Time to Chill

A Year of Crazy

So I was minding my own business, trying to limp my way to life's finish line, and bang... as if I didn't have enough problems of my own we elected a "racist troll" to be our president, the democrat opposition decided to spend their time screaming about the fact that he's a racist troll so they can win the midterm elections so they can.... be in power again?... not suck as bad as a racist troll?... show how morally superior they are by electing a fill in inspiring rock star politician here  hand picked insider as president? How about a plan? For jobs? For the climate? For education? Nah, but we can be just like Republicans but not as mean. Speaking of the the Republicans, it seems they have used the cover provided by the "racist troll" we call President to effectively destroy the New Deal. Well pending the reconciliation of the house and the senate versions of the tax bill. In an unprecedented show of heavy lifting, gamesmanship, dishonesty and spite they will destroy the New Deal, the basic contract we have had with our government, then replace it with...wait for it...nothing. Almost 75 years of old people getting health care and small pensions, uppity minorities voting and expecting equal protection under the law, woman becoming a growing force in our workplaces, political life, and academia, all swept aside and replaced with...nothing. Come on Republicans, you've had 75 years of stewing about poor people getting food and shelter and middle-class people having health care and social security to think up something better and the best you can do is a massive tax cut to corporations supplemented with poison pills to destroy every entitlement programs that average folks have been paying into their whole working lives. Also as a cherry on top of 2017's shit sundae Nazis/racists are a thing again...What? I know PC culture is annoying, but our answer to a bunch of over excited collage freshman is to bring back Nazis? Don't get me started. Wait, wait, wait! I almost forgot, seems that we also have this problem with huge numbers of powerful men proving to be sexist assholes. Not a surprise...well maybe the shear number of assaults that involve masturbating is a little surprising...sure, like being a Nazis and dick picks, masturbation seems like something you would do in private, but it's good to be the king, right? Whoa, time to take a breath.

To be clear this does not prove there is a patriarchy so much as prove the world is full of assholes.

So why chill? If we soak up enough news it seems like we are collectively heading to hell in a hand basket. Psst... pick any day in history, look as long and hard as you can at all of the soul crushingly horrible things humans did to each other and you will find that we have been going to hell in a hand basket since Cain bashed in Ables head with a rock and God gave us a massive time-out so we could evolve into better people. That was 3 or 4 million years and a ton of evolving ago so  if we are going to hell in a hand basket we should either be there by now, or maybe, just maybe, we're on a completely different journey. I'm going out on a limb here, and I know I am luckier than most, but since in the last 24 hours I have had  hot and delicious pizza, ice cold beer, a relaxing hot shower, access to indoor toilets, Netflix+Hulu, a car that starts, ice cream (mmm... ice cream!), a well lighted clean health club to work off all those calories from all those goodies (1rst world problems much?)...I could go on but you see my point right?...not a hand basket.

...or at least a hand basket with fluffy kittens.

So why chill? Maybe Netflix does have "Stranger Things","Orange is the New Black", "Daredevil" and both endings to"How I met Your Mother"(I like the one where the Mom lives), but Bub! you just admitted that the world is a horrible place where our fellow citizens are ready to kill each other, our political parties have no vision, or worse their vision involves grinding us into paste, and the media comes at us hard with this stuff not to enlighten us or help us to answers but to sell beer and ice cream. Fair enough, but this is why you have to chill. Every moment of your lives you make choices about what happens next. So maybe you get pot roast instead of meat loaf for dinner, or you cuddle on the couch instead of having wild monkey sex in the shower, perhaps you finally give your corduroy suit to Goodwill (God I loved that suit), or maybe you reach a once in a lifetime crossroads and it's time to wrestle the Devil for his fiddle. This is that time(for the fiddle thing, I'm not giving up the suit).

No, no, no...time to chill, time to man up (or lady up if you must defy my gender stereotypes despite the fact that I'm old and I use "man up" for brevity because my old guy brain sees "man up" as a clear call to arms that should be understood as such across generations and not as a micro-aggression affirming the need to perpetuate the patriarchy at the expense of women... cis-up? human up? people up?...who am I kidding? "man-up" was just a lazy word choice, but this whole digression was a full blown aggression, micro is for wieners, against people that nitpick my lazy word choices to hijack my moral high ground despite the fact that we are on the same side), time to come together and redirect our reality in new and improved directions. (this entire paragraph was brought to you by the just chill and stop destroying easy targets on your own side coalition #just chill#word mistakes do not a monster make).

The amuck Nazis, the powerful men with their dicks out, the Dickensian meltdown of the Republican party, the morally bankrupt idea less Democratic party and yes our President the troll offer us a clear contrast, a laser like focus on the rot that has pervaded our country, our world, our lives. Sure it's scary that everything  happening on the news is a confusing jumble of policies, ideas, and habits that most of us find appalling, but it's better on the news, in the public eye, than the corridors of power or the smoke filled rooms at the good old boys club. The best way to get rid of rot and mildew is sunlight and 2017 was a nova above what is going wrong.

More cleaning power than every chemical Proctor and Gamble ever made.

The vast majority of us don't like Nazis, sexist assholes, gutless business as usual democrats, merciless compassion less thieving republicans, or our troll of a president. So now is when we choose. It's not going to be easy. We might not even be successful. The world has tumbled back into darkness many times in the past, but never before have the vermin infesting our society been exposed to so much light. That's why they are all fighting so hard, lying so much, ramming legislation through in the dark of night; they know that unless they shut off the lights they will be done. You think we're going to hell in a hand basket? I think it's time to beat the devil and play some sweet, sweet music because in the end we have the power.

