Indigo Girls - UPAC, Kingston, NY

Great show last night... I think it was the 16th or 17th time I've seen them. I miss seeing them play with a full band, as they did on their tours in the 90's, but they are good solo acoustically too. I was very happy to hear them play Three Hits and Reunion; it was really nice to hear Chickenman live again too. My siblings and I hung out for a bit by the stage after the concert. Sully, their head roadie, gave us guitar picks and a copy of their setlist. Then we waited outside by their bus for a while, and my brother got his picture taken with Amy Ray. He was so happy, I thought he was going to wet himself.

There was a time in my life, my early twenties, when I went to concerts whenever I could. Now I just don't any more, and that's sort of sad. I have too many other distractions and competing priorities. Last weekend, Nellie McKay played in Woodstock, and I didn't go to see her because I'd been hiking and biking all day and I was tired and wanted to turn in early. Lame! What was I thinking?

Speaking of competing distractions, I've been taking a break from TV for a while. I wrote a few weeks ago about getting agitated and irritated every time I turned the damned thing on. That kept happening, so I've put the remote to rest for the time being. Curiously, I still feel sort of on edge, but I don't have the boob tube to blame anymore. Maybe I'm just detoxing from media withdrawal. I'm sure Marshall McLuhan would have had something to say about that.

I don't know if I'm going to break my stint of television abstinence to watch the debate tomorrow night. I'm kind of tempted to, but I know I'm 100% guaranteed to feel agitated and irritated if I do. Besides, the debate I'm really looking forward to seeing is the vice presidential debate (which unfortunately is scheduled for the same night as the Canadian national party leader's debate). This afternoon I saw a clip of Katie Couric interviewing Sarah Palin, and I discovered that not only is Palin bat-shit crazy (this, I'd already realized), but she's also completely unable to think on her feet. She was just spouting a bunch of talking points that must have been fed to her by the McCain campaign. Even when Couric asked her to clarify one of her responses, she just paused for a few seconds and then repeated what she'd just said, word for word. I can't wait to see her debate Biden. It's going to be a complete train wreck.

Part of me does feel bad about looking forward to seeing her destroyed in the debate, but that sense of guilt is overwhelmed by my anger. Is Palin really the person the Republican party deems to be the best candidate for vice president? Someone with no relevant experience, someone who is stupid, vain, and self-involved enough to believe that it's good public policy to ban library books which espouse a different point of view from one's own, and that political office is an appropriate platform from which to act on personal vendettas? Someone who believes the fundamentalist horse shit that life is a constant battle between Good and Evil and there is no middle ground or room for negotiation? I think I am justified in looking forward to watching Biden tear her apart into little pieces of crazy.

My father used to (and probably still does) quote Winston Churchill, who said that "a free people get exactly the government that they deserve." I disagree. We deserve better than this.

Ugh. This post is in dire need of more editing, but it's past my bedtime so I'm uploading it to the interwebs as is, crows feet and all.