Boogie Woogie

 Myself, I had some coughing and a lot of sneezing about a week ago, and didn't think much about it, but then I came across this article: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/566706-the-signs-you-have-the-delta-variant-are  Not sure what to think now.

great wall 10

 Seems to me that it well could have been the boogie woogie flu?  How can you know unless you are tested and I don't believe they can test you after the fact?  Pink, why yes of course, the whole reason plants are green is because they absorb rather than reflect red light.  Makes you wonder why all grow lights aren't pink.  I remember that ricin was a lot more in the news when you were growing it, and I was worried for you about cops dropping in for some lawful reason and then asking, "What is that you're growing Lad?"

That rule to work thing sounds a lot like the blue flu.  Legally cops can't strike, so they call in sick a lot, and when they are on the clock they do their job in a minimal manner, just enough to not get legally fired.  I suspect the Canadians also are not legally allowed to strike.

And here is the ending of The Great Wall.  I would love to get your impressions after you have read it, and I will have a few words to say about it.

I was thinking my next story will be nonfiction along the lines of how I dodged the draft back in the day.  Have a pleasant weekend Gentlemen, and as the cop in Hill Street advised his charges, be careful out there.

I was going to drive her home first thing, like I had pantomimed to Vincent, but the police station was closer and maybe the first thing I should do was bail out Leon.  But when I got there they were going to need another half hour to finish booking him. 

I couldn’t leave her in the car while I sat in the police station waiting for the procedures.  I could have sat in the car with her, but it had been a long day and night and I sure could use a drink myself.  There was this crumby little bar across the street from the police station, and she was doing pretty good by then, so I took her in with me.

I settled her into a booth, got myself a beer, and when I came back Dawn asked, “Where’s mine?”

Startled, I started, “Dawn, I really don’t think you need…”

“Where’s my drink?” she cut me off.

Well what more harm could one more drink do?  “Glenlivet?” I asked.

“Sure, that will do.”

I’d left my cigarettes and lighter on the table and when I got back with her Glenlivet, she was smoking one. She kind of just blew the smoke out and coughed, but she kept right at it.

I sat the glass down in front of her, leaned over, and touched her shoulder, “Dawn, what’s happened to you?  Is it because of those little bottles?  Because you were thinking about your dad’s death?”

She looked up from her cigarette.  “That fucker,” she said, “I wish he was dead.”

I watched as she took a healthy sip, made a little face, set the glass down, took a puff, coughed.

“He’s not dead then?” It was all I could think to say.

“Fuck I don’t know.   He wasn’t the last time I saw him. Unfortunately.  I suppose you want to hear the story.”

“If you want to tell it.”

She stubbed out her cigarette, lit another one right away.  “Okay,” she said.  “Why not?  I was in the third grade when he ran off.  No warning, he just didn’t come home one night.  Mom said he took up with booze and hookers.”

I cringed a little thinking of Raven and Ruby.  They had seemed nice enough girls.

“He was drinking Glenlivet?” I asked, just to keep up my part of the conversation, just to keep things straight.

“I guess he did.  I guess he was drinking all the scotch in the glen, and all the gin in the mill.  Mom taught me that one.  I don’t know how he kept his job, but he did, not that that helped us, all the money went for the booze and the hookers, he never sent us a fucking dime.  For a little while, I was a little girl, I would miss him, miss him kind of taking care of me when something bad happened.”

“He’d say, ‘shrug it off?” I prompted.

And that made her laugh, “Shrug it off?  Maybe he said that.  He sure shrugged us off.  That fucker!  And then nine years, nine years later, on my seventeenth birthday, my aunt, his sister, though I didn’t put that together until too late, invited me to her house for dinner, and when I walked in there he was sitting at the table.  That fucker!”

She paused for a quick puff and a gulp.  “And he had this package, this gift-wrapped package, wrapped up professionally like the store will do if you ask them to, and it was my birthday present!  Nine years not a fucking dime and here’s a fucking birthday present.  I was shocked, too shocked to do or say anything so I just took the package, opened it up, and it was a make-up kit.  I never wore make-up.  And it wasn’t even a real make-up kit.  It was a toy make-up kit, like for little girls.  It was so stupid.  That fucker!  I broke it over his head, and then I kept beating him with the pieces of it, and he had his arm over his head, and underneath it he was trying to say something and I just kept beating him until all the pieces were broken too small.  And I haven’t seen him since then.  That fucker!”

The Heroine of The Great Wall finished her story. I looked at her in her red dress stained with soy sauce now and sticky from sweet and sour, sitting in a crumby bar, drinking whiskey, smoking cigarettes, saying ‘fuck.’

“What about the Peaceable Kingdom?” I asked her.

“The Peaceable Kingdom?”

“You know, the lion laying down with the lamb.”

