Author Archives: tacit

Goddammit, can’t sleep…

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…broke a tooth a while ago, and it’s keeping me up now.

Silly me, I don’t have dental insurance, and i figured I’d hold off on getting it fixed ’til I could find some. Well, all the dental insurance plans I found have at least a 60-day waiting period, and in the last few days, the damn thing’s gotten infected. Now I’m on a very heavy regimen of antibiotics and have to see an oral surgeon on Monday.

Should’ve not bothered trying to find insurance and just had it taken care of immediately. Grr.

In happy news, though:

– Shelly and I are going camping with smoocherie and her partner Fritz for Thanksgiving! Yay! I can’t wait!

– Front 242 is playing at Masquerade on December 2 (Friday). Any local and semi-local peeps interested in going? datan0de? nihilus? zensidhe? smoocherie? (Don’t know if that’s your speed in music or not.) johnnymoon? (I have no idea what kind of music you listen to these days.) nekidsteve? khepra and fangly? Anyone else I may have forgotten?

Links: Zombies, Philosophical canoodling, transhumanism, and more!

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First, we have the world’s simplest role-playing game, with zombies

Genre: cinematic modern horror. Playing time: 2-4 hours tops.

1. GM supplies general setting of the game, e.g. Teenage Slasher or Suburban Zombie Apocalypse. Everyone creates a character accordingly.

2. List FOUR things that the character is especially GOOD at, such as running, driving, climbing, picking locks, survival in the outdoors, fast talking or decapitating zombies using only a vintage 1940s tea set. The GM must ratify these.

3. List TWO things that the character is especially BAD at, such as swimming, finding their way in the wild, avoiding alcohol, keeping their cool in a fight, or not flipping out in confined spaces. GM ratifies as before.

4. Everyone writes their name on a piece of paper and gives it to the GM.

5. The GM picks out one name at random. This person is the Survivor. No matter WHAT happens (except see below), this person will survive, so long as he is trying to. Everyone else will die. Without exception. Everyone. The players are not told who the Survivor is.

It goes on from there. Looks like a lot of fun. Hey datan0de, think you could turn it into a strip game?

Next up, a couple of links from nihilus:
Turing’s cathedral, an exploration of the question “What makes you so sure that mathematical logic corresponds to the way we think?”

The Ship of Theseus: Identity is not so static nor so clear-cut as you might think. You can never step in the same river twice, but what does it mean to take the same boat across the river twice? (Shelly and I have discussions about this as it relates to transhumanist ideas on an ongoing basis–is a copy of me, perfect down to the limits imposed by Heisenberg uncertainty, still ‘me’?)

I really, really like this photograph (may not be work-safe for some work environments).

BDSM themes are becoming more and more prevalent in everyday media, and beer ads are no exception…this Heineken ad plays with that to very amusing effect.

Work-safe, kinda (it is a network TV ad, after all), and very funny.

What happens when a pro-life protester needs an abortion? It happens more often than you think.

“I’ve had several cases over the years in which the anti-abortion patient had rationalized in one way or another that her case was the only exception, but the one that really made an impression was the college senior who was the president of her campus Right-to-Life organization, meaning that she had worked very hard in that organization for several years. As I was completing her procedure, I asked what she planned to do about her high office in the RTL organization. Her response was a wide-eyed, ‘You’re not going to tell them, are you!?’ When assured that I was not, she breathed a sigh of relief, explaining how important that position was to her and how she wouldn’t want this to interfere with it.”

Ryan

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Last night, Shelly and I visited alias_node in the hospital. We saw him at Necronomicon just a couple of weekends ago, and he was his normal (which is to say, bizarre) self, telling stories about physiological reactions to bromide, and sporting a new ‘do that almost makes him look respectable, for whatever value of “respectable” is most appropriate; perhaps it’s best to say “a new ‘do that takes him to the perigee of his extremely eccentric orbit around respectability.”

Somewhere between then and now, things got bad. I’ll just point to datan0de‘s journal entry for anyone who wants more information.

We’re both worried.