Even the cosmos know we're here, we're worried about a few scurvy men?

By the way the special election in Alabama is happening today. "You mean  the election where Jesus freak, pedophile twice dismissed judge Roy Moore has a good chance of going to the Senate"? Yes I do. Plenty of sunshine on that one but it looks like it might not be enough. So what? Who said things were going to be easy? I said chill out and use the fact that the lights are on to make changes. Roy Moore is going to be the poster boy for the Republican party for years to come. The vast majority of Americans think he is vile. How's that going to work out for the Republicans? Maybe you get Alabama but what about all those purple states out there? Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada? Places your troll president squeezed to a victory in 2016? If the picture gallery includes a selfie of Roy Moore, a blow up of W's "mission accomplished" carrier photo op, a slide show of Trump being a horrible person maybe people start to "get" you. So maybe you independent voters can link up with the growing discontented democrat majority and the Republicans that still have a soul and we can win this thing, change this thing at least until the next thing. I do love God's sense of humor. Bone cancer is a laugh riot.

So? Even terrible things can? might? cause positive change. No promises, but there are more of us than there are of them. We can still make the world a better place, or at least have wild monkey sex in a corduroy suit after some fine pot roast.

New Direction/Same Old Crap

I have to confess that I didn't think I would be doing this anymore. Do we ever really need another voice in the scrum? Another soul bellowing "Listen to me!" mixed among the vast number of voices brought to you by the inter-webs and the electronic media only to be ignored as lies or delusion unless that voice confirms everything you already believe? Seems like a waste of time and energy, and where will it take us? Either we all get angrier and angrier until we go to war with ourselves, or we all come to believe the same things, give in to entropy, and end as a species. Worse, what about babies? If we  let enough time pass with everyone believing that only there own stuff is real eventually babies (who only believe in "feed me!" and "I've shit myself, clean me") will be our default setting for reality. So as funny as it would be to see you all in your diapers finally getting the world that you are willing to believe in I guess I should at least try to push things in my own odd way so that you'll  push back against me enough, shake your own thinking enough to maybe make a little chink in your world view armor. I don't want to change your mind, I want "you" to change "your" mind💩, or at least touch it up with a wet nap and maybe a little baby oil.

The only way Ted Cruz becomes president.

So I haven't blogged in over a year, why? Well partly because I didn't want to be just another narcissist blowhard trying to delude himself  into thinking he was important in a completely random universe. Fine. I also got tired of howling at the wind. For years I published this thing until I was getting a couple hundred hits whenever I would spew but I got exactly zero feed back. Not even someone calling me a left wing boot licker, or a white privileged mansplaner. Nothing does a man more proud than feeling like he's an idiot child who gets his crayon drawings on the fridge so he'll just go away. Turns out we narcissists don't just want to hear our own voices, we want to hear other voices telling us how smart we are. The cherry on the cake was my Mom and FOX news. She never went full on right wing on me, which would have been OK, rather she would  binge watch FOX news until she had convinced her self that the world was one lit match away from that final big bonfire.

...and I want all the words that rhyme with orange.

 I would talk her down every week only to call the next Sunday and listen to her start up all over again. We did that dance right up until the week she died. So bless you FOX news for scaring the crap out of my Mom for the last three years of her life. What made me feel the lowest though was, being a reasonable as I could, with no sugar coating the random cruelty of reality, getting her to believe that getting up every morning  was an awesome thing to do. my whole point of blogging was to remind everyone that getting one more day was the best gift ever even if things weren't perfect. The there I was in real life, with someone that I loved, and I talked, and I reasoned, and I never lied, but instead of embracing her final years she simply decided to die. Ignore the Doctors, refuse to eat, self medicate, quit. A three year suicide tends to cause a bit of collateral damage and when she was done I felt about as voiceless as I ever had in my whole life.

Surprisingly trite and unfunny in real life.

Then came Trump. I don't want to blog about Trump. I don't want to blog about Trump supporters. They are not the reason we are in out current mess(which is ugly as messes often are, but is no worse than most of recorded history. World War 2? The Depression?Disco?), so I am only going to say this once: Trump is a bloviating, undereducated, racist asshole that somehow had the street smarts to game the system after inheriting tens of millions of dollars from his slum lord father. If you voted for him for president you know what you did; either you agreed with all the profoundly awful things he is on tape saying, or you so hate the left that you allowed the buffoonish false moral equivalencies fostered by the mainstream media about Hillary Clinton mitigate the vile things Trump says(on camera). Before you come at me with all your... "but Hillary" BS I will tell you that the rest of this blog will be me tearing Hilary and the liberals apart just not about made up shit(Yes made up shit!). Hilary did not murder people, Benghazi was poorly handled but 7 or 8 Republican investigations gave us nothing criminal and republicans were the ones that cut the funding for embassy security in the first place, the e-mail scandal ditto, she did not kill Vince Foster, the Clinton Foundation was absolutely based on pay for access which is how every politician ever funds their foundation and while ethically lame is really no different than the people in the Bush administration allowing the industries they came from to formulate the environmental regulations the people in the Bush administration would return to in the private sector( the swamp is deep and wide and both parties wallow in it as has President cheeto by his own on film words),Whitewater was a failed land deal that cost people other than the Clintons their investment but it wasn't illegal(Trump people? Offended?Really?really?). Welcome to the American dream.

Who are those folks in the mirror?

