Happy fucking birthday, George W. Bush

I repost this from a predecessor blog because it’s a particularly fraught anniversary, and because I still think that something like a malign configuration of the stars hovered over that morning, then so hopeful (reposting follows):

On this date many years ago, a Saturday, it was, I flickered into consciousness from sleep as—ah, Nabokov described it in a similar context in Ada—“the tiger of happiness fairly leaped into being.” I woke up, entwined and ungarbed, with a young woman whom I’d been stalking (as she would likely put it today) for over a quarter of my young life. I don’t think that the morning assembly of reality has ever rocketed up such a vertical gradient of joy, and I’m astonished looking back that my nose didn’t bleed. It all ended badly about a dozen years later, and while I don’t hold any truck with astrology (we Leos aren’t that credulous), I have to scratch my head at the thought that this radiant morning was also G.W. Bush’s twenty-eighth birthday. Clearly doom and grief were in the air, all unnoticed then...