This afternoon’s entertainment brought to you by the Religious Right

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The following was recently posted in the guestbook on my BDSM page. All grammatical, syntactical, and spelling errors preserved intact.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005
From dallasx9@aol.com
to: (human trafficking) this i say and read me good woe unto u and all that hurt these little one’s it would be better for u to have tide a mill stone around you’r neck and thrown into the deepest sea, then to fall into the angery hands of the living GOD.u will mark my words stand before god upon that great judgement day. upon you’re death or the great coming of the lord jesus christ. hear him never rest with out him. yes u can repent now today god is that forgiving his love is great and mighty this is why he is god and died on that cross of salvasion iam just forgivin because who ever u all might be u are full of darkness yea smile laugh party you can be with the party place god has prepard for the devil and his angels oh boy what fun for ever and ever and ever and ever and everburning burning in that for ever flame of fire the burning pain always upon u u u u u u no relift from the pain of fire and u that don’t repent u have sent you’re self to hells pitt.oh go ahead make fun of my spelling or anything else. because u human being here on earth the account ability age is 12 and i am writeing to all of u u adults u u u u u u uuuuuuuuuu.peace to u that known our lord. and no rest to u that choose the darkness, remeber this it will be for ever and eternity one day is like a thoudson years. oh can u imagein.?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? well can u!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I wonder which “little one’s” he’s talking about. I’m also not quite sure what the reference to the “age of accountability” means, but there’s something in me that makes me wonder if this guy wasn’t abused as a kid.

Andrea: Chaos, Politics, and Urban Decay

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feorlen spent the last few days with us, braving Florida’s humidity and a cat with an unfortunately-timed UTI to hang with Shelly and I.

Wednesday we wandered around downtown Tampa and Ybor City, talking about relationships and urban decay and taking pictures of the grafitti. Tampa has recently seen an explosion in political “treet art,” most of it preprinted and slapped up on abandoned buildings all over the place. Some of it is really quite sophisticated, and it’s everywhere.

We didn’t have to look too far to start seeing commentary; someone had made his views on the recent rate increases on downtown parking meters quite clear:

A few blocks from where we parked the car, we found an abandoned building totally plastered in political agitprop:

The image on the left is well-known in billboard hacking circles; it’s the face of Andre the Giant, and the icon was designed by activist Shepard Fairley as part of an anti-authoritarian and anti-consumerist propaganda campaign. (There’s an interview with Fairley here.)

Some of the other imagery, though, is even more interesting. Bandwidth-crushing photos lie beneath!

More sights to show you

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Halloween weekend: Necronomicon!

Necronomicon is the closest local equivalent of the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. The nice thing about Necro is that the pilgrimage comes to me, rather than the other way around. It’s an annual convention of science-fiction geekdom of high order.

Sadly, I have relatively few pictures to share of this year’s Necro, as an unfortunate accident on my part deleted many pictures from my camera. All was not lost, though, and I do hae much delight to show you.

smoocherie stayed with us for the weekend, which was delightful; we’ve seen more of her these past three weeks than in the six months prior. Shelly got a new, silver corset for this year’s festivities, and it is the hottest. Thing. EVAR.

The convention was, as it always is, the usual assortment of geeks, freeks, and general hottnests. This year’s festivities featured not one but two strip parties; Strip “Are You a Werewolf?” and Strip “Apples to Apples.” Physicist Sir Arthur Eddington once observed, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” It is not, however, so strange that datan0de can not make any part of it into a game in which the players disrobe.

Of bondage, drama, and nudity

Friday night: Strip “Are You a Werewolf?” This is a social game, played with a deck of cards which randomly assigns a role–werewolf, villager, or seer, to the players. A game is played in cycles; each night, the werewolves, whose identity is unknown to the other players, silently and secretly choose a player to devour. That player is then removed from the game, and the seer silently chooses a player and has a vision that identifies that player as villager or werewolf. The villagers, incensed at the heinous crime, vote among themselves as to which of their number they believe to be the werewolf, who is then lynched. The cycle continues until the werewolves devour the villagers or the villagers correctly identify and lynch the werewolves.

Traditionally, the way we play is that each member of the losing side–werewolf or villager–loses an article of clothing.

During this year’s werewolf party, someone brought out a large coil of rope and casually mentioned that it was ideal for tying people up with, and someone else–a friend of phyrra and nihilus–eagerly volunteered to be the subject. “Well, hey,” someone else–I didn’t quite catch who–said, “Franklin here does rope bondage, and the next thing you know…

“I’ll try to do this without groping you,” sez I. “Groping’s cool, grope away,” sez she. I managed not to grope her–probably a good thing, since her partner appeared about midway through, within seconds of this picture being taken, and there was some drama. I didn’t witness the drama, and I’m told it was resolved amicably the following day, which is always good.

