Approaching Manhattan from JFK. That's the Empire State Building there in the middle. Still get a chill when I look to the left before dipping down into the tunnel. Has it really been seven years?

There on the golf course, Mike stepped to the tee, lifted the club, and--poooock!--knocked the ball straight/high/long down the fairway. Behind him, there was a white heron poking along the bank of a pond and, beyond that, staring straight at me, steely and proud, the white letters of a McCain/Palin sign in someone's backyard. Mike got his degree in business administration from a college in California last year and then, in a move that still amazes me, joined the Army. One of the advantages of joining the Army with a college degree is that you can start as an officer, but such was the state of Army recruiting a year ago among people with college degrees that the guys behind the desk in the recruiting office had to dig up a manual to figure out how to sign him up when he walked in the door.

Mike's a Republican, a semi-Libertarian, an action-movie fan, a born warrior, and easily the most virtuous of my three brothers--honest, humble, hardworking, funny, self-deprecating, easygoing. He doesn't make a theater of his opinions, the way the rest of us do. He's not a meat head. He voted for Kerry in 2004 because, as he explained to me at the time, "Bush is an idiot." A couple months ago, bored out of his mind at an Army base in Oklahoma, he bought and read Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father because I told him how good I thought it was, and then he did me better by reading John McCain's Faith of My Fathers, which he liked better. I tried to make a case about the importance of Obama having written his own book, but it crumbled in mid-air. For a military guy, McCain's war story is hard to set aside on a technicality. Most of the guys in the Army are voting for McCain. "Except for the black guys," Mike says.

Ever since he read Faith of My Fathers, Mike's been leaning toward McCain, but since he's not big on pronouncements, his way of telling me that has been to say he hasn't made up his mind. And cuz I love the guy, and cuz I know he knows what I think, and cuz I don't want to spend the little time we ever get to talk hassling him, I haven't been bugging him about it. But seeing Sarah Palin's name in bright white there on the golf course, and later by the side of the road where our hotel was, and later in the front yard of a house next to the house where we went to a pre-wedding party for our older brother who was getting married--which is why we were all in Florida in the first place--I got up the nerve to ask Mike what he made of the possibility of Sarah Palin as commander in chief. This, I was pretty sure, would score me a couple points. But never one to fight, he grinned and said something neutral and changed the subject.

Our dad was in the Air Force. Our older brother, the one getting married, is in the Navy (he's the one I wrote about years ago in this piece, parts of which are regrettably stupid [the lack of understanding of Iraq's history, the part where I hold forth on what Iraqis "want"]). Our grandpa was in the Marines during World War II--was a hand-to-hand combat instructor, lost a bunch of buddies in Japan--and then a conservative politician in California. I sat next to grandpa at the wedding rehearsal dinner and asked him the Sarah-Palin-as-commander-in-chief question. Even though he is a true right radical (thinks teachers get paid too much, thinks the plight of black people has been "overdramatized," he wrote a bill when he was in the California legislature that would allow Christian Scientist parents to let their children die of easily remedied medical conditions), I suspected that the idea of Sarah Palin giving orders to the Marines would freak his shit out. No such luck. He smiled and told me that he loved Sarah Palin because unlike most politicians, who don't tell you the truth, she says what she believes, no matter what it is. Like how she doesn't believe dinosaurs existed or whatever.

My dad, now a vice president at Northrop Grumman, the military contractor, lives in Virginia and is voting for McCain and there's nothing that will sway him. He laughs whenever I bring it up. His wife, my stepmom, is voting likewise, though they both are resigned to the probability that Virginia will go for Obama anyway.

As for Mike--well, when I sat down to write this post, I didn't exactly know where things stood. As far as I knew, his heart was still with McCain. He just finished field artillery (i.e., blowing shit up) school in Oklahoma and drove to Texas last week for his new assignment in El Paso. I sent him a text last night to ask him how Texas was treating him and whether he'd made up his mind about the election. He texted back to say:

I already voted Obama. Texas seems okay I guess. Definitely better than Oklahoma.

I texted:

Are you getting shit from your pals in the army? Or do they not know who you voted for?

He texted:

They know. Both my roommates voted too. They both went McCain but I guess they were on the wall.

I wanted to know what did it for him, what put him over the wall. He texted back:

Republican party, palin, and the neverending "redistribution of wealth" (that's what the government does!) needed better argument. SHIT'S WEAK

Mike Frizzelle, ladies and gentlemen.

Landed at Chicago's Midway Airport about fifteen minutes ago. I'm already on an Orange Line train headed downtown to the Loop, where I'm going to meet up for a late lunch/very early dinner with my brother and his "partner," a.k.a. this woman with whom he's been involved for years now but absolutely refuses to marry. She refuses to marry him too—at least she has a good reason—and isn't that your straight privilege for you right there? Get married, don't get married—whatever you want! You're straight! Up to you! It's magic!

Anyway, riding a fast, reliable train from the airport to downtown Chicago—$2. Getting to vote for Prop 1 this November and help bring real rapid transit—fixed-rail transit—to the Seattle area? Priceless.

And here's an ever-so-slightly lovelier picture of Chicago from the train...

Joan Didion (from one of the essays toward the back of Slouching Towards Bethelehem):

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

Skipping a paragraph...

