My Annual Cruise With Hot and Sexy Carnival Queen, Katrina vanden Heuvel

It wasn't as if I had applied for the job. She supposedly (and here I just now felt I wanted to insert the appropriate word apparently for supposedly but thought better of it and held my hand back) had read some of my work online and thought I would be a fantastic candidate to write something for The Nation that the other boys and girls in her employ simply could not carry out by their own means. Seems they had not the balls for an assignment the forceful editor deemed necessary to The Nation's long-term survival as a viable journal and one the rest of the republic would still consider virile enough to withstand the heat soon to be emanating from its very own kitchen. If you have ever read The Nation you would know the writing there lacks nothing in the cerebral department, so smart to a fault, but lately, Katrina is wanting balls for pure measure of the magazine's salt and therefore demanding mine.

Katrina vanden Heuvel has always been viewed by someone like me as not one of my favorite persons to hang out with in what I mostly consider the mundane drudge in the getting of my daily bread. Suffice to say I have seen her countless times over the years on the Chris Matthews show Hardball and actually thought she came off more often enough as some angry bitch carrying more than one heavy axe to grind. I often wondered how her husband could stand her, but my deviant thoughts would always evolve into a fascination regarding the possible sex acts one could have with a woman that mad.

As for Chris Matthews and his show she appeared on regularly, I credit Little George with getting her so riled up for so long that rarely could she conduct the amiable interview necessary to pull off with skill the points she wanted to make to the other pundits sitting around the conference table. All she was able to do was form terse arguments that immediately polarized and erupted often enough into shouting matches and serious games that seemed to award points to the loudest person on the set. I finally gave up and quit listening to both her and Chris Matthews until a few months ago when I saw Katrina on a different talk show with Tucker Carlson, she now brilliantly calling these new right-wing fringe idiots who gather to protest the Obama administration Tea Baggers and easily getting under Carlson's skin in a really funny and almost jubilant manner. I had never seen Katrina vanden Heuvel so relaxed and confident in her own skin. She was beautiful. Her intelligence was now shining bright and obvious, and she became for me almost invincible clad in her new gleaming armor. I believe Katrina's new calm demeanor has everything to do with Barack Obama occupying the position as her new president and she no longer having to daily wake up to George W. Bush in the White House along with his grandpa-sick sidekick Dick Cheney hidden in some undisclosed location. For once I felt as though Katrina was happy. And so I decided to accept her invitation.

Seemingly out of the blue I had received in the mail a card from Katrina vanden Heuvel. She had sent to me what appeared to be a personal "message about America's future and yours". She said to me, "our challenge now is to insure that a transformational moment becomes a transformational era." I thought about how sexy she looked, I confess I fantasized how she might love me in her very own private, but physical way, and in my mind I decided I would follow her wherever she might want to lead me.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editor, publisher, and part owner of The Nation magazine which recently turned 141 years old. Her office is on a small street in a nondescript building just east of Union Square in New York City. I nervously scheduled my appointment with her and flew into the city to accept my first writing assignment with one of our oldest journalistic institutions.

The offices of The Nation reminded me of a huge warehouse space, an open loft with half-walled cubicles in the middle surrounded by glassed-in squares that house the desks of the other editors. Behind one of these glassed-in barriers sat my date at her desk, wearing a headset, and obviously deep in conversation as she is wont to do as seen on the many talk shows she now contributes her opinions to as the brand face of The Nation magazine. She motioned me in, all the while talking on her headset and driving her point home with whomever it was she was speaking to. As far as I was concerned it could have been Mikhail Gorbachev. I sat on the sofa across from her desk. Her piles of books did not intimidate me as I have piles of my very own I could intimidate her back with. But I admit I do not have a talking Clinton doll as she does. But I have broken bread two tables away from daughter Chelsea and her friends at a little charming breakfast place my wife and I loved called 9th Street Market now closed and gone as also is their once blue awning.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is not as tall as she looks on television. She is actually rather small. She wears dark jackets and slacks and I have to admit I do enjoy looking at her. She rises from behind her desk to shake my hand and we immediately get down to business. Our talk is brief, there is no small talk, and with assignment in hand, I make my way back through the vast space of cubicled corridors arriving at the eighth floor elevator and my slow ride to the bottom of the stairs where I exit to the street below. I am breathing heavily and wanting fresh air. I am not exactly sure that what has taken place up there in that office in fact actually did take place or even could have. I am not sure if what I've seen was in a dream or if my ticket was even punched. I am floating, and so very much in love with my own life. I telephoned my wife immediately and told her I loved her.

I finally took one of those cruises they've been advertising all over where you get to be on the same boat as Katrina vanden Heuvel. It's a seven-night Carribbean cruise featuring the likes of Howard Dean, E.L. Doctorow, and other liberal-minded Democrats. I have only recently become a Democrat in order to vote in primaries in Kentucky because the Republican counterparts generally suck the wind out of any good feeling one might have for the future of our country in this now very red state of ours. I was completely surprised when Kentucky voted for Bill Clinton for two terms because of what I have seen through the last eight years of my previous twenty-five while fixing up three homes in Louisville in order to get ahead and keep the wolf from our door. There has been such an extreme move to the far right politically and these people are rabidly connected at the neck socially by Christian fundamentalism. Louisville now has one of the largest mega churches in the entire country. They broadcast live streams electronically to several satellite congregations throughout the surrounding counties including many in southern Indiana. Kentucky can be a scary place in which to live if one isn't careful and too forthcoming with one's personal world view.

My wife and I are situated in our cabin on one of the seven floors of this massive ship and generally feeling mortified by being on the same boat with all these intense strangers. It seems the only place to get away from the burgeoning crowd is on the hidden deck where all the row boats are stored in case of pending disaster. We both haul out deck chairs and sit below the hanging vessels in order to take some filtered sun and read our books in quiet desperation. It was early the first morning when my wife looked up at me from a prone position flat on her back in bed and demanded that I get her off this boat immediately. I told her I couldn't, that it would be another six days before we would be back stateside, and for her to make the best of a very poor situation.

The food was good, but we tended to go from one meal to the next until we couldn't even shit anymore and chugging prune juice by the gallon made absolutely no difference to the wadded up mess bulging in our colons. We were miserable. At dinner we would get into arguments with people who absolutely love to cruise and tell everyone who will listen about each one in total. I finally suggested to them that they should both write a book about their travels. Get that riveting story down in writing. Here we were constantly adding more food on top of food and getting no relief from it. We were certainly packing it in and paying an awful price for it, what with extreme discomfort and no bowel movement in sight. The tour director Doug would announce on the intercom at seemingly horrific and inappropriate intervals in bed that there would be bingo in the Hello Dolly room at such and such a time. At one point I figured there would be a ghastly murder committed on the high seas. But I never saw Katrina one time. Never did we have our promised tryst. And never did I even try.