Old times

Well, college fraternity reunions are interesting things. Woke up at 3 a.m. so I could drive to Evanston to pick up another buddy/brother, and then off to O'Hare for the o-dark early departure. Met up with another brother at O'Hare, and off we went to the homeland.
On arrival, had to make an early In-n-Out Burger run (a franchise sorely missed here in Chicago.) Double-double, fries and chocolate shake-only thing better is a Tommy burger with the chili dripping everywhere. Since we were catching a schoolbus filled with kegs to the Rose Bowl later, had to forego Tommy's in the name of intestinal self-preservation. Nobody in their right mind would load up on Tommy's knowing that he'd have to find a usable toilet at the Rose Bowl later in the day.
We then drank our asses off for the next 15 hours.
The guys are almost uniformly successful. Lawyers, doctors, investment bankers-these guys are approaching their professional peaks and are an amazingly able and productive group. And as soon as the boozing began we all reverted to our default setting-fraternity drinking machines. There were drunken scenes and declarations of love and affection (kinda nerve-wracking for some of the straight guys-we had a lot of guys come out of the closet after graduation), competition for the unattached women, and extremely long BS sessions lasting until about 3 a.m.
What had changed: hairlines, waistlines and bathroom lines (much longer since a lot of the guys were puzzlingly reluctant to piss outside the bathrooms-you'd think they were trying to protect their reps or something.) Additionally, conversation was far more mature. Topics usually included jobs, partners, wives, children and portfolios, not to mention divorces, the next guy coming out of the closet, and a certain guy raising quintuplets or quads on his own after his partner left him.
Now you know why we didn't stop drinking.
What had not changed: the amount of booze consumed (far too much), the amount of boasting pertaining to said consumption (more than enough), and the filthy songs that were summoned forth from the bottomless memories of the brotherhood (certainly too much for my 18 month-old daughter to ever hear.)
It was a great weekend.

Life during wartime

I grew up in Huntington Beach, on the northern fringe of Orange County-behind the fabled "Orange Curtain." It was only natural that I ended up conservative and Republican, in that order. Of course, it has been thoroughly enjoyable watching the ongoing self-flagellation by Democrats in the wake of Bush's triumph.
It has been very difficult to refrain from gloating. However, in the afterglow, I continue to wonder just why my liberal friends persist in paranoia. Specifically, I have several friends who simply refuse to acknowledge the possibility that born-again, evangelical types might not be one step removed from the Taliban.
I don't know any born-again Christians, but I have met a few people since I moved to Chicago who are serious about their faith to a degree I have never seen, not even in the land of the Crystal Cathedral. They don't seem terribly eager to push for legislation demanding that women lose their footwear and return to the kitchen to cook turkey pot pie for their lords. Yet the commentary from my liberal friends implies as much, and I simply cannot understand why. The only potential explanation I have concluded is that they see Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and those kooks who show up at every major gay rights activity with their "God hates Fags" signs and assume that not only do these men seek to impose an ersatz form of sharia here in the U.S., but also that these individuals are representative of the entire evangelical movement.
And yet, these are the same liberal friends who always get pissy about the SF Chronicle showing pictures of the more outrageous groups in the Gay Pride parade on the grounds that "the photos misrepresent the majority of the gay population."
If the majority of the gay population is a lot more, well, normal than the gangs of bull dykes, leather fetishists and drag queens regularly depicted in the SF Comical, than why is it so difficult to consider that the majority of evangelicals may not be slavish followers of Pat Robertson who demand nothing but Ozzie & Harriett on TV and a return to Victorian morality in other matters?
A little more tolerance and further exercise of the allegedly greater mental capacity of blue-state residents would be appreciated here.