I don't want to tool too hard on my Hilliary peeps since I worked for her in NH, but seriously, how long are we going to play the business as usual game in this country when business as usual seems to be a steady erosion of the rights and benefits that people my grandparents age fought (&died) for. The right want the new deal dead, dead, dead. This is not a secret. The liberals think that in order to win elections they have to be more like the right. Anyone want to guess at likely outcomes as far as working people are concerned? So we end up with this horrible "two sides of the same coin" narrative rammed up our asses by the media and embraced by everyone that wants to win elections. "We're not too far right, we're not too far left" we're just more competent than the other guys. Shenanigans. The republican party are a bunch of evil dicks that think you are gorging at the government trough while victimized billionaires suffer tax+class warfare.
 

The business of 'merica is business.

The democrats are gutless wieners smugly clinging to identity politics because it lets them feel good about themselves instead of actually legislating. I actually like the democrats but when I called them gutless wieners it reminded me to use this picture.

OK policy wonk what is your... oh never mind.

A perfect picture of why Hilliary was a crappy candidate. Arrogant, tone deaf and privileged to be the anointed one to break the glass ceiling she ended up with state department e-mails on the computer of the biggest screw-up in the last 30 years of the democratic party.

 She was quoted as saying she had to duck sniper fire.

She was quoted as saying she was named after Edmund Hillary

She spit this out despite the fact that Pennsylvania and Ohio were swing states.

She smug slapped my Mom with this one. I was there when it happened and if you think I'm being a little dramatic for Mom it was like a gut punch. Just that tone... you knew... Loser!

She was married to and a strong supporter of Bill Clinton who I dare one feminist to look me in the eye and tell me he was not as crass as Trump or that the power differential between him and Monica Lewinsky would not be considered sexual harassment on every college campus in this country. His crimes were not her crimes, but her crime was silence.

Speaking of crimes she sat in a completely safe democrat senate set with the most famous name in the senate at that time other than Kennedy when she added her support to W's repulsive murder spree in Iraq.

Voted for the Patriot Act too.

It's the little things. Little things that let otherwise pretty decent people to vote for incompetent racist gasbags. Since 1947 the GATT treaty has slowly morphed into the WTO, the world was declared flat by the no-skin in the game editorial wizards at the NY Times, NAFTA passed under Bill C and in certain regions of this country jobs have just vanished into the ether while a quarter of a century of the status quo has not brought them anything but food stamps. Hillary is the status quo just like Repub loser Jeb Bush. Not two sides of the same coin, but both status quo. We have to purge ourselves of the faux royalty that rots our system. Especially when the last 15 years have been about how crappy business as usual is.

A long time insider neck deep if free trade (something I have come to believe that a world full of poor people ultimately needs), identity politics(something that needs persistence, education, enforcement and time instead of more legislation), smugly knowing it was her turn, and 28 years of her every word and action smeared across the national stage made her, made you, a sitting duck in an outsider election. She would have been a better choice for a competent president than the rest of the field but to ignore just how damaged a candidate she was makes you fools. Trump voters wanted something.  The hypocritical voters of small government wanted something. Trump said 'Yes', Hillary said "blah, blah, blah".  

And she almost won anyway. Not because most of you charged out of the gate sure she deserved it but because people like me, people trained in futility since 1972, people that know you have to be able to sail a ship before you pick a destination, worked for her, voted for her all the while thinking... eye roll..."Here we go again".

Oh yeah 30,000,000 people that did not bother to vote; you suck. Repeat after me, "They are not all the same","Your vote does matter","Things do change". The 2016 federal budget was 3,688,000,000 dollars. If you think a figure like that does not need to be watched carefully you are as dumb as a box of rocks...no box of rocks is too kind, sorry.

Always Home

First I want to establish that she was my go to protection against Frankenstein. Now I want you to know that while I was ten I wasn't stupid, I didn't say Mom was my first choice, it was just that Dad didn't want to hear from Frankenstein, which left me shit out of luck  after me and my overactive imagination binge watched five days of Creature Feature on TV 38.(Binge watching could take years of careful preparation back in the day unless you were lucky enough to stumble upon Movie 38's Frankenstein week) Dad was a hard case, no matter how many times Frankenstein was in my closet, that noise couldn't have been the pipes, he had no intention of indulging my childish fears. Mom on the other hand always assured me that Frankenstein was fake, but that didn't stop her from sitting in the rocking chair until I fell asleep.

...because of coarse she could kick Frankenstein's ass.

Now in retrospect it seems obvious that a 5'3" 115 lb. woman couldn't have protected me from Frankenstein if he really was in the closet, but it is also obvious that I'm still here to write this. So either Mom gave some serious monster beat downs after I fell asleep or Frankenstein was a serious pussy. Hard to say because Mom was hard to figure out.

She definitely seemed tough. First anybody in her family to graduate collage, she then flitted off to Hudson Bay to help  Mcgill University map what were uncharted territories in 1952. With her cartography project done it was then off to the University of Nebraska for a masters degree in geography. I know, standard lady stuff in 1953, that degree would almost be a cliche if she had got it. Dad happened instead. By 1954 they were both teaching High School in New Jersey. Then I came along. By 1958 Dad was working on a Masters in education at Temple University and Mom was a housewife.

She was not a standard issue housewife though. She was still both tough and ,well, odd. One time when the neighborhood kids I was playing with hoisted my 4 year old brother into a tree by tying a rope around his ankle she vaulted a standard backyard chainlink fence, caught the ringleader by the ear, and never let go until he lowered my brother to the ground. She then dragged him home to be lambasted  in front of his mom and dad. after which she lambasted the mom and dad for good measure. Did I mention that she was pregnant at the time.