Got a nasty rope burn on my thumb, though.

Of elevators, Apples to Apples, and taking over the world

Saturday we made our appearance at the convention quite late, a fact I blame on smoocherie. I wanted to go to bed early, see, but she insisted on being interesting at me.

We arrived eventually, and ate ice cream. Ran into an old partner of mine, M:


smoocherie, M, and Shelly

Also spent some time with my archnemesis, and saw his hero, Gir:

My partner S‘s other partner Sterling entered, and won, the masquerade contest. I’m told this is a character from the TV show Angel; never seen it.


Necro was held in a new hotel this year. Traditionally, in every hotel which plays host to the convention, at least one of the elevators will fail every year…and this year continued the tradition. Fortunately, the new hotel is equipped with hydraulic elevators, which don’t fall when they’re overloaded.

The elevators were mirrored, as all swanky elevators in all upscale hotels are.


smoocherie multiplied, and my partner S

Later that evening: strip Apples to Apples.

Sunday: Groping and Relationship Negotiations

istislah showed up on Sunday, so sadly missed much of the activities. She did, however, bring a rather copious supply of M&Ms.

Now, negotiation is an important part of any relationship, particularly a polyamorous relationship or a BDSM relationship. smoocherie and I are, for example, currently negotiating the beginning of a relationship right now. However, even the fearsome negotiation skills of all of us combined–smoocherie, Shelly, Sterling, and I–failed before the complexity of the negotiations over istislah‘s M&Ms. In fact, I was just today informed that istislah has made a unilateral and entirely non-negotiated decision regarding the disposition of the remaining M&Ms, something which might warrant a Kierista-style gestalt on the subject.

She also took advantage of the opportunity to grope smoocherie, something that may or may not have been negotiated but definitely needed no intervention:

I had more pictures, which have been sent to digital oblivion–among them being pics during Werewolf and many pics of S and the members of the Smoosh. smoocherie snapped this pic of me, which is horribly backlit but shows off my fun “Hellraiser” jacket:

I know a lot of you guys out there have additional pics, which I need to get copies of…datan0de? zensidhe? nekkidsteve? (I got the pics you sent of the impromptu bondage session.) Anybody else?

I have such sights to show you…

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…and many weeks to catch up on. It’s been a busy, exhausting, overwhelming, and fun few weeks.

I have not read LiveJournal in over two weeks now, so if I’ve missed anything anyone finds particularly compelling, now’s the time to say so. 🙂

So on to the past few weeks!

Shortcut to Nirvana

Two weeks ago last Saturday, smoocherie came into town and we went to the movies. Sound like an ordinary evening? Wait; it gets weirder.

An old friend from many years ago was in town from Seattle, and rang me up to see if we could get together. We invited her to go see the movie with us; Shelly and smoocherie and I were meeting another old friend, Charlie, to see a documentary on an Indian religious festival, Kumbh Mela, called Shortcut to Nirvana. The film’s director, Nick Day, is a friend of Charlie’s, and was on hand for the movie.

If you’ve never heard of the movie, I strongly recommend it. You can find it on DVD on the film’s Web site. The Kumbh Mela is thew largest gathering of people anywhere for any reason in the entire history of mankind, yet very few people outside of India have ever heard of it.

Got a photo op of the group of us at the theater:


Nick, Charlie, smoocherie, Shelly, and me

After the movie, we all kidnapped Nick and decided to show him around Ybor. First stop: sushi! We talked about religion and God and the role of science and philosophy and HBO’s awful series Sex and the City…Nick is intelligent, articulate, and very well educated, and a fascinating speaker.

After dinner, my Seattle friend, who had already seen the movie and skipped the film to go out partying, invited us to a lesbian bar.

But not just any lesbian bar…rather:

The most dreadful lesbian bar in the world

I say that with complete confidence, even though I have not, in fact, been to every lesbian bar in the world. I can state with absolute certainty that even in the blackest heart of Calcutta in the days leading up to the Great War, you would not have found a more dreadful lesbian bar.

