I don’t know yet if there will be any Mustang events at the auto show in Fort Worth next weekend, but I do know that muscle cars are now on my horizon when they never were before because of the job I’ve been doing for the last year, but also because my cousin S. is talking about having NASCAR fantasies again.

I have to confess, I’ve never been able to sit through more than a lap or two of any auto race, but when we lived in Colorado when I was a kid, I did enjoy my one visit to the auto rallies on the ice of the Georgetown reservoir. My impressions of the day are choppy: cold weather, revving engines, cars that looked impossibly fast and impossibly flimsy, at once. I suppose there was also beer, but as a seven-year-old that wouldn’t have caught my attention.

Still, I smile at the memory I do have. And when I see old muscle cars for sale, like the mustang I wrote about several weeks ago, that was a tempting buy, if completely impractical, I get kind of wistful, and wonder if maybe I’m channeling S. Because I don’t like cars. No really, I don’t.

At any rate, Fuzzy and I are going to the auto show. I suspect he’s only agreeing because it will mean yet another weekend in which he will not have to paint the kitchen, and because I told him that the Humane Society will be there. “Cute puppies and cool cars,” I IM’d him, in my pitch. I have a hair appointment that Saturday, so I guess we’ll go on Sunday. The last day of the show. Oh well. It’ll still be fun.

…that I’m out of my house before eight in the morning any more. Hell, it’s not often that I’m out of BED before eight any more, but today is the Texas primary, and since we slept through early voting (Texas has this thing where you can do early voting for about two weeks before the actual election, but the number of polling places is reduced.) We had to be up. Technically, because Texas is weird, we’re supposed to RETURN to a polling place after the polls are closed to participate in caucus, but I doubt that will happen, because of our schedules, though I kind of think it would be fun. Just as voting on the actual day is more fun.

In any case, there is some irony (and it shows you how relatively new our neighborhood is) in the fact that the Democratic primary was at Ronald Reagan Middle School. It seems a lovely school, though granted, we only saw the outside and the gym. (Fuzzy lives on Planet SoDak where apparently strange adults can walk through schools during classes to get to places like the gym, and seemed much put out when we had to move the car once we found out where we were supposed to go.) I mentioned to the election volunteers that having a sign that was larger and more prominent than the lawn signs for Obama, Clinton, and “Stretch” might be a wise idea, since the lawn signs were on BOTH sides of the driveway, not just on the driveway that leads to the gym. (The Republican primary was at a different school in the neighborhood – one that hosted the election in 2004 –

While we were there, the morning announcements, including the pledge, were broadcast over the PA system. (Apparently no one thought to turn it off in the gym), making it my first experience at hearing the entire Texas pledge, which really does boil down to “Fuck All Y’all.” (Actually, that’s kind of a joke, the entire text is “Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible.” Just as “under God” was added to the US pledge after the fact, so too was it added after the fact to the Texas pledge – last year, to be exact.) Still during the US pledge there was a gym-ful of adults looking around for a flag to salute – habits are so ingrained – which was comical in one respect, and somehow appropriate in another.

The voting was with pen and ScanTron sheets (Fuzzy complained about the size of the bubbles – they were huge bubbles), and then we fed the sheets into the scanner which fed into a locked box.

And so I have my sticker and it’s 9:26, and I have an article due today, but I don’t want to write. I want to sip coffee and read the paper.

Guess that means I should actually make some coffee.

I haven’t had any in ten days.

Be afraid.