She did other bad ass stuff too. Did you know she used to pull her own teeth?

Had to hurt right?

I was a kid at the time so stuff like that just made me think, "My Mom is a badass". Kids never think of other possibilities. Possibilities like maybe she was so afraid of Dentists that she would have to take extreme measures when the pain of a rotten tooth would get to be too much. Years later as her health began to fail and her hospital freak outs became more acute it was obvious that kids know nothing.

Still even afraid, angry or sad she was no standard issue mom. When I was about 5 our dog Pepper, actually it was Mom's dog so I can't account for its' where-abouts while she was traipsing across the country side for collage, got sick. Mom took him to the Veterinarian. Well he was 17 years old and it was the 60's. Time to say goodbye right? Let the Vet do his job. A little cyanide, a disposal fee, then pick out a new man's best friend at the pound. That didn't play with a woman that had a set in stone moral code and an unhealthy love of Walt Disney movies.

Mom loaded Pepper, a shovel, and her .410 shotgun into our 1957 Pontiac station wagon and drove out to the Pine Barrens. She only brought home the shovel and the gun.

He's my responsibility.

 Moms bid to be a Nietzhian obermensch freed from her slave morality to truly make her own ethical decisions based on empathy and her own sense of right and wrong ended as those things often do, in tears and self doubt. Even if it is the right thing your brain doesn't always let you off the hook.  I on the other hand learned a valuable story telling lesson. If you want to make people cry kill the dog. Thanks Uncle Walt, it is a small world after all.

On the plus side Mom always insisted that life was awesome. All through my childhood she shlepped me and the rest of the brood to the library, the beach, the woods, the ball field, the frog pond, where-ever there was an adventure to experience. "I have travelled extensively in Concord Massachusetts". She loved to quote Thoreau, but she also made fun of him for taking home his laundry to his mom. So while I don't remember her quoting Walden ironically or wistfully  I was a kid so what did I know.

Me and my sibs brought the pee to peaceful every time we visited Walden.

I don't think Mom could do irony though. This was a woman that taught us how to catch snakes, frogs, turtles, toads. She was always setting up fish tanks, pens, and cages. Once a box turtle tried to trek across the yard and the dogs, pepper was only the first of a steady supply of dogs, messed him up. After 2 days trapped in his own shell off to the Vet we went where she would't leave until the Doc, who even a 9year old could tell thought she was nuts, at least tried something. 2 Months after that Mr turtle was back in the wild far from angry dogs. She never wanted us to own nature, but she wanted us to understand nature so every spring we would raid the pond with our nets till we had a bucket load of tadpoles. By early summer we were back at the pond with a bucket load of frogs.

Back to the wild?But them's good eating.

When she wasn't teaching us how to live in the moment, how to embrace the magic of the back yard, or how to climb a tree, she was always trying to step further afield herself. She did Bible study, book groups, PTA... not a joiner though, she always quit for something else. She'd always come home with tails about boneheaded people of privilege. She was a person of privilege that didn't like or respect persons of privilege. She was also hopelessly aware that somehow her proximity to life's finish line was somehow not an advantage for her.

I guess that was pretty much a life theme for Mom. Chained to societies rules, and her personal rules, even while the times were shattering them both. She worked as a substitute teacher for years but couldn't get hired full time even though my father was a principal.(I won't help, that would be unfair nepotism, chains) she tried to get involved with the civil rights movement by bring an at risk kid to the house for the summer and working with METCO.(we don't need help from the clueless privileged, chains) she immersed herself in Friedan, Steinhem, and Bouvior(she couldn't make the leap that wealthy middle-class people were also oppressed, chains). She was an outlier and her comfortable life was a gut punch, maybe because she was afraid or because she thought too much or she took the easy path or she had too many rules or maybe it was all on these things and none of them. A gut punch is a gut punch.

She could have taken Barker and Sandler both.

I don't mean to be maudlin. It's just that my Mom's story is so different from my Fathers. He got the standard issue American success story. She got a pretty good life, it just the one forced(?) on her not the one she though she deserved. And of coarse the new age of feminism was extra kind to those that got left behind. (Sarcasm)

I get it. The 60 minutes guy asking the questions with all his male privilege pissed you off. Having to do the interview at all probably pissed you off. Not an unreasonable response, but the contempt you showed for the cookie bakers with your tone pretty much defined my mothers self image going forward. Nice job. 15 years younger and completely immersed in the barriers you crossed while casually  oblivious to the trials of those that went before.

The new information age proved to be too much for Mom. She was a Catholic born and raised with a Catholic's rules drilled into her, but when liberation theology came to Central America she watched nightly on TV as the church turned its' back while CIA trained death squads murdered priests and nuns. She was front and center as the Boston Globe spotlight team reveled the abuse scandal. She watched in person as that self same church plopped her mother into an old people warehouse after taking all her money then working her for 25 years as a nun.(that's a whole other story).

So there she was, yolked to her churches rules but unable, or unwilling, to believe in her church. She fancied herself a liberal at a time that liberals where being vilified by the right and looked down upon as clueless boobs by the left. She was outside of labor. Feminism passed her by then forgot her. She was an outstanding Mom but even her own kids had issues with her fear and her Disneyfied beliefs. And how do you have Disneyfied beliefs when the nightly news shatters those images every night?

She got more and more insuler as the years went by. More and more she was living the magic of the back yard. If the world doesn't want me I don't want the world. Then Dad died. When your world stops at the end of the driveway it gets pretty lonely when you are the only person in it.