It’s not just the place. The bar itself wasn’t particularly dreadful; a tiny, almost unnoticeable hole in the wall, reached by a steep flight of narrow stairs leading into darkness…uncomfortable certainly, but not especially dreadful.

A truly dreadful experience has to be a well-rounded experience, and indeed this bar fit the bill.

Imagine a cramped, narrow bar that’s mostly a dance floor, with a tiny stage on one end and a distinct lack of usable facilities. Now, cover every square inch of the place in dreadful Halloween decorations from the local Wal-Mart. Still not especially dreadful overall, but moving in that direction.

Now stage a completely over-the-top drag king show in this place. Still not dreadful; drag king shows are supposed to be over-the-top, right? Ah, but here it comes, the piece de resistance: Imagine that this show is being overseen by a huge, and very loud, MC who sincerely believes that the height of wit is insulting the patrons at the top of her voice, while jumping up and down and sweating profusely, and then cause the sound system to fail intermittently. The sound system is an important element because when it failed during a performance, it made it just that much easier to hear the MC singing along to the song.

These words can’t really convey the dread of the place, in much the same way that calling Great Cthulhu a smelly squid can’t adequately communicate the horror of the Great Old Ones. The combined experience was the stuff of which Lovecraft novels are made.

But I digress.

Nick and Charlie were good sports about it all, and eventually the group of us fled with at least seventy percent of our sanity points intact. smoocherie even managed to get in some wiggling with my friend, which was great fun to watch, despite the multitude of horrors around us.

Downtown Ybor is currently home to some of the most fascinating grafitti I’ve ever seen, and seems to be a sort of Mecca of grafitti these days; I took pictures of many interesting specimens, which I had planned to share with all of you. Unfortunately, I pressed a wrong button and inadvertently deleted all of the images from my camera. Perhaps later.

The rest of the weekend was much more placid–shopping for fetish clothes with smoocherie and generally ignoring the impending threat of the hurricane, which passed us by with nary a problem. We heard a techno cover of the Clash’s Rock the Casbah in one of the fetish stores, which just goes to show you.

Polyamory as a zero-sum game and other musings on relationship

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I get a lot of email from my polyamory site. The majority of that email is very positive, but every so often someone takes issue with the idea of polyamory (not so much of the idea of being polyamorous, so much as the entire existance of polyamory), and objects to polyamory in principle as well as in practice.

One of the most common objections to polyamory is based on time management, and betrays a fundamental worldview which, I think, is not necessarily accurate, but which is buried so deeply in assumptions about the way relationships work that it’s nearly inaccessible.

Now, before I go any further, I do think it’s important to say that there is a kernel of truth in complaints about polyamory from a time-management perspective. Love isn’t infinite, press releases to the contrary; but more important, time and energy are definitely not infinite, and are sometimes in very short supply indeed. It is not possible, philosophically or practically, for a person to have an indefinite number of partners; eventually, even the most patient of people will simply run out of time.

But that doesn’t happen as quickly as people think it does, because love is not a poker game.

A poker game is a classic example of a zero-sum system. In game theory (and in economics), something is said to be “zero sum” if all the gains and losses in the system, added together, always equal zero.

In poker, it’s easy to see how this works. If Alan and Bob play poker, then for every dollar that Alan wins, Bob loses exactly one dollar. The total of the winnings and losses added up equals zero; each dollar in the pot that one person wins, the other players have lost.

Many people approach relationships in much the same way. The assumption is that relationships are also zero-sum; every minute of time, every bit of attention you give to one partner is a minute of time or a bit of attention that is taken away from someone else. If Alan is dating Betty and Cindy, the net sum of the time Allen spends with Betty is time taken away from Cindy, and if you add the total amount of time one partner gains and the other loses, you always end up at zero.

Now, hidden deeply within this idea is another, related idea, and that is that a person who is in a relationship has a rightful claim on his partner’s time and attention. If I am dating Alice, then Alice’s time and attention rightfully belongs to me; if Alice spends that time and attention on someone else, i have lost something which I am entitled to and which is mine by right. Her time is mine; she has no right to take it away from me and spend it on someone else.

Both ideas are wrong, though for different reasons.

