a little more once again, gang. As Micheal Moore said above: "We may, just possibly, also see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment and creativity. The arts and the artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths."

We can only hope, we can only keep working, and then we shall see!