It took 5 more years. It was probably the longest suicide ever. Last weekend I watched as she slowly, painfully died. Afraid, then beyond afraid, in pain only slightly dulled by morphine, her cognitive functions reduced to a primal cry for things to end, and I couldn't even offer her the dignity she offered to a 17 year old black lab. She passed on a Sunday morning while I was in the TV room watching the FOX talking heads basically say it was time for Pope Francis to shut-up, liberation theology was dead, and nobody cared about it anyway.

Goodbye Mom.

Between Holidays

Well, are you going to thank me? I did spare you a post about how Thanksgiving is the best holiday of all time, I didn't hector you about losing the Christmas spirit to our consumer culture, I passed on calling New Years a holiday for amateurs, and I kept my Valentines Day sour grapes to myself. Seriously, weren't you get sick of this moralistic twit blogger constantly telling you the right way to think or the proper way to feel? Aren't some of my holier than thou pronouncements enough to make you want to reach through your computer and give a good slap to my overly round head? "What the #@$%! you blogging piece of ^%$$#*."  Christmas has all that great family stuff plus presents, just because some people act like jerks doesn't make it a bad holiday. Mmmm presents! Besides blogger boy you know you like presents too; you just like stuffing your face more. New Years is fun! Wouldn't you like February 14th more if there was a remote chance that you could get laid someday?

Please Oh Lord, my your gifts involve face stuffing.

I guess I have to plead guilty on this one. The holidays show up, I get kind of jazzed and I want things to conform to my view of the world. Which makes the holidays vastly different from... July 12? Sept 22? March 28? Everyday? Duh! Truth be told the holidays tend to stir up a ton of regret about how little I've managed to make my world conform to my idea of the world. So, because I didn't do bigger things with my life I hector you about perceived things that you do wrong with yours. Wow, smug, condescending, arrogant and riddled with regret. Happy Holidays. Although today is St Paddy's day, isn't drunk blogging the best?

Words to live by... if you're Hitler

So here is where this blogger, and maybe you,  goes wrong. Words and meaning aren't always as clear cut as we would like them to be. This isn't lawyerly BS either. Is the above quote the affirmation of a wise old timer that has lived a full throttle existence, or a get out of jail free card for a sociopath? It is of coarse both while also being totally false. No Regrets? Are you kidding me? Regret comes to you about all kinds of events for all kinds of reasons and you cannot talk yourself out of feeling them. Like if you bumbled your career path and now the people that write your pay check know you had better do the monkey dance when they snap their fingers or learn to like homeless shelters. Only you didn't take good care of your health and now the monkey dance hurts in physical as well as emotional ways. Or maybe the only woman you have been interested in for the last 20 years is gone because you had too many rules about age differences, economic differences, plus you couldn't bare for her to see you do the crippled monkey dance for you corporate masters.... so, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain..."

Damn! 3 years to plan health care and we still forgot to hire the computer guy!

It happens to the best of us. So, we finally get around to what today's blog is really about which is the things that you can get for less than a buck that you should really be thankful for. In fact it is a product of your extraordinary existence that you have the luxury of thinking that diamonds or cars or appliances are more valuable than this stuff. It's all material stuff too. Rock solid pick it up and use it stuff. No found "wisdom" in bold fonts superimposed on colorful backgrounds to hammer home meaningless points and puff up the ego of blog boy. So...

Ain't they purti...

I know, I know, I know... I just got done talking about things that make life better than diamonds (for the record diamonds are stupid and unless you can get some pinhead to give you money for them they add no value to your everyday existence)when I whip out a picture of ... not diamonds. That kids is a close up picture of table salt. Mmmm salt! Think about eating. Think about eating 3 times a day. Now boil some unsalted water and cook an unsalted chicken in it. Eat. Wow! Does that ever suck. Try other things; pasta, corn, green beans, all without salt. Try a salt free diet. Try not to rip your tongue out in despair. You spend an hour or two every day eating, seven days a week three hundred sixty-five days a year for the duration of a seventy plus year life. Salt/no salt, Pleasure/no pleasure. Salt brings you 4.5 years worth of 24/7 pleasure for about 2 bucks a year. Screw heroin, I want salt.  How big would a diamond have to be before you'd trade it even up for 4.5 years of pleasure. I didn't think so...

Oh yeah, give me the good stuff.

I don't know what people did in the olden days, but I'm pretty sure I don't ever want to find out in person. Wikipedia suggests leaves, corn husks, corn cobs, stones, broken pottery, moss, ferns, rags, sand, fruit skins, the left hand, and the always comfy seashell. While we are trading in diamonds and pleasure maybe we can also put a price on reducing yuck. Six billion people times at least one load a day times six billion rather foul corn cobs is one hell of a lot of yuck. It is yuck to the power of OMG! Yuck as a way of life. Yuck that you can never get away from. Yuck!

What you going to do with your blue ray phone now?

I am not saying that a 70 inch HD television won't bring you pleasure, I'm just saying that when you are "ahem" trapped in a moment, where you lept before you looked, and now everyone at the morning meeting is wondering where you are there are other things that have more value. Maybe some Ivory...

You'r missing the point here...

We are talking about cheap (and legal). It's bad enough that we covet rocks and metals, how messed up is it that there is a huge trade in pieces of dead animal when the ivory with the real value is...

Invented 2000 years ago it took until the 11950sbefore most people started using daily.