The fact is, my partner’s time does not belong to me. Nor is it anything I should legitimately feel entitled to. Two people engage in a romantic relationship for the mutual benefit of each; should the relationship not be a source of joy for each person, it’s certainly reasonable for them to look for relationships which are satisfying. More importantly, though, it’s neither beneficial nor necessary to lay claim to a person’s time and attention.

It’s not necessary because if a person is interested in you, it’s reasonable to assume that person will dedicate time and attention to you; people tend to spend their time on things which are important to them, and to find time for those things. Behavior is an emergent phenomenon; people behave the way they do as a result of the things they believe. Someone who does not believe that his partner is a priority or that his relationship is important is not likely to focus a lot of time on it, and compelling him to do so won’t make him feel like it’s important to him.

It’s not beneficial because a person who gives his partner time and attention only because his partner forces him to is not likely to provide high-quality time. Just the opposite, in fact; he’s likely to resent it. You can’t compel someone to find you important, which is precisely what you’re doing when you believe that his attention is something you can lay claim to.

Getting back to the point, though, love is not a poker game. Time and attention are not zero-sum, and time spent with one person does not necessarily mean time taken away from another.

It’s reasonable for the people in any romantic relationship to expect to have a certain amount of “alone time” with their lovers, of course. This is something healthy relationships need in order to grow and develop; and because time is not infinite, it’s reasonable to say that no person can really expect to build high-quality relationships with a vast number of people.

But even considering that healthy relationships do need some measure of alone time, it’s still not a zero-sum game. This is because it’s possible for a person to spend quality time with two or more partners concurrently.

If–and this is important–that person does not see his relationships as separate and discrete things to be kept isolated from one another.

here is a model of polyamory I call the “free agent” model. People who subscribe to this model tend to isolate and compartmentalize their relationships, and one of the hallmarks of free-agent polyamory is that the people who subscribe to it will often present themselves as “single” when meeting new people, and behave in public as if they were unpartnered, even when they have existing relationships.

On the other end of the continuum from free agents is people who subscribe to an “inclusion” model of polyamory, one that sees all the relationships as interconnected, and that seeks to build relationships which are mutually compatible and supporting. This does not necessarily mean that people with an inclusion ideal of polyamory want their partners to be dating each other, or sleeping in the same bed; it means that they seek to find partners who will respect the existing relationships, who can spend time together, and who don’t view each other as competition. It also means that they seek to find relationships in which everyone involved feels comfortable with everyone else involved, and tend to be aware of the effects of each of their relationships on all the others.

One of the primary drawbacks of the free-agent model is that it can lead to resource competition, in which time and attention given to one person is taken away from someone else. If Alice is dating Bob and Charles, and Alice compartmentalizes those two relationships–by spending time with Bob or with Charles but not with both, for example–then the relationships are zero-sum. Time given to Bob is time not available to Charles, and vice versa.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The benefit of seeking relationships which are mutually supportive and which aren’t compartmentalized is that Alice can spend quality time with Bob and Charles simultaneously, without competition. When this happens, suddenly those two relationships aren’t zero-sum any more; it’s possible for the sum total of time spent with Bob and time spent with Charles to exceed 100%. It is not necessary for Bob and Charles to be romantically connected with each other, and it certainly is not necessarily for Bob and Charles to be sleeping with each other; all that’s necessary is that Bob and Charles be able to function together without competing for Alice’s time.

Of course, there’s a drawback. It means thinking about relationships, and choosing partners who fit into the existing network of relationships well. It means finding partners who are philosophically compatible with one another. And, it means being aware of the effects of each of those relationships on all the others, and taking responsibility for those effects.

I have in the past been involved in situations where my relationship with someone is a source of pain or discomfort for that person’s other partner. When that happens, i don’t try to isolate myself from her other partner; instead, I’ll tend to put the brakes on that relationship until I and her other partner can work out where the problem is. Doing this means I don’t always get to pursue all the relationships I want to as quickly as I want to–but it also means that I’m not participating in a system that’s hurtful to someone else, even though that person’s happiness is not directly my responsibility, and it means that, in the end, the relationships I build are healthier and more inclusive.

When you build relationships this way, something magical happens.