"On nights like that," Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, "every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom.

And also (can't resist)...

Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.

Right on schedule, the fires in Los Angeles and Ventura counties are raging right now, and the Los Angeles Times is blogging about it like crazy. Here's a photo taken by the LA Times's Francine Orr last night of a news van parked just north of the 118 Freeway, just before evacuations were ordered. Those streaks of orange light are embers blowing in the wind.

Here's a gallery of photos by LA Times's photographers, beginning with this one:

And here's a gallery of photos by Reuters photographers, including this one:

Gov. Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency. Two people are dead so far. And so is at least one squirrel, who started a small fire with its own flaming body ("Firefighters say the squirrel set off the blaze yesterday when it shorted out a power line, caught fire, and dropped into dry vegetation").

BERNALILLO, N.M. — A hot air balloon crashed into power lines and burst into flames Friday during Albuquerque's annual balloon fiesta, throwing both men on board to the ground and killing one of them.

According to the local NBC affiliate KOB 4:

Friday's fatal balloon accident is not the first for the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, which began in 1972... During the 1998 fiesta, a woman was killed when a balloon plowed into power lines, two men died in 1993 when their balloon hit power lines, and two men died during the 1990 fiesta when their balloon crashed into power lines.

KOB 4 also has photos of the incident on their site taken by witnesses Mike and Shaunie Briggs of Winters, California--including this one, the most ghastly/striking/artful thing I've seen all day, in part because it makes whimsy (the balloon in the distance covered in sea creatures) look evil (never trust whimsy):

Jesus Christ. Condolences to all, and nice photo, Mike and Shaunie.

...but this ad for Extended Stay Hotels doesn't exactly make me wanna book a room in one of their stank-ass hotels. Via Sullivan.

This has to be the nicest replica of Michelangelo's Moses that I've ever seen in a parking lot.

This dapper young caricature is called Dennis Lennox. He's 24 and "the youngest delegate or alternate from Michigan."

He didn't have anything original to say—except that the protestors should cancel their march on account of the hurricane—but isn't he cute? Like Republican Ken. Or a stylish lemur.

Sammy Hagar was wearing pink Crocs. That's all you need to know.

Then this poor guy, who is also from New Orleans, got up and tried to auction off a guitar for a hurricane relief fund:

Maybe Sammy played it that night. Maybe he signed it that night. It was kind of hard to hear because the Southern delegation was drunk, yapping, and wouldn't pay attention. These guys—I swear to you—were discussing golf. It was like a cartoon:

"C'mon all you people who make a lot of money in Washington," the auctioneer said. "Can I please have your attention?"

He could not.

Protestors were a couple of miles away, getting lashed up at Pi Bar and having some kind of queer-carnival event.

(I swung the hammer; I hit the bell.)

The next morning, a few protestors from Seattle got up from the couches in the apartment where they were staying, rubbed their eyes, and wrote the number of a legal-defense fund on their bodies with Sharpies, assuming they'd be arrested today.

Their plan is to lock down the streets to prevent the delegates from meeting today (as they must, for convention protocol.) Teams from different cities are taking different sectors around the Xcel Center. They wouldn't share their plan of attack.

"Meet you at the barricades!" one said as I rode off on my bicycle. "I've always wanted to say that."

Looks like there's one in downtown Minneapolis, too. Guards in camouflage stand watch over Second St...

... and hide behind walls when they realize you're taking their picture. (See the bit of orange vest out from behind the pillar?)

We played an eerie game of hide and seek for a few minutes. They'd stand, I'd point my camera, they'd scurry away. They'd peek out again, I'd raise my camera, they'd scurry away. They all watched me, some through binoculars, and talked into their walkie-talkies. Nobody came down to question me.

Spotted by our magical bookkeeper Renee.

Also, are there any other words in the English language that have three consecutive pairs of letters like the word bookkeeper does? I can't think of any. Then again, I suck at Scrabble.

This weekend, after a previously planned out-of-town trip for a story fell through, I decided to take a road trip to Ocean Shores.

(And here, within the snug confines of these parentheses, I will go a little bit LiveJournal on your ass. The topic of conversation will continue after this self-indulgent break: Having grown up in Maine, I'm fond of cheesy, touristy beach communities, because they remind me of home. The trip itself was kind of difficult. After four hours in traffic, I finally arrived: it was 50 degrees and foggy with light rain. The next morning, it was so foggy that you couldn't see further than thirty feet in any direction, which made for a pleasant, though weirdly apocalyptic, walk on the beach. The fog did not stop me from getting a very bad sunburn. The end.)

My question is this: How the fuck is it still legal to drive cars on beaches in Washington state? Or, to be more specific: why are beaches considered part of the highway system, with a 25-mile-an-hour speed limit? This is just a bad idea. Besides the fact that people drink at the beach, and that people tend to, you know, take naps on blankets at the beach, cars also leak all kinds of horrible fluids. Is there a powerful beach-driving lobby in Washington? Will people get pissed if they can't drive on beaches anymore?

There are lots of states where you can't drive on beaches—I'm from one—and never have I heard any variation of "You know, this beach experience would be so much better if I could park my fucking Hummer right next to me while I tan and drink beer out of a cooler in back." It seems like banning cars from public beaches is a really simple, really non-controversial environmental law that should've been passed ages ago.