How great is this stuff? Could we even live as we live today without soap? Would we even want to? Think if everyone smelled like the smelly kid from 5th grade. How about those gym lockers in high school? Maybe you wouldn't care if your date was like that fat sweaty guy at Walmart who's wearing the same gym pants for the 3rd day in a row. ( Wait, that's me! This could explain the mysteries of my love life) Maybe. Face it, soap is the bomb with the added bonus of keeping us healthy as well as smelling good. That's right, when it was invented nobody knew that smearing yourself with rendered animal fat that had been exposed to an alkaline solution would keep  disease away as well as the stink but hey, bonus!

Which is why I go to Walmart dateless.

Of coarse that brings us to an even bigger prize: clean tap water. No, not the bottled stuff almost all of which has come from...wait for it... a tap. Yeah it gets filtered by the corporate giant that is happy paying pennies a hundred gallons ( subsidized by the government) for something it can sell to you for $1+ per pint thereby legally stealing your money, but if you live in most parts of the US or Canada the tap stuff is just as good if not better. (your public water supply is checked for heavy metals your bottled water is not) (because corporations don't pay to do things the government does for them for free). And can you do this with bottled water?...

You can drink it, bath in it, play in it, flush with it...Tap water WooHoo!

So with less money than the pope spends on funny hates you get a years worth of wet and clean with the added surprise bonus of fewer colds and less gangrene. Pretty sweet deal, Huh? ...and we aren't even talking lush sinful flavor yet. That's because we're really getting into the luxury realm now. My next favorite score could run you a brutal $75 a year if you are a real addict. Even more if you fry with it but then you can subtract the cost of vegetable oil and your house will smell better than your naughty bits after an encounter with soap and water.

Plus you can totally believe it's not butter. 

Butter, Mmmm butter! It's a party in your mouth. Salt gives everything a chance to be good. Butter, Mmmm butter! gives everything a chance to be great. Invented in cave people times for God only knows what reason (cave people did not have toast) butter, Mmmm butter! was only a way to get a few more days out of milk for most of its' existence. Milk lasts what? a day without refrigeration? In cave days stretching that to a week when no other food was on the horizon was survival. Well the survival of your ancestors and the evolutionary need to enjoy getting fat kept butter around long enough for me to deem it the one possible proof that there is a benevolent God. Plus in a pinch it makes a wonderful marital aid.

Once you're all buttered up, and you think you are in a private place, and you let a wee bit of whiskey loosen you up, and the happy gene kicks in, isn't a bit of music just the thing? Now I know you can spend big on tunes, the current Stones tour starts it's tickets in the thousands of dollars, but for personal consumption isn't that lame wheezing you do in the shower some of the best s%^t ever? At least for your personal consumption? Why we sound good to ourselves when we don't sound good to anyone else is a mystery but isn't it a cool gift from the powers that be?

Suck it rock stars, I'm listening to me.

I need no more proof than any season of American Idol ever. We just love, love, love the sound of air blasting through our own pie-holes. And not just because it's free, but because it feels good. In fact all bodily functions feel pretty good when you... Time to stop the blog. The Old Bushmills is taking me down a path where no family blog should go. So write tonight, edit tomorrow. Maybe blog again if I can convince myself it is worth doing. You could send me salt, butter, TP, soap and tap water if you are feeling generous, or a song would be nice.

Too Late Smart

I often lead off this blog with some clever quote punched with colorful framing images from the Internet . Because... colorful? I often lead off this blog with a quick hit concerning the politics of the day. Because...current? I often end this blog with a recipe which I have somehow forcibly joined to my political point. Because... Mmmm food? I often scatter this blog with amusing pictures that I have skimmed from the Internet. Because... yeah theft? I often write this blog so I can feel heard. Because... I'm important? Well, clever quotes aren't truth, politics is where smart goes to die, theft is nothing to be proud of unless you are Robin Hood or an investment banker, and I'm just as important (i.e. not at all) as the other 7 billion of you taking up space on this earth. Food? Mmmm food... but you can get better recipes and cooking tips at other sites so you don't need me. Truth be told despite over 50 of you being regular readers this whole activities real value is keeping me out of bars and off of dating sites. No, don't listen to him, move along, move along... nothing to see here. Unless...

Wiener dogs should get more Internet love than cats. They just should.

...I start writing about things that I actually experience. For example I woke up recently realizing that I was too soon old. Isn't everyone? Do you think that there is anyone out there besides little kids breathlessly hoping to be older sooner? And too late smart? What about never smart? What if you speed right to old then never get smart? What if you are just some crinkled up old dope that can't even find his own butt in a dark closet? That's it! a blog about where my butt is... but I closed my eyes and still managed to find my butt, article ruined. So, of all the things that are breaking down as I age the damage doesn't yet include my body sense. What they do include is...

Eye booger, say something or let it slide?

...eye boogers. Suddenly I'm sitting around the house minding my own business when I realize that I have eye boogers. At least the hair growing out of my ears is free of slime, but then there is the nose hair... and eye boogers? God almighty do I gag the people around me? I mean it's bad enough when someone casually hands you a tissue because your nose is misbehaving but I don't think people even dare with eye boogers. You hand some poor old bastard like myself a tissue and I'm going for the nose even if I don't feel anything... then you'll have to redirect me to my eye?! Why does this happen? It's almost like after years off abuse my body has decided I need to be punished...

There they are! Some mornings finding them is like looking for a child lost in a crowd. Panic doesn't help but...

...why else has it moved my feet further away from hands? There was a time when my feet were at arms length. This came in really handy when I was doing that daily sox/shoe thing... which I still have to do even though my feet were moved further towards the floor. So there I am, in my bed room, eyes full of unnatural goo, deaf from ear hair wrestling with my MIA feet when I realize...

Yep, and it hurts every day.