She seemed to be giving it some thought.  She lit another cigarette and didn’t cough at all.  “They were just posing for the picture,” she said.  “As soon as the painter put in his last brush stroke the lion ate the lamb.”

She finished her Glenlivet, plunked the empty glass in front of me.  “What’s a gal got to do to get another drink around here?” she asked.

Coming back with her next drink I noticed that she had all the little Glenlivet bottles lined up along the edge of the table, and one by one she addressed them, “Shrug this off Fucker,” and flicked them to the floor.

As soon as I set her scotch on the table she grabbed it and took a big gulp.

I leaned over her to settle her down and she put her hands in the hair behind my neck and drew my face down to hers and gave me a big deep kiss full of scotch and smoke, and with her stained red dress and some low blues song on the jukebox of the crumby bar, it was like kissing the devil.

Work to Rule Strike

 Never heard of it?  I didn't either until I came across this story on my news app last night.

"In a work-to-rule strike, employees obey policies, procedures and laws that apply to their work and perform their jobs to "the letter of the law," the unions wrote. That conduct includes not answering questions from travelers about border laws or gathering duties and taxes, according to Reuters.

The unions said their conduct "may cause long and unavoidable delays at Canada's borders as workers carry out their jobs as they were trained to do."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/canadian-border-staff-to-begin-work-to-rule-strike-friday/ar-AAMX2EC?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

This is brilliant, they continue to draw their paychecks and can't be punished because they are just doing what they're supposed to do.  

Checking in...

Lot going on in the kennels of the Old Dog and didn't make it to the internet yesterday.  I was ailing and out for the count: sore throat, headache, body aches, coughing, sneezing, general weakness, and slowly rising temperature.  Everything but the Boogie-Woogie Flu, it seems.   And this morning?  Fine and dandy with a temperature of 98.3F, a little soreness in the back of the throat like when you eat a lot of crunchy food, but otherwise nothing that I've noticed.  No medications other than aspirin, lemonade (the real stuff!), gargling with salt water, and plenty of rest.  Go figure.

As mentioned previously, here's a pic of the castor bean plants I tried to get going.  The pink light is from the  grow-bulbs; I don't have any pix with natural light, sorry.

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 When the pandemic began my sister sewed me a couple masks, and I remember looking at them and wondering what use I could make of them in a couple weeks when this had all blown over.  And maybe a month ago I was looking over the masks I had accumulated over the last sixteen months and wondering if it was time to toss them out, but then things were getting a little iffy and I took to stuffing one in my pocket before I left, and maybe slipping on if I were going to be in a store for awhile, and yesterday afternoon there was an email to all residents and now I will have to mask up when I walk into the hallway and keep it on until I get outdoors and then be prepared to put it back on whenever I go inside a building.

Fuck the anti faxxers, fuck them for fucking with me, fuck their bogus claims to personal choice, fuck them all up the butt with a long and fat needle full of vax.

Know what I mean?

Annette had left the keys with the hostess, who wanting to get out right away, left them with me to close up, and as the place emptied I remembered, how could I have forgotten, Dawn.

I hadn’t seen her come down so I went up.  It was dark and empty, and I noticed that some of the tables still had dishes on them and when I looked over to where the little bar was there was Dawn slumped in a chair.  The empty bottle, lying on its side, was a fifth of Glenlivet.

I nudged her a little and she mumbled something and slumped further into the chair.  I looked downstairs and realized that everybody else was gone.  I gave her another little nudge and now she kind of sighed and slipped right off the chair onto the floor.

Well this was just some kind of thing.  It must have been all that talk about her father and his death, and then those little bottles of Glenlivet like toy soldiers.  It must’ve just happened.  She had said she never drank. 

Anyway I had to lock up and I couldn’t leave her there on the floor. I knelt down and put one arm behind her shoulders and one arm under her knees and stood up.  She felt good in my arms, warm and soft and breathing contentedly.  I could see a reflection of myself holding her in one of the mirrors along the wall and I looked quite heroic, like an Aztec hero carrying the princess from the Temple of Evil. 

I got her to the stairs and down them, but once I got her to the first floor I realized that that was as far as I was going to be able to carry her.  I set her down in a chair.  She was a little more responsive now, her eyes opened and she looked confused.

And then I heard someone coming up the stairs from the kitchen.  It was Vincent walking around in the dark empty restaurant and looking around for anybody who spoke English that still might be around, so that he was glad to see me.  I guess Leon had called Vincent from the cop shop and taught him his first English words, “Jail,” and “Bail,” which Vincent repeated to me handing me the keys to Leon’s Buick, to drive down to the station, and the roll of bills that would be the bail bond. 

When he saw Dawn who I’d deposited awkwardly in the chair at the base of the stairs, his smile evaporated and we were no longer the Aztec hero and the princess fleeing the evil temple.  We were the lion and the lamb, and we weren’t in the peaceable kingdom anymore.

