My Albino Ex, a quirky sort, had one relationship that was more sacred than any other: his bond with his childhood pillow, Sleepasaurus, or Saurus for short. The pillow had gone to crumbled foam by the turn of the century, but the pillowcase — there were four identical ones — showed a green stegosaurus, or part of one, with a fatuous yet sly expression.
Saurus was the mastermind behind all the marginal businesses in the world, including convenience stores. He hit on women (especially character dolls like Holly Hobbie, or so we were told) and occasionally tried to sell arms to foreign governments. He spoke, when channeled by my ex, in a wise-ass Groucho twang, and he would sell you anything you needed or solve any problem for fifty bucks.
If something involved the color green, or a fifty-dollar sum, my ex would say “I have a bad feeling about this…” Any organization whose dealings were faintly shady or, more often, just slipshod and incompetent was usually referred to as “a division of Saurus, Inc.”.
I once put Saurus in a pair of knit boxers with a lifelike, and life-size, green latex masculine implement protruding from the fly. My Albino Ex, who can’t see too hot, greeted the dawning awareness of what he was beholding with an expression so fraught and stricken that no painter or thespian could have captured it.
I thought of Saurus today after I had completed an online donation exceeded only in vainhope by the actual political work I did as campaign manager for a nutjob. The nutjob was someone with all the right ideas, no ability to connect with people, and a fuse that was shorter than probably his schmengie. Fuse and schmengie excepted, I’m starting to see Creigh Deeds in much the same way.
Except his opponent is a religious-right SOB bankrolled by Pat Robertson, whose much-publicized (at least since the Deeds campaign dug it up) graduate school thesis argued that working women were “detrimental to the family” and the government should “discourage homosexuality,” among other familiar refrains. Alas, down in the corners of Virginia where they still believe Jesus drives a pickup truck and doesn’t swallow, sentiments like that are probably just nuts to the voting populace, and unfortunately the Deeds campaign hasn’t been able to think of anything else to put into its TV ads. Oh, except one of McDonnell’s staffers made fun of Deed’s speech impediment.
We have transportation problems up the wazoo in this state and budget hassles and god knows what all to talk about, and McDonnell seems cut from about the same cloth as the last Republican administration that ran the state right into the ground, but the whole race has been sucked into the shrieking wind tunnel of personal style and knee-jerk ideology.
Olympian deities, where are the German troops who will pull Deeds, like the stammering Emperor Claudius, from behind the curtain and back his bid?
Well, here it’s still done by public voting preceded by campaigns and donations. And, because it’s not over till it’s over, I just sent the Deeds campaign… fifty bucks.
Oh shit.
Virginia! Hmmm….
Love the story about the ex.. Did you say he had FOUR of them? Talk about oddities… Is he kissing it in that picture?
Kind of doing chummy-cheeks with it. One pillow, four pillowcases so the pillow never had to go without its persona on laundry day.
He actually tracked down the woman who had done the original design for Dan River to see if it would ever be produced again, and looked into some fabric preservation specialists. Some things are just that goshdarn important. You gotta realize this is one of the things I loved him for.
ok, that I can agree with. It was a pretty dedicated move.
Is this the ex you referred to in a recent post, who passed away?
Nope, the Albino Ex is alive, kicking and being a pretty good friend actually. We dated for around five years after my divorce (from ‘98 to ‘03), and god love him, when my former husband died two years ago he helped me clear out a storage unit packed to the rafters, even though we’d been broken up for over three years. It gets complicated why I ended up with that job. Don’t try to keep track of it. I go through life sporting a comet trail of peculiar exes.
I still have my childhood doll and all the clothes my mother and I made for her. Some things are just too important to let slide away.
It’s great having in-jokes like that with old friends (and exes).
Reckon Deeds will enjoy working for Saurus Inc?
I’m afraid he’s got Saurus Inc. working for him…
I was hoping this was going to be a race between mediocre, but qualified contenders. Instead it is turning into what someone around here recently described as a high school fist fight in the locker room.
The Democrat is trying to distance himself from Obama, and the Republican is trying to distance himself from Bush. Gone are the days of some truly exciting Governor’s races in VA.
“his bond with his childhood pillow, Sleepasaurus,”
oKay. I have not gotten past this yet.
I didn’y vote for Creigh Deeds. I voted against Bob McDonnell, Ken Cuccinelli and Bill Bolling. I’ve seen McDonnell and Cuccinelli in action when I covered the General Assembly, and I met and interviewed Bolling.
Enough said, except maybe for Cuccinelli. But then again, talking about an insane, intellectually deficient shithouse rat leaves a foul taste in one’s mouth..
With a name like Creigh Deeds you have to be sinister.