... Oh my God! my butt is going rouge. "No, no, no I'll get to you after I put my socks on." Like your butt is going to listen to your voice once the direct line from your brain has been severed by age. My only option is to drop the socks and make a run for it... ah, made it...

"Oh come on!"

... worst of all if you are male is that a modern American bathroom is only equipped to work in one direction at a time. It's like Sophie's Choice except with sewage. And you are old now so nothing can actually be aimed with any effectiveness. Did I mention that all of this, except for they eye boogers, is happening during sever physical distress?

Three weeks ago I went to work feeling fine, nothing happened, and I came home with a knee that hurt so bad I was sure I needed a hospital. Did I go to the hospital? Of coarse not. First of all I am not getting old I'm just sore. It was my knee a few weeks ago next time it will be my shoulder or my hip. Second; nobody, not even doctors, sometimes especially doctors, believes you when you tell them you are in unbearable pain unless your leg is shot off and you gimp to their office on the stump. My job requires a lot of walking. If I make too much of a howl about how I can't walk the people that write my checks will stop doing so. The workman's comp people don't even know me and I know they will think I'm lying...How? Because almost everyone else thinks you are lying...

It's amazing how the medical professions beside manner changes when you are butting up against an insurance claim.

... 12 years ago I was run down by a car. If I wear shorts it is obvious that my right leg looks like meatloaf severely hampering my ability to mack on the ladies when I'm in my speedo. Woman do not like you to look like the elephant man no matter how many times they say it's what's inside that counts. What if the insides are oozing to the outsides? Every doctor I go to, and I have been to quite a few, says pretty much "Get over it". So while I schlepped around looking for relief from my imaginary pain I have powered through 12 years of walking miles and miles a day.12 years! See, I was wrong and the doctors and insurance people were right. The debilitating pain was a figment of my imagination.  So now there is a new pain that I expect them to believe in just because I'm old? I would be better off getting a new job with out all the walking, but I am old, where in office/non-walking skills I am behind the tech curve...

My life as a green ball, bummer.

... which is extra bad as you get old because you already need too much money to pay your bills and nobody wants to give you 60 grand a year when there are high school freshman that understand computers better than you do. I'm not one of those Luddite anti-tech meat heads either it's just that there is a whole generation entering the workforce that speaks tech. They just know how to use the stuff. Me? I have to buy all the "...For Dummies" books then hope I'm not mocked by a kindergarten class full of kids with blue-ray smart phone tablets. Getting old doesn't mean I can't become intuitive with modern devises, but even if I do I'm still a barefoot, creaky, pain-wracked oldster covered in pee, crap, and boogers. Not exactly the face of the company there.

So, what to do? What to do? Shut up, toughen up, and keep on trucking. What else is there? Not everything is broken. For example, I still don't need Viagra. Granted it tends to be a solo activity when you are covered in pee, crap, and boogers but hey it's something to build on...

Really God? Really?

The Fair

Fair point. For a country famous for wasting stuff we sure do like to trot out our old bullshit in a shiny new wrapper. For example we are currently having a government shut down. We had one before back in the 90's. Several in the 80's. It's politics as usual. This is not to be confused with the government default which will happen in a few weeks if we don't raise the debt ceiling. Mmmm! default. It also has nothing to do with the sequester, which congress passed on condition of raising the 2011 debt ceiling which cut last years budget and will continue to cut budgets by taking an ax to each of them when the pinheads in congress can't agree on a budget that doesn't raise the new debt ceiling. Wow, that was quite a mouthful, but doesn't it all sound vaguely familiar? Blah blah doom, blah blah screw them, blah blah.... blah. Just the same old stuff over and over again. Hell it's even in the bible.

It's Ecclesiastes, you have to believe Ecclesiastes. That's a bible top 10. and look! a fern!

Well none of this sat well with me. What do you mean it's not a concern? Just because it sounds like the same old bulls#@t doesn't mean it is the same of bulls@#t....

This doesn't prove anything...

... but even if it is the same old bulls#@t that doesn't mean it isn't harmful. Isn't it possible that the ruling class in this country wants us to think everything is the same old thing so we all; left, right, and me; think 1) that whatever is going on confirms our deeply held beliefs 2) the only side that is right is our side. In this way continues the status quo with profit and political safety trumping actual solutions. I had to defeat this paradigm at all costs so for you I took the ultimate risk...

... I went with a friend to the Topsfield Fair. Oldest state fair in the country. Yes, I do things so you won't have to. I haven't been to the fair in over 20 years, and I loved it as a kid...

Cider donuts hot out of the grease! Yeah baby!

... after all what's not to love. Giant pumpkins, fair food, crafts, prize winning farm products, cute animals, fair food, a colorful carnival midway, manly demonstrations of work skills, ladyly( I know this is not a word) demonstrations of domestic skills, fair food... it is all things America enhanced with deep fat frying...

Like donuts, only worse for you. Mmmm worse!

... but where do they get the Twinkies now that the unions have selfishly destroyed the Hostess Baking Company? I'm guessing the Gov'ment has space people in Roswell New Mexico churning them out ( talk about illegals) in order to keep real Americans at their proper weight. In any event I enlisted a friend and trekked off to Topsfield MA to see if the more things change the more they stay the same.

$15! Per person. Just to get in. Throw in another $5 for the car and we were already down $35 before we even got close enough to get a whiff of deep fried anything. They didn't even hand you a guide to the fair. The Lowell Folk Fest was free and they were handing out colorful schedules enhanced with a map of downtown Lowell, but that was a bunch of crunchy granola hippy pukes grooving on polka music and sea shanties. I had hoped that my admission money would have included a cup of powder sugar covered deep fried Crisco but I would have to weight (irony intended) for the goodness to start until I was inside. After all the whole thing was about American farm traditions...

