The 23rd was a tank-town race. The conservatives the Governor of Virginia and New Jersey. And for the first time in my life I crossed the holy blessed Democratic party line to vote for the Republican.

Why on earth does anyone profess surprise that Obama has finally been turned into a field hand wearing a suit? This country has never escaped from the plantation mentality of its founding, nor shall it ever do so.

My mother died in 1992 after a year of simple decline from old age. Oh, call it one of her chronic broken bones, or diabetes, or high blood pressure, or finally a stroke--the fact is her body decided it was enough. However: she made absolutely no provisions for her own death, no plans for her own burial, and no instructions of any kind. "If I don't look at it, it's not there." But it was there. And I, as the only child, was left to make all the choices: including writing a Do Not Resuscitate Letter. But that was no enough for modern medical practice. The day before she died, her internist called me and asked me to interpret the DNR letter. I cursed him and said he was making me play God. He was covering his own ass because he was afraid that I might sue him for offing a woman of 86. Ugly as this is to say, my mother's lifelong selfishness and refusal to accept her own mortality (she'd only seen her parents, five sisters, and her husband die) made me into the bad guy who had to choose for her because she would not choose for herself.

So in 2005 I write an advance directive and appointed my sons as my proxies. It is minimalist. If I have an inoperable cancer, make me comfortable. If I'm going to live hooked to feeding tubes, pull them. That's pretty much the gist of all the instructions. "What is this life that you cling to it?" Nothing very much. I was influenced at that time in early 2005 by watching Pope John Paul II's dignity even in terrible decline; by watching the hideous circus around Terri Schiavo; and by the two month death struggle of my brother-in-law, who prolonged his agony by almost bungling a suicide attempt.

Who do you blame? Everyone. Don't blame doctors as a group because they are responding to the lawyers who really managed health care in this country. "I'll sue you." Some lawyers are responsible. Years ago I knew a personal injury lawyer in Newark who was visited by the family of their deceased father. He died during surgery for appendicitis. The lawyer asked "How old was he?" The answer: ninety-eight. The lawyer: Get out of here. Give thanks that he lived as long as he did.

I would be they found someone else.

Carlene's not the hypocrite but at least half of you are. You bring your naive, knife-edged wish for consistency into the one area where it's not only vain, but where it also is downright insulting and simple-minded.

You self-centered pretend social activists...all the whining about how the RCC is anti-what?--gay, abortion, liberation. Where the priests violate their own vows. Where the whole structure is a big Nigerian scam to separate people from their money and then make them think they are doing it voluntarily. You sound like a bunch of children: "But you said it would be niiiiiice!" Idiots.

Oh I forgot the best one: "There IS no God, the whole thing is a delusion," as though intellectual frauds like Hitchens and even Freud are supposed to impress anyone with more than the shit for brains you people seem to pack like loaded guns.

See, I am a convert from Judaism. I became a Roman Catholic. I'm not Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, anyone else. I'm not Oscar Romero or Dom Helder Camara, I'm not the Jesuit martyrs of the university in San Salvador. None of you are fit to clean their toilets.

Do I sound angry? I'm supposed to. I'm supposed to sound angry at purporting to have an intellectual and artistic life that is disdained by other so-called intellectuals, especially one who sent me private email inviting me to commit suicide. The real shape of rationalism of that filth emanating from the British Library. It's from the gorge of that drunken pig Christopher Hitchens. It's from people who have forfeited any right to express an opinion on something they've prejudged as infantile, oppressive, and consumer fraud.

Carlene's decision reminds me of mine in 1997. It was terribly difficult but was then followed by a sense of intense liberation. When you grow up, if you do, you discover you cannot fix everything. You cannot fix anything except you own soul, if you haven't renounced that too. Life does not fit into nice little categories of consistency and inconsistency, or good and bad. It just is.

Now shut the hell up.

People with larger feet. Oh, I know: size 13EE is not a demographically significant segment, etc., etc., but that's what I wear, and the only style that fit me was the "original" Beach Crocs. They don't feel good. They are made with hidden defects, especially that the supplied strap does not fit the foot and must be replaced by an overpriced adjustable strap for an extra $16.00. So we're talking about truth in advertising, misrepresentation, etc. Plus I found them hard to walk in, and once had a bad fall because the shoes froze in place while I kept moving. Ugly.

I started reading prepared to dislike Vicki Forman. Instead, I wound up weeping for her, her husband, her daughter, and the two children she lost.

...O'Reilly is the one I would like to see hurt. Physically and severely. He is a schoolyard bully and I hope to Christ that someday someone beats the living shit out of him.