1a. I promptly forgot about the city when I got back to Portland and saw the pink sky over Casco Bay.

1b. Yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about being in Maine and being in New York and being in places in general. It’s habit by now. At least I don’t bite my nails.

2. One of the (many) things I miss about zine publishing is the schedule: one or two issues a year, 32 booklet pages. For me that is a perfect level of casual-writing output. Frequent enough to be serial, spaced far enough apart to allow for rethinking, revising and general ruminating. The truth is, if I didn’t get paid to type things on a website every day I probably would not type things on a website every day.

2a. This is one of the (many) reasons I don’t type things here every day, or even every week.

2b. Or here, even.

3. In case anyone’s still reading, here is a picture of some sled dogs I met last month.

3a. Things sled dogs eat include: raw venison, raw smelt, hard-boiled eggs with the shell still on, raw carrots.

Anyway, I’m fine, in varying shades of purple. The lesson here is always wear a helmet when bicycling. I was wearing my helmet and if I hadn’t been I might not be typing this right now, and just think how sad you’d be. Also, eff you U.S. health care system ($1,200 for a CAT scan “just to be sure” on the noggin front? Deductible votes no!) and thank heavens I’m a filthy hippie who knows how to take care of myself (ginger for inflammation; arnica for bruising; loads of B vitamins; hatha yoga to prevent stiffness; small quantities of organic beef for iron; an acupuncture session to hit the reset button). Free advice, there you go, no copay necessary.

* * *

I’ve spent a lot of time lying on the couch, giving myself a crash course in American rom-coms. There is no helmet for that, as far as I know, but there should be. It should’ve been called He’s Just Not That Into You Because You Are a Terrible Movie And He Resents Having His Intelligence Insulted For Two Hours, and 27 Dresses Plus a Free Shotgun For Shooting Your Eyes Out Afterwards.

On the other hand, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People was very good, Kirsten Dunst notwithstanding.

It is nice to have an excuse to lie around and watch movies, even if some of the movies make me angry and my DVD player is held together with Scotch tape.

* * *

Comrade Trying to Schedule Plans: So what’s your deal?
MPS: I’m going to raise commodity prices by establishing a system of “domestic allotments” that will create artificial scarcity conditions
MPS: OH WAIT NO that was FDR’s deal

Gchat: How to lose friends and alienate people.

* * *

Current obsession: traffic islands.

* * *

Fetal joke: Something about the Senate voting down ACORN funding on account of the prostitution video thing and the Senate’s continued funding, via payroll, of David Vitter. (Joke never carried to term. It will not be missed.)

* * *

So what do you think? Brain damage, yes/no?

A few years ago I tried to popularize the term ‘braffed,’ a word to indicate a situation that has been overwhelmed by irritating mediocrity. Example: “Argh! My boss rewrote my presentation and put three typos in it!” “Man, you got braffed.” It never caught on, but once I tested the Ruined Music email list software by sending myself a message that read “Test test, you got braffed,” and in a stroke of misfortune, sent the message to the entire list. I braffed myself!

Zooey Deschanel
I want to think I’m wrong on this. Maybe if I hung out with Zooey Deschanel we’d discover that we have sooooo much in common, and we’d run around the Lower East Side shopping for adorable vintage bracelets, and she’d convince me to cut my hair in thick chunky bangs, and then we’d drink kombucha and giggle and swing our purses as we skipped down the street and then a unicorn would fly overhead and vomit glittery stars and we’d hold hands and promise to be BFs for F. It’s possible.

Then again maybe not.

Conor Oberst
Hey Conor. Yeah, look, a lot of people didn’t like George W. Bush. Most of us were able to deal with this without resorting to tripe like “Does God suggest an oil hike when the president talks to God?,” but then again most of us are not bugeyed professional daydreamers in Prada suits. Aw, I’m sorry, did I hurt your feelings? Quick, someone get Conor an absorbent sweater, I think he’s going to cry.

Sandra Lee
I have seen this lady on television maybe three times in my life, on account of not having cable (move to Canada you goddamn commie), but three times was enough to convince me. Plus surely you’ve seen the mashup clips that are circulating on the internet, this one being the best/worst (pet peeve: ‘expresso’), via Salad & Candy:

***BONUS: A Person I Have Already Punched in a Bar***

Sufjan Stevens. Except it wasn’t in a bar, it was on the sidewalk outside a bar, and it wasn’t an angry punch, more like a friendly one. Also he was very drunk so I don’t think he felt it.

…identify ‘em all and I’ll buy you a hot dog and a box of sparklers.

Via the Organic Trade Association.

ps. Mary, did you wake up this morning and start googling “rock opera” + “Lehman Brothers” “Bear Stearns,” almost before the coffee started brewing? MAYBE. POSSIBLY. Not telling.

Yet as he spends his days in his family’s mansion on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, N.C., Edwards can’t help but fret about how Washington and the country are getting on in his absence.

That John Edwards! Always thinking of others, etc. etc.