If Alice is dating Bob and Charles, and each of them is equally important to her, and Alice wants to give each of them equal time, but she compartmentalizes those relationships, at the end of the day Bob and Charles can have no more than 50% of her time and attention. But if Alice does not compartmentalize her relationships, then at the end of the day each of them can get much more than 50% of her time and attention; each of them may get 70%, or 80%, or more, of her time and attention. The relationship isn’t a poker game.

I have been involved with people who do not believe it’s possible to spend quality time with two partners concurrently. I’ve also seen it often in other people’s relationships. In fact, this belief often lies beneath many enforced primary/secondary structures; people will construct primary/secondary relationships out of fear of losing importance or losing a partner’s time and attention, and see primary/secondary as a means to keep the time and attention they feel rightfully belongs to them.

I remember one night when Shelly and my ex-wife and I had gone out to dinner together after I came home from work. We went to a Thai restaurant, spent a while lingering over dinner and talking, then came home. On the way home, my ex-wife asked me “When am I going to get to spend some time with you?”

The fact was, she’d spent the entire evening with me. But the fact that another person was present somehow invalidated that time in her mind; even though we’d had a wonderful dinner together, it “didn’t count’ for her, because she believed that love is zero-sum. Time with her had to be time spent away from any other romantic partner, or else it wasn’t really “her” time. (Interestingly, the same was not true of time spent together with friends who were not romantic partners–far from it, my ex loves to entertain, and was extremely happy spending time with me and with friends, provided they were not lovers.)

When a person approaches a relationship with that philosophy, it cannot help but become zero-sum. he sad part of that is that in a zero-sum relationship, everyone loses. The total amount of time and attention spent on all the members of the relationship can never exceed 100%; the pot is smaller, and there is no win-win scenario.

Love does not have to be a poker game. When it is, it becomes a game nobody wins.

Interesting news on obesity and Alzheimer’s (damn, I’m posting a lot today!)

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First, from wldrose, Vaccine may target obesity in the future

When babies receive shots against diseases like polio and measles, their vaccinations may in the future include protection against getting fat, according to researchers.

Infection by certain pathogens triggers rapid increases in fatty tissue in animals, Nikhil Dhurnadha told the annual meeting of NAASO, the Obesity Society, in this western Canadian city.

At the same time, the discovery that many more obese people than normal-weight people have been exposed to a certain virus suggests a link between obesity and viral infection…

Dhurandhar became interested in viral causes of obesity while working as a family physician in Bombay in the 1980s, during a severe outbreak of SMAM1, an adeno virus that kills chickens.

A friend noticed that the dead chickens were unusually fat, with enlarged livers, kidneys, low cholesterol levels and an atrophied thymus gland…

“In 10 years, people may be able to walk into a clinic and be told that their obesity is due to X cause, such as genes, the endocrine system, or pathogens. That may have a more productive outcome than a blanket treatment right now, (which) is not very successful,” said Dhurandhar.

And because viruses are hard or impossible to treat, he said, prevention through vaccines will be key.”

And this one, from shamangirl: Good News for Pot Smokers

An oft-mentioned danger of marijuana smoking—so widely believed that the smokers themselves admit it all the time—is that it kills your brain cells.

But a new study has found that one of marijuana’s active ingredients actually helps produce new brain cells, and this is correlated with anxiety-reducing effects…

[T]he new study found that rats given heavy doses an artificial version of a potent, active ingredient of marijuana grew new brain cells.

In the journal’s November issue, Xia Zhang and colleagues from University of Saskatchewan found that creation of new brain cells was aided by a “potent and synthetic cannabinoid,” or man-made version of a compound extracted from marijuana.

The rats also exhibited less anxiety- and depression- like behavior after a month of the treatment, the study found.

It’s hard to find good protesters these days.

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Every day, on my way to work, I drive past a small women’s clinic. Last Tuesday, there was a group of about five or six people standing on the sidewalk in front of the clinic, waving signs showing pictures of fetuses. They’d unfurled a huge yellow banner that they’d placed across the sidewalk, reading “ABORTIONIST!” in large block letters with an arrow pointing at the clinic.

On Friday, the number of protestors had dwindled to three. The big yellow banner was gone–possibly because it had been blocking the sidewalk, or possibly because it was just too much hassle to set up. (Putting up a six-foot-long banner is more work than it seems.)

Saturday and Sunday, nothing. Apparently, protecting the unborn children is important, but not something you’d want to, y’know, give up a weekend for.

