Kiss My Benchmark

Last weekend I was sitting in my old Jeep in a parking lot at a seafood stand in Ptown, waiting for a friend to get the world’s most expensive, smallest lobster roll. The place was packed. The lobster roll was not. I was listening to “A Prairie Home Companion” and their special Memorial Day Show from Wolf Trap outside Washingtoons, DC. Ever since Garrison Keillor tried to blog funny about gay men adopting children, I’ve been a little reluctant to listen. And sometimes his breathy voice is a little too pervy for me.
But the music was the heartbreakingly, tender ballads of leaving loved ones behind to fight the great, big, last war to end all wars. The finality of those separations is contrasted with the global connectedness of this war through emails, podcasts, and skype phones. Yet the pain of physical separation – “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places.” “What’ll I do when you are far away?” – is just as real now for young soldiers and their families.
As I listened, absent-mindedly watching all the sunburned people returned from the beach, I got all choked up, went home and called my oldest brother He had been drafted, learned Vietnamese at Ft. Bliss [!]. Texas and served a year in Vietnam. His job was interpreter with the pacification troops who went into towns and villages to help with rebuilding. He didn’t talk about it when he got home except for one story about almost falling out of a helicopter making a quick exit out a village that wasn’t quite ready to be rebuilt. We caught up a bit on their Memorial Day picnic plans and then I thanked him for serving in Vietnam. He was quiet, then said, “That is so weird. You’re the second person to thank me. Back then, no one thanked us.”
Sometimes it’s surreal to be in a vacation town as the world goes to hell around us. Like during this dirge of a surge. Just a few streets away on Commercial, the town was filling with fabulous young lesbians from colleges all over the Northeast on one last huge fling. It’s an unofficial party stop on the unofficial lesbian party circuit. I interviewed some of them, that’s what I’m calling it anyway, and they said it’s all word of mouth. And a lovely mouth it is.
Speaking of mouths, I will miss Rosie’s mouth on The View. There are certainly different ways of fighting the war and she chose to be outspoken and unwilling to swallow the extraordinary renditions from the Bush “administration” about what is happening. For that she was treated as a big hysterical lesbian. Interesting how the other side does an operation distraction and focuses on the girlfight and not the war. I hope she has a good summer rest and comes back on her own late night show.
Midst the constant coverage of Lindsay Lohan’s last fling, I saw the story that Cindy Sheehan, mother of a son killed early on in the war, announced that she is depleted from fighting the administration and her so-called allies. She’s going home. She should rest and come back as Rosie’s sidekick. Let’s all rest up this summer, because come September, they can kiss my benchmark.

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