this is not a post about healthcare reform

You'd think Philadelphia was six square inches, the way it is so small townish.

It's hard to miss anything in this one (million) horse town.

I saw Barack Obama yesterday, just by chance.  Two Americans, passing in the night.  Day.  Whatever.  Traffic was blocked at Broad and Vine and at first I was all pissed because I couldn't cross to get where I needed to be but I have this sickness that makes me stick around in a crowd just to see what's going on. 

I also have a sickness where I like to stare into the sky to see how many other people stare into the sky.  Sometimes, if enough people are looking up, I'll point up and dart into the subway, like I'm running away from something.
What?  It's better than starting a fire to watch the pretty lights come.

So, first the helicopters.  Traffic accident, I assumed.
Then the dummy motorcade, driving in circles.  Shriners, I assumed.
Then holy crap hold on to your hat because the President does not eff around when it comes to getting someplace.  Our highway patrol broke the soundbarrier, flying down Vine in a V-formation and the towncars floated through the wake.  One hundred miles per hour?  One twenty?  Probably. 
There was no chance of sniping that bitch, that's for sure.

You could see right in Barack's car.  I love that he lets me call him that.  The windows were tinted, but not blacked out.  He smiled and waved.  He was wearing a seatbelt.

And then he was gone.

I got pissed again by the time I got to 12th street because the abortion protesters were all up in my bus stop.  Trying to touch my vagina with their words and their yelling and their intolerance and their signs stapled to 2 by 4s.  Spittle shooting from the corners of their mouth, eyes bulged out in an attempt to make me listen.  Three inches from my face.  I can hear you.  You spit on my cheek.
No dignity.  No respect. 
They don't know me.
I could be one of them, why are they treating me like this?
Why is this okay?
I just want to get home to my son.
I just want to get on the bus.

I have a problem with authority figures, if you haven't already gotten a sense of that.  I have a bigger problem with people who aren't the authority of anything trying to boss me and my gender around.

I'm an asshole like that.  I don't even like people who protest against things I am against.  Shut up.  Get your ass off the street, out of my way, and in front of a typewriter.  Draft a letter.  Call your congressman.  It's not the '60s anymore.  Things that were effective then aren't so much anymore.  What ever happened to sit-ins?  Can't we all band together quietly?  I have a hard time with excess noise.  I'm sensitive.

Seeing those protesters makes me want to get an abortion just for the hell of it.  Makes me want to abort the snot out of an unwanted baby out of spite. 

Late term.

I'm kidding. 

I'm not. 

How can I even joke about that?

Easy.

Because it upsets me and that's how I deal with things. Because I know if I got pregnant now I would be faced with the choice whether to try and make that baby stick up in my guts for 26+ weeks at the risk of my health, my life, my happiness, and my relationship with my entire family, especially my child. 

If I got pregnant right now I would seriously consider an abortion.
Any doctor- hell, anyone who loves me- would advise me to have one, considering the risks.

Whether I would go through with it or not, I can't answer that.  But I like being secure in the knowledge that there are safe, clean, nurturing places that I can go to have it done.  That I could have counseling and aftercare and followups until I was ready to stop having counseling and aftercare and followups.  I know if I would abort a fetus I would live with guilt for the rest of my life, every time something bad happened to me or someone I love, I would wonder if the universe was punishing me for tossing away a tiny cluster of near-nothing pulse.  As if the universe has time to worry about me and what I'm doing down here.

I killed a $5 Trader Joes's rosebush and I feel like I owe something to the world.  I set spiders free.  Silverfish even, and they are the ultimate grossest.  I rescued a mouse from the inside of my cat's face one time.