Yep, heading out to the north 40 just like in colonial days.

WTF? How do you milk that thing? More importantly why would you strap little kids to its' back? You could go to you tube and type in "rampaging elephant" but I already did it for you. Domesticated American farm animal or highly intelligent, often angry and exploited killing machine? I report you decide. Still I seem to vaguely remember non farm type animals at the fair during my youthful visits and I don't remember the ticket prices so the old was still new for now.

Still if you have ever seen a video of the way elephants are trained and what the can do when they decide they don't like it you might have second thoughts, or third thoughts, about strapping your kid to one. Fortunately the great white shark petting tank was closed so we went to look at the actual farm animals. Now as an admitted meat eater I have to say it would be hypocritical of me to go all PETA on you right here, but a quick tour of the animal pens left me a little flummoxed...

Why there's almost enough room to turn around.

... I mean I don't want to be judgmental here but...

... living, eating, sleeping and pooping in a wire mesh box the size of toaster oven pretty much has to suck. At least the cow gets to be murdered so I can have some tasty hamburgers, but Bugs? What sets him free? Does anybody besides me even eat rabbit? Show of hands. I didn't think so. So a coat maybe? or a quilt? I know, I know, no judgements. So off to the produce barn and worlds biggest pumpkin.

Not the worlds biggest and technically not a pumpkin.

 Sadly it is actually a giant gourd so us rubes were being sold a bill of goods which come to think of it is a fairly ongoing common and old school theme. For the scientifically obsessed there were a couple of big arsed real pumpkins to look at. Both of them had been lying around past their expiration point. In fact the whole place had the fetid smell of a compost heap. Because that's what happens when you pick a vegetable, pin a ribbon on it, and then leave it out for a week with no refrigeration...

...because wasting food in the name of prizes is always OK

... I guess onions and potatoes are OK but tomatoes? Broccoli? Cilantro? I'm no farmer but I'm pretty sure the latter 2 shouldn't be brown and the tomato shouldn't ooze and smell like my armpit. Here's a suggestion, after awarding the ribbons couldn't they just go to the supermarket and replace the veggies every day with fresh? I would be too dumb to know the difference and you could give the day old ones to a soup kitchen or homeless shelter. Or maybe put a number on the back of that $15 admission ticket and have a lucky winner get to take the veggies home with them at the end of the day. I myself would rather have the Crisco and powdered sugar, but who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth. Wasting food? Gratuitously? Check and check still the same old crap.

Of coarse there was the midway...

Ooo...sparkly!

...and while it is possible that the rides are overpriced compared to the good old days I have no point of reference to make that claim. One thing that hasn't changed is the midway games with their weighted bottles, narrow slightly tilted basketball hoops, and everybody wins a prize games where the prize would have been cheaper if you just went to the dollar store and bought it for yourself. Then I saw the holy grail, something completely new and different... the Fair trade pavilion, Wo Hoo!

There are new things under the sun. We aren't in an endless cycle of repainting the same barn. Pleased that a small smattering of awareness for small time 3rd world farmers crushed by unfair government subsidies to first world conglomerates like Conagra and Monsanto I strode up to the door of that brie smelling, eastern elite, guilt inducing barn and marched inside to...

 ...That was the first booth I came to. There was swifters, there was replacement windows, there was car detailing... I threw up a little... there was insurance and window treatments for your replacement windows and big screen TVs and a place to lay your soul when it dies. It wasn't about "fair trade" it was about Fair( Topsfield Fair) trade. Why anyone would buy replacement windows at a state fair I'll never know, but I guess you had to buy something at the fair since you couldn't buy homemade jam, locally sourced honey, or a bag of vegetables. This was the big change? The new thing that was going to replay the old with a shiny coat of consumer paint? I wanted to cry. I always loved the fair...

... but that was it! I loved the fair when I was too young or too uninformed to think that animals might not like spending the day in a tiny box or that the rides were overprice. I wasn't smart enough to know that the arcade games were rigged or that government farm practices in America contribute to hunger in Africa and Asia. The Fair was obviously just the same

old thing with hot tubs replacing the homemade jam. Fine. I was the new thing. Me and everyone else that struggles with loving the things we used to love before we knew better.

It doesn't have to be more of the same old thing. And we can still have fried dough... Mmmm! Fried dough!

Yeah!

It's easy as long as you ignore the mess.

1. Buy some pizza dough at the supermarket.
2. Add enough oil to a cast iron skillet to come 1/3 up the side.
3. Divide the dough into 4ths per 1 pound package of dough.
4. Flour your hands and press out each piece into a rough circle 1/4 inch thick.
5. When the oil starts to shimmer toss in a small dough ball, if it sizzles you're ready to rock.( you could use a thermometer, don't touch the bottom of the pan, to see when it reaches 350 degrees.)
6. Make sure your stove fan is running on high.
7. Lay in a dough circle.
8. 2 minute, flip with tongs.
9. Place newspaper or paper towels on your counter, cover with a wire cooling rack. You should probably do this before you start not as step #9.
10. Place the golden circle on the rack, douse with cinnamon sugar and eat with a Woodchuck hard cider. Coffee or milk if you are a sissy.
11. If you don't want to eat as you go you can hold them in a 200 degree oven until you have cooked  all dough circle. Just wait on the sugar until you take them out of the oven for consumption.
12. Butter them first, Mmmm butter, if you want them to be extra bad for you.