All along, I’ve been thinking that I was an Obama or Clinton supporter… but according to the overly simplified flash app at ABC News, my ideal candidates, in order, are Mike Gravel, Chris Dodd, and Dennis Kucinich. However, given that I believe Kucinich hasn’t got a bat’s chance in hell of being elected, and didn’t even recognize the pictures of Gravel and Dodd when they popped up, I’m guessing that I won’t be THROWING AWAY MY VOTE when North Carolina’s primaries roll around. Here’s the worst part about it: ABC matches your views with those of the candidates. Out of eleven key issues, I share views on five with Gravel and Dodd, four with Kucinich.

Heather returned packet #5 today. I could, in theory, be officially done with my essay semester. But who am I kidding? On to packet #6!

Ladybug and I ended up taking an impromptu road trip before through northern Durham and Orange counties, driving some roads we’d never driven before. It seems irresponsible to take a drive just for the sake of taking a drive, but that was something I loved doing as a kid. My parents got divorced when I was twelve and my father moved into an efficiency about a mile and a half away. That wasn’t very far, but it sure seemed like a million light years away at the time.

I didn’t see much of him during the week, which in retrospect doesn’t make a great deal of sense, since he was so close. But every Saturday, we got to hang out. We’d usually start with a trip to the comic book store, then lunch at Houston’s, where my father would draw cartoons of a suicidal dog named Chuck on the cocktail napkins. Maybe we’d wander over to Egghead Software, but more often than not, we’d hop in the car and set out. He was usually pretty cool about letting me choose the music, so I spent more than my fair share of Saturdays buckled into the passenger seat, listening to REM or They Might Be Giants.

We’d drive just to drive. There’s not much highway in Maryland that we didn’t cover, and a fair bit in Northern Virginia. I know a couple of Saturdays, we turned around when we hit a state line, and on rare occasion, we’d head on past them, venturing into Delaware or West Virginia. I always wondered if we drove so far because we didn’t really have anywhere else to go, really. We’d usually end up back in his efficiency around 6 PM, in time for microwaved hot dogs and Star Trek, and I’d read comics for a while before we’d go to bed. There was no pressing urgency to get back from driving, and I don’t remember my father ever saying, “Let’s go home.” It was always, “Let’s go back.” I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I’d said, “We should keep driving”– how far we would have gone, where we would have run out of gas, what reasons we would have found to go back if we got far enough away.

Much Wii this evening. And I get a bonus hour. I wonder what I’ll do with the hour that doesn’t count. I’ll probably waste it surfing the web.

I am getting slaughtered in just about every scrabble game I’m playing. Ah well.

40 lines tonight… well more than the 15 or 16 I usually crap out at during po-grind months. Plus, Andie MacDowell makes an appearance in tonight’s poem. You know it’s good when Andie MacDowell is in it.

Oh, wait, that’s not true.

Tomorrow, planning for Iron Scav 10 (why haven’t you formed a team yet?), writing poem #3 (or #34, depending on how you look at it), and nighttime goofing off with Bryan King. I’m motivated to read some more of David Allen’s Getting Things Done; I can see why there are cults around this book. I feel myself becoming a cultist. I’ll probably also begin re-reading In Our Time for bookshop. I did the unspeakable… I crossed over to fiction for a bookshop. But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to discuss the book that has my favorite story in it. (Hilarious: there’s a SparkNotes page for “A Very Short Story,” which is almost as long as the story itself.)

Harry Potter books spawned cults, too. I wonder how many people were David Allen for Halloween?

Andie MacDowell was in Hudson Hawk. It was one of the few movies that was made better by her presence. (It’s this mack truck of awful which somehow veers across four lanes of suck, crashes through the median, and ends up on the really enjoyable side of the highway.) I wonder how many people were Andie MacDowell for Halloween?

I spent the day in a training for a product that the Community College system is evaluating, and as awesome as it is, I am not sure I can tell you anything more, because I signed an non-disclosure form. I had never signed a NDA before. I feel now like I have a great secret– though, to be honest, the secret would only have been fair-to-middling if it hadn’t been for the imposing NDA.

November is month 2 of poem-a-day grind, with mildly relaxed rules. Three U of M poets, three from Warren Wilson. Not everyone knows each other. I like it.

Seriously, if I don’t get on the stick and put up a profile for Kirk on Catster tomorrow night, I’m gonna be embarrassed. That cat has needed a profile since Monday.