On Monday I returned the keg from my party to the liquor store. The woman who processed it lifted it and said, “Seems like you didn’t drink a lot.” I told her how the tap was a little wonky and even those present who had worked in bars and/or were hippies hadn’t been able to get it to work. She apologized and gave me a $25 gift certificate. (I’m determined to use it for something classy like nice wine, rather than two cases of PBR. We’ll see how that goes.)

Then, about an hour later, I’m at home reading when the doorbell rings. It’s a man and a woman from NARAL going door to door, collecting signatures and donations. I admire what considerable chutzpah it must take to go around a neighborhood (even an ostensibly progressive neighborhood in an ostensibly progressive town) and essentially say, “Do you support abortion? If so, give us money.” (Their pitch was admittedly a bit more nuanced than this.) So I gave them $25 and felt pretty good about myself.

So but then, as anyone who was outdoors in the Twin Cities area yesterday afternoon will know, there was a little plane flying around towing an enormous benner that said “10 WEEK ABORTION.” My initial reaction, before I could fully parse the message and its intent, was that the plane was advertising 10-week abortions. (I’m pretty sure I was not alone in this assessment.) Further inspection revealed that the banner also had an enormous photo of an aborted fetus. Classy!

I don’t know what relation the third paragraph has to the first two. Maybe a freakish, dispiriting epilogue.