Monday and Tuesday, the same three protesters were back. Fewer signs this time, and they just seemed all so…disspirited. Today, the protest had collapsed to a single dishevled man, who looked for all the world like he was homeless, standing in front of the clinic and shaking his fist and screaming incoherently, and, bizarrely, pulling branches off the large tree that sits in the corner of the lot overhanging the sidewalk. I filled my car with gas at the gas station next to the clinic and watched him for a while.

Now, it used to be, back in the day, that people took this protesting thing a lot more seriously. I moved to Tampa in 1992, and then as now, my path to work took me past the clinic every day. (Funny thing, life.)

Back then, there were always about twenty or thirty protesters outside the clinic, every day, rain or shine. I worked at a place called Printgraphics at the time, and one of the protest organizers actually came into the ship once, asking me to design some anti-abortion signs and placards for him. I declined, and he went away and got someone else to do it for him.

But I digress.

They were there every day, chanting and waving signs and holding prayer vigils to, I don’t know, call down a rain of toads on the place or something. The toads never materialized, but that didn’t seem to bother them.

And then, overnight, it all just kinda fell apart. I can even point my finger to the moment when it happened.

It started one day when a young couple and a doctor walked up to the clinic. Someone in the group of protesters thought that saving an unborn child’s life was just absolutely the most important thing imaginable, and such an end justified any means, and he started throwing rocks at them. Next thing you know, a bunch of people had joined in, and showered the couple and their doctor with rocks and bottles. Made the papers and everything.

Problem was, they weren’t going in for an abortion. As it turns out, the couple were going to the clinic because they were trying to conceive. The doctor? He wasn’t an abortion doctor; he was a fertility doctor.

The point was well and truly driven home a few nights later, when one of the protesters decided to vandalize the clinic. The clinic was surrounded with a chain link fence at the time (it’s since been replaced with a more attractive metal fence), and he decided to ram his car through the fence, and…

At this point, I need to stop and digress for a moment. You know those Hollywood movies where you see someone, usually some hero with a beautiful and sexy young woman in his protection, drive a car through a chain-link fence? Forget it. It doesn’t happen that way.

You see, chain link is flexible and giving, but it’s also very, very strong. There ain’t no way you’re driving through a chain-link fence in anything short of an armored, treaded vehicle like a tank or a self-propelled howitzer. It’s not gonna happen.

What DOES happen, in the real world, is that the fence bows, and the car rides up onto the fence and gets caught.

Which is exactly what happened to the hapless protester. His car got hopelessly hung up on the fence and he couldn’t figure out how to free it, so he eventually just abandoned it and walked away.

I saw it there, still hung up on the fence, the next day when i drove to work. the police came, ran the registration, picked the guy up, and that was that.

After that, the protests ended. They just plain stopped, and stayed stopped for years. Too embarrassing, I suppose.

In a way, that’s been a microcosm for the organized anti-abortion movement in the nation as a whole–arguably the most inept and ineffective social movement the nation has ever seen. Groups like Randall Terry’s Operation Self-Aggrandizement Operation Rescue have been good at getting newspaper inches, and have proven very adept at raising money from the faithful. Some of that money goes to administrative costs, a lot of it goes to keeping Randall Terry in his signature $1,000-a-pair alligator-skin boots, and the rest of it seems to be spent on researching new and ever more spectacular ways for the movement to shoot itself in the foot.

Now, the Senate still tosses the issue around whenever they feel like dodging real work, like getting runaway government spending under control or managing the dramatically inept war in Iraq. But for the most part, their heart just doesn’t seem to be in it any more. They’re like that tiny handful of people marching around in front of the clinic last week–but not on weekends and only if, y’know, the weather is nice.

Time was when you could really count on the fanatics. They had the holy light of God (or the holy light of murder–sometimes, they kinda look the same) in their eyes and a fire in their bellies. They would stop at nothing to save a child’s life–or at least, nothing short of, y’know, actually adopting an unwanted baby with cerebral palsey or something.

But today? Today we see one homeless man shaking his fist and pulling down trees. Kinda sad, really. Where’s the real spirit? Where’s the real chutzpah? Where’s the photo op of a bunch of True Believers standing in the rain? I wanted to take pictures, dammit!