Okay, another thousand words. I meant to put them into something with a broader use- the article I’m writing on the London Blitz, maybe, or a short story I started a few days ago that needs a new ending- but it was Kat’s first day off in a week and so we slept late and then went to the public peace garden around the corner with sandwiches and Pringles for lunch. When we came home I helped her organize her paperwork from her school year in a binder so she can use it as reference material for, like, the rest of her life as she embarks on this career. By the time that shit was finished, we were due at the National Theatre to see Vanessa Redgrave in the year of magical thinking, and that was followed by meeting some friends at a pub not too far from our flat while one of them played a show with his band, which I will henceforth refer to as a gig because that is the English way of doing things, and I am in England.

I’m not even sure I had any new thoughts today, so I’ve no idea where these thousand words are going to come from. And as it’s late now and I hadn’t thought much about what I’d write, I’m down to random, completely uninsightful observations about the news. All of which should probably start with the word dude, as in dude, tim russert’s fucking dead or dude, r kelly’s innocent.

Nothing much to say about Russert. Like any good fucking politics nerd, I was familiar with him, and thought he- er- sucked, but it’s a shame that he died so young. Heart attacks are terrifying to me, anything that can kill someone so unexpectedly. This was what the year of magical thinking was about, too- it’s a one-woman show performed by Redgrave, adapted by Joan Didion from her own memoir of the same name. It’s about her husband dying suddenly while her daughter is in a coma, and the mourning process for the two of them. The magical thinking of the title is basically the bargaining stage of grief, the idea that if one can only act in a certain way, then something impossible she wants desperately to happen might. That if, say, a woman whose husband died suddenly refuses to donate his shoes to charity and instead keeps them, he might walk back through the door and put them on his feet. It’s the sort of thing that I can’t really process except to say maybe that really is how it is. But then, I’ve been fortunate.

The R Kelly verdict, now, well- shit. What is there to say about that? Apparently peeing on a fourteen year old girl and videotaping it is no longer a crime, because I’ve no idea what other conclusions one can draw from that. I mean, it’s not really ambiguous. He peed on a girl and videotaped it, and we know that this is true because we’ve seen the tape. Kels’ defense strategy was quite literally cribbed from Chris Rock’s (it wasn’t me) and Dave Chappelle’s (it was digitally inserted urine) routines on the matter. Did the jury just go for it because the jokes were funny, and it was neat to hear them in a court room? Or maybe it was a case of jury nullification, that seldom-used power of the American courts, in which a jury has the legal right to find innocent a person of a crime that they have committed, if the jury feels that the law is unjust. This power, incidentally, is not popular with judges, for obvious reasons. It was determined in a US court just before the turn to the 20th century that a judge has no obligation to inform the jury that they can find a person innocent of a crime they’ve committed if they choose, and seventy years later they decided that, not only was a judge not obligated to inform them of that, but a defense attorney could not mention it. Which begs the question- where did it come from in the R Kelly case? Did every member of that jury look at the tape and think what’s so bad about peeing on a little girl?

There were supporters celebrating outside the courtroom when the verdict was announced. These people were not under an obligation to consider the legal arguments before them, such as the prosecution may have failed to fully prove that it’s really r kelly and the prosecution did not actually confirm that it’s not cgi pee, and as such they had access to the same information that you and I did- that a videotape in which R Kelly, who looks very much like R Kelly, pees on a very young teenager, exists. That they took this information and decided to celebrate when he was declared innocent of peeing on a very young teenager because they, I guess, love his music so much and can’t wait for the next trapped in the closet leads oen to the conclusion that, perhaps, twelve jurors entrusted with delivering justice felt the same way. Which is gross. Probably not as gross as being peed on, but I am not a scientist and will not conduct experiments to determine these things.

And so much for that. Another thousand words, slain like a foul beast, peed upon like a teenager under the mighty urine stream of-

Okay, stop. Pee jokes are usually funny, but I’m actually kinda pissed about this. And, for the record, I love the man’s music. I listen to “The World’s Greatest” on repeat whenever I need to be inspired. double up was my favorite record of 2007. But how the hell did he get out of this?

Being famous in America must be fucking awesome.