It wasn’t like that of course, but how to explain?  I didn’t have to, but I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.  I did an elaborate pantomime of putting her in the car, driving her to her house, taking her to her door, putting her inside and then closing the door and walking away, closing the door and walking away, closing the door and walking away.  And he just looked at me in exactly the same way.

So then I did another pantomime, this time I included him in it.  In this one he helped me put her in the car and I made a point of sitting him between the two of us for the drive to her house.  Now he smiled, now he nodded.

As it turned out the cold air revived her, and she didn’t need much help at all.  And with her recovery and my sincere assurances, Vincent must have felt better about the whole thing, so that when I motioned for him to get into the car, he looked about at the dark wilderness outside, shook my hand, and went back into the restaurant.

a couple things we oughta do

I am wrong again.  I was thinking of the Arizona legislature when I linked Michigan's antimasking movement with the election fraud thing.  In fact here is a an article that puts the Michigan republicans in a pretty good light, except for that voter suppression thing which I am not in a mood to bang the drum for today.    

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/michigan-republicans-eviscerate-trump-voter-fraud-claims-scathing-report-n1272116

You know I sit up here in my tower and I watch my CNN and listen to my NPR, and I read my two local papers, and I get a Washington Post feed on my tablet, and I have my two political sites which I look in on several times a day, and I think I am oh so well informed, and I think here I am with all this knowledge and my fine analytic brain, the better to steer the ship of state and yet my vote is cancelled out by some nimrod who doesn't know how many supreme court judges there are or who his own senator is.

Or how about this?  My vote is also cancelled out by another nimrod who spends a lot of time with his own political sources and is convinced that the democratic party is the party of pedophilia.  From his point of view he is also oh so informed, and maybe even moreso than me because he possesses this secret knowledge of which I am unaware, though I do expect that he also doesn't know how many supremes there are or who his senator is.

 But what he thinks is an obvious lie and since a lie is the opposite of the truth, shouldn't his vote count negatively, so that his vote goes to the candidate that he didn't vote for?  

In fact wouldn't it be a great idea to program the voting machine to sense the electromagnetic waves of somebody who believes in conspiracy theories and then automatically changes their vote to the other candidate?  

Oh wait, nevermind.  

I've got my Ten Cat show on October 2, and my annual (except for last year) Punkin Palooza coming up in a couple months and I fear now that they will both be cancelled out by the delta.  I am looking for some rosy news, but all I have so far is that the London delta rate has begun to mysterious drop and maybe the US will also, and there seems to be an uptick in vaxxes lately, not all that much, but maybe it will grow.

I think a lot of the resistance to vaxxing is kind of a tribe thing.  People have a tendency to think and act as their friends and neighbors do, and normally. everything else being equal, that works out pretty well.  And so maybe once a few of their friends get the vax, and are as fit as a fiddle while their other neighbor who didn't get it has been intubated, well maybe they will change their mind.

Masking is a good thing to do, but it is nowhere near as good as vaxxing, and a lot of people just don't want to be seen in masks, but nobody can see if you have a vax.  You know you see these motley crews of anti vaxxers here and there with their Q and Trump signs, I think we should counter them with pro vax demonstrations demanding things like mandatory vaxxing.  Yeah that's what we oughta do.

Told You So

Okay, it's not as bad as I predicted, at least not yet, largely because Biden has been continuing a policy, started by Trump, that uses COVID as an excuse to turn back most illegal border crossers.  I don't know how long he can keep this up, but it's better than nothing.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/u-s-to-continue-migrant-expulsion-policy-indefinitely/ar-AAMRlBY?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

 "Would be nice if your state legislature would also urge people to act responsibly instead of spending so much time and money disputing the election."

I don't remember hearing anything about the Michigan legislature disputing the election.  Last I heard, there was some guy going around from county to county trying to persuade the locals to conduct a "forensic audit" like they are doing in Maricopa County, Arizona.  Our county sent a letter about it to our Secretary of State or somebody, but I haven't heard if anything came of it.  I still don't know why the Trumpists would want to audit Cheboygan County since Trump carried the county by a substantial margin.  There was a lawsuit filed in nearby Antrim County, which I believe Trump also carried.  I seem to remember reading that one failed, but I suppose it will be appealed. 

The dispute between our legislature and our governor has been about COVID restrictions.  They pretty much fought each other to a standstill, but the pandemic was generally believed to be winding down by then anyway.  With the current surge, Queen Gretchen has taken to issuing recommendations instead of edicts.  At least 30 counties have been designated areas of high transmission and hence subject to these recommendations, but Cheboygan County is not one of them.  We have been averaging one new case a day for the last couple weeks, but none of them have been the Delta variant.