I’ll Need a Travel Visa and Jeff Sessions is an Idiot

It’s been a lotta hours since four-thirty this morning when I got up to go to Atlanta because I realized a week ago that my passport had expired and you can pay extra to get the renewal expedited but even that way it takes three weeks and the day that I realized that it was expired was actually a day less than three weeks until I’m supposed to leave for Australia so I called the passport office because I remembered once before when my friend Jack had to get a passport in a day and there was some really, really quick solution so when I got the woman on the phone at the passport bureau she didn’t instill me with a lot of hope but that’s okay because I have enough hope to make up for a small island of totally hopeless people (maybe they’re stranded and don’t have a radio) so I was determined to find out how the super fast passport renewal thing happens and of course, given that I never ever give up no matter what I arrived at my answer but the answer worried me a little because the truth is you have to actually wait until your impending travel is within fourteen days which meant that I had to wait for six more days to start to do something that I felt like I needed to have done yesterday or the day before but I sat about three reminders and asked my friend to remind me too and when the date arrived that was fourteen days before I’m supposed to leave for Sydney (which was today) I called up the automated appointment line for the regional passport office in Atlanta hoping that I would be able to get an appointment in time to get the passport before I have to travel and in fact I was able to and as a matter of fact the appointment was the very next morning which was this morning or actually yesterday morning now that it’s past midnight and so I got up at four-thirty this morning and drove to Atlanta and applied for my passport renewal and I noticed that there were people there who actually were traveling today so they were getting there passports on the same day but for some reason since I live in Alabama and am not traveling until the 8th of October the lady said they’d have to mail it to me and so I paid extra for them to overnight it so it should be coming at the beginning of next week which is good because I found out that you have to have a travel visa to go to Australia which is something I’ve never had to have before even though I went to the Soviet Union while it was still the Soviet Union and I didn’t imagine that I’d need one for Australia because I reckon that it technically is still part of the British Commonwealth even though that’s probably a point of contention for a lot of people but that notwithstanding it’s the reason I thought that I wouldn’t need a travel visa because I’ve been to the UK a few times and never needed one but my friend in Australia told me that the reason we have to have one now is that The United States started making Australians have to have one to enter the US so Australia just said, “Well if you’re going to be that way about it we’re just going to make Americans get a travel visa too before they can enter Australia” and as has so often been the case in my life even minor disagreements between countries end up inconveniencing me including but not limited to sending me to war but let’s face it what happened between America and Australia regarding travel visas isn’t hardly in the same ballpark as war except that when I realized it was going to have to do yet another step before I could actually consider myself ready to make the trip I did kind of feel like I wanted to kill somebody but I got over that fast when I realized that mostly what I was was just hungry and that as soon as I left the passport office I could find somewhere to eat some breakfast because I hadn’t eaten any when I left Alabama before dawn and sure enough when I got outside the passport office on the streets of Atlanta there was a homeless man who saw my Marine Corps t-shirt and started saying, “Hooah” to me which has absolutely nothing to do with the Marine Corps but instead is something the Army says and there’s an old joke about something about “hooah” being what it sounds like when someone says “oorah” with something stuck in their mouth and I’ll just pretend like I can’t remember what that something is out of respect for the soldiers who’ve sacrificed too and also because the joke is homophobic and there’s plenty of that shit floating around without my joining in no matter how much shit I take for trying to move us forward socially by looking at the language and I know I lot of people would think that’s hypocritical given some of the shit I say in the blog like “shit” for example right there I gave you an example but actually my swearing and vulgarity and debasement is used more judiciously and purposefully than my detractors (or other self-righteous Puritans) might imagine and I don’t usually just swear for the sake of it but for many reasons including upending the paradigm because the paradigm is sick and do you know what a paradigm is? it’s twenty cents made up of two coins.

I’ll have to apply for my travel visa after the passport arrives. But I think I can do a quick version of that too by going online. I’m going to call the Australian Consulate tomorrow to ask their advice. I hope they’re nice to me. I can think of at least one scenario wherein I might like to one day apply for dual citizenship and this would be an early impression of how my perhaps-new-adopted-second-country-of-citizenship might treat me. I already know that I’d be a second-class citizen if things don’t change soon because they don’t allow all Australians to marry like we do. ‘merica! Fuck yeah! But marriage equality is coming to Australia soon. Mark my words. It’s coming. God’s setting Australia up to be run by Labor in the very near future because the Liberals blew it, just like their American counterparts The Republicans blew it. But that’s okay. God ultimately supports freedom and liberty and those who strive for it, even against overwhelming odds. And although the so-called Conservatives in America talk a whole lot about those jingoistic catch phrases, what they really mean is liberty as it suits them, freedom as it suits them. Want proof? Jeff Sessions (the idiot) says that the Pope should stick to talking about spiritual things and stop talking about Climate Change. Guess what Dickweed– Climate Change is a spiritual issue; it’s a moral issue in the extreme. See, it’s just fine and dandy for the Republicans to bring their religion into politics all day long but it’s not okay for anybody who disagrees with them to do it, especially if it threatens the bottom line of big time donors to Republican candidates. You better hope there’s no Hell buddy. You better just hope.

Oh yeah, and the homeless man, as you can imagine was working me for money– but I did let him walk with me a block or two and tell the story he’d made up and point me toward a good diner where I could get breakfast so I guess technically he had done me a service so I paid him three dollars, said goodbye, and went inside to have a nice breakfast. If I was really the good man I pretend to be, I’d’ve invited him to join me. But I’m not. So I didn’t.

See y’all tomorrow.