Only thing is — and if wanton displays of naïveté aren’t your bag, you should leave right now — I liked this guy. No. I believed in this guy. Not so much in previous campaigns, or when he was yoked, uneasily, to Gore. This time around it was different. (Maybe I was just extra-susceptible.) Sure, the “son of a millworker” schtick wore thin. A lot of people heard it and called it phony, coming from a millionaire trial lawyer. Me, I thought about the men and women I knew who’d stitched shirts for a living, and the way the 4 p.m. sun shone straight through the empty brick buildings in my hometown. I thought: self-made wealth doesn’t mean you can’t understand that. I thought: some people become lawyers because they believe everyone deserves a representative in the halls of justice. That’s why my parents became lawyers, though in the middle of rural Maine lawyers aren’t millionaires.

I’m biased. It’s true. We all are. We gravitate toward politicians who best reflect the particular beliefs and values and ideas we’ve absorbed in our lives, from our parents, our schools, our communities. And it just so happened that I was raised with a certain set of beliefs and experiences, and these included things like soup kitchens and Dorothy Day and serviam, to say nothing of George Orwell and Upton Sinclair. And here comes John Edwards, shaking off his Ken-doll coma, speaking reasonably directly and with a believable (inasmuch as any of this is believable) passion, and with good ideas to boot. It was a hard time. I had no illusions left to lose, and I wanted to believe in something.

I am not a sucker, not often, anyway. But what can you do when you grew up with Pete Seeger and dinner table conversation about homelessness and a man in a suit uses his podium to say this:

I have walked into courtrooms alone to face an army of corporate lawyers with all the money in the world. I have walked off the Senate elevator and been besieged by an army of corporate lobbyists. And I have beaten them over and over again.

But let me tell you one thing I have learned from my experience — you cannot deal with them on their terms. You cannot play by their rules, sit at their table, or give them a seat at yours. They will not give up their power — you have to take it from them.

Don’t lecture me about speechwriters and strategists. I’ve been paid good money to put inspiring words in other people’s mouths. I know how this game goes, and even in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, I believed.

Which is why, without telling anyone, I decided to enroll in the Democratic party for the first time in my life, a fact that might amuse those peg me as a rank-and-file lefty. Since my 18th birthday, which I celebrated by going to City Hall and registering to vote, I’d clung to my flanneled-Yankee Independent status on principle, even though it meant forgoing Maine’s lively caucus proceedings. I was in New York in 2006-07, so I mailed in my request for a change of party and an absentee ballot for the Maine Democratic caucus.

While I waited for my registration to be confirmed I spent a lot of time in debate with my politically-engaged friends, all of whom were squarely in the tank for Barack Obama. I stayed up late and woke up early to read speeches and policy reports, sending emails with side-by-side comparisons of health care plans, arguing and defending the man I wanted to be president — although, see above re: illusions, I knew full well he’d lose.

I could not afford make large contributions, much as I wanted to; New York rent and student loans and a useless freelancers’ health insurance policy brought my balance to zero each month. I did, however, hear that a family friend was doing some sort of organizing work with the Edwards campaign, slated to be on the ground in New Hampshire and then South Carolina, and I began investigating the logistics of a bus to Greenville. Work commitments made it impossible. I decided it was all right: the most important thing would be my vote in the Maine caucus.

South Carolina Democrats voted on January 26, nominating Barack Obama by a decisive margin. Four days later I sat on the floor and cried harder than I could remember crying over anything in years, and somehow I didn’t even have the presence of mind to feel embarrassed. John Edwards looked tired, there in New Orleans. He stumbled over a few words and squinted in the wind. He waved and it was over. I sat on the floor for a long time after the newscast moved on to whatever else was happening that afternoon.

The next day I received confirmation of my enrollment in the Maine Democratic Party.

I wish I could tell you how I felt when news of the affair broke. I think for a long time I felt nothing, on purpose. Very few people knew the extent of my emotional commitment to his primary campaign, and for the most part they were tactful. I made careful show of shrugging, but I found myself reading every article, looking at the photos, watching the videos. The story was squalid. His attempt at spin was even more so. The knives came out but for once I couldn’t muster a word, no scorn, no outrage, no jokes. The whole thing seemed small and exhausting.

Eventually I realized that what I felt was resignation, that and the cold slap of inevitability. I had been foolish. I chose to believe in an idea of someone, an idea of someone’s ideals — a politician, no less. I knew better. It’s a lesson I won’t forget again and for that, more than anything, I’m grateful.

*Full disclosure: I did, in the end, joke about it. But not well.

In a wide-ranging discussion with the dairy case stocker, he said that the nonfat sour cream really did taste different but the nonfat yogurt was about as good as the regular.

In a wide-ranging interview, he revealed his desire to be a team player while adding value to the firm.

In a wide-ranging conversation with the bewildered tourists, she suggested that Route 201 would be fastest but the Back Road might be more scenic, although you’d have to remember to take the detour around the old Lemieux place because the road washed out last weekend and they haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet.

Front page of the hometown paper today.