I get a call at work now and then from a friend who shall remain anonymous, known only to my co-workers as "the voice." He/she is a true friend in every sense of the word and I always step a bit lighter when I hear the smartass putting on a happy tone to make me smile. " How's your day going? What's up with the kids? Can you *believe* that shit really happened?!" In the midst of the stress of puttin' up with physician's extra-large egos that voice is a welcome sound to the old Poopster's ears.

I tend to be quite straightforward with how I feel about things, and that puts some folks off...most especially men. It's the whole Mars and Venus and cave and rubberband thing I reckon. One thing that I've learned through decades of saying what I think and engaging in "healthy debate" is that what goes around comes around. Never before have I felt that as strongly as I do now, one week pre-election. I admire Oprah for not kicking Bill O'Reilly's pompous ass but giving pissed off Americans the chance to do it instead. Kudos to Jon Stewart for taking the high road with Ashcroft and injecting a bit of humor with a guy who's trying to wrap it all up with a lucrative book. I can't think of anything nice to say about Cheney. People who profit from war contracting are lower than a snake's belly in my book..so sue me.

I was at the Kudzu bar Saturday night when a group of folks came in that I joined for meet-n-greet. One of the group was a beautiful young girl, pregnant as a goose, who had just returned from duty in Iraq leaving her husband there to fight the "war on terror." Halfway across the world in the middle of a civil war that has always been thus and so, she sang Journey's Open Arms to her Mama on the computer when she was scared for her life. Now she was here all fat and sassy and knocked up singing karaoke to her parents...safe and sound back on US soil. Everybody around that table had something to say about the politics of war, but I felt that she should have a voice since she was the only one who had actually been-there-done-that. When I asked her how she felt about the whole deal, her reply was simple: "We need to get out."

My Daddy has a friend who served in WWII and has kept a wallet that he lifted off of a dead German soldier. Daddy is researching the contents of that antique leather pouch...four black and white pictures. One is of a very young man in uniform. The others are a family shot and a couple of pics of he and his buddies during happy times. I have been imagining what his name might have been and how his voice sounded since he spoke to us from his Bavarian grave there just recently. Call me a dreamer, but I think I heard him say "Give peace a chance." Could just be the liberal utopian in me and a flashback from LSD.

Time will tell.

^j^