If I didn't have an abortion and I miscarried- which is very likely to happen- I would feel like a miserable failure at sustaining life.  Less than a woman.  Not a worthy mother.  Not a worthy person.  A waste of space.  My body can't even do what I was biologically born to do.
That's what happens when you (I) miscarry a baby, that's how you (I) feel. 
If I carried that baby to term, even if it was perfectly healthy and whole, a tiny part of me would feel horrible every time I was at the end of my tether with the brat, with the current state of my life.  More than once the words "maybe I should've had an abortion" would creep slowly and quietly from the deepest darkest backest blackest part of my brain until they were in lights, on a marquis, screaming in front of my face, rendering me unable to see or hear or feel anything else. 
That's what happens now and then when you (I) have a baby that you (I) didn't necessarily want, no matter that it (Jake) becomes the one true love of your (my) life. 

When I see those protesters, with their photoshopped signs of dead babies (I've miscarried babies older than what you are claiming to be showing me.  I fucking know what a dead ten week old fetus looks like, thank you.  I've let one slip through my fingers before I flushed it down the toilet in a vulgar attempt to forget what I just went through.) I want to hurt them.  Wrap my fingers around their wrists and demand to know why they feel that they have a right to force me into doing something that isn't good for me, for my (born or unborn) child, for my body.  Why they can't work for their cause by encouraging their daughters and nieces and friends to remain abstinent unless they are trying to/willing to get pregnant.  I wonder if they would ask their goodgirl twoshoed daughter to deny herself and her partner a physical relationship if she had a giant chunk of her reproductive organs removed because of a tumor.  Because that's what they are asking me to do.

No sex ever unless you are trying to make a baby.
No food ever unless you are starving to death.
No water ever unless you are almost dust.
No shelter ever unless you are in a storm.
No clothing ever unless you are freezing.
Where does it stop?

I am anti-abortion, I guess, not really, I don't know, I don't care.  I feel like they shouldn't be used as birth control, but I feel that no one should carry an unwanted baby or a baby that risks the mother's health. 
I am extremely pro-choice.  It's that whole belief I have that I truly do live in a free country, one where I can chose not to have an abortion just the same as I can chose to have one.

I don't want to hear that Jesus or God or Allah told you that abortion is wrong, because Jesus AND God AND Allah AND one time Mohammad, but that was on the subway so it may have just been some random dude, have all fucking told me that it's okay to take steps to take care of myself and my child above all other things and I was born with a gift of free will, which allows me to chose things for myself, not for everyone else.  Just like I can't make anyone else do anything they don't want to do, no one else can make me do anything I don't want to do. 

Jesus doesn't put babies in my belly, and he doesn't have a say in whether I take them out.  We were all created/evolved to be able to reproduce biologically, not spiritually.  I know this because I was there when I got a baby in my belly.  And trust me when I tell you, if Jesus had any decorum whatsoever, he would have been embarrassed enough to step far, far away from the whole situation.  Far enough away that he couldn't knock me up.  Unless he is in to that sort of thing.  It was wild.  Maybe he was there.  Maybe he's a freak like that.  Maybe Jesus got me drunk that day.  Drunk enough not to use a condom.  Drunk enough to be all like "just pull out" but maybe he was there, holding us together so pulling out was impossible.  Maybe Jesus roofied me.  That Jesus with his whiskey and horse tranquilizers and divine intervention.  He's always up to something.

Anyway, Jesus told me that he has bigger fish to divide into more fish than worrying about what people are doing with their babies.  That's why he lets children be abused physically and sexually and emotionally and starved to death all over the world.  Not his problem.  He's all "meh, I'll deal with the abusers at the back end of it.  That's what Judgment Day is for."

God told me that when he decided to put humans on this planet he made us so we can go ahead and do that part all by ourselves.  That's why there are men shuffling around.  To shove the babies up there with their Baby Shoving Rods of Passion.  God told me that he has nothing to do with it beyond making it possible for it to happen.  He was all like "Lo, I shall make one type of human with an innie and one type with an outie down there, and the outies will fill the innies with nectar and a tiny human will grow and slither out the peehole upon the dawn of its ripeness".  And that was that.

Funny that he is sending mixed messaged, isn't it?

So take your fucking opinions elsewhere, assholes, and let me get on the bus and on with my weird life.