the world is going to hell

November 15, 2018, the world is going to hell.  It was only a few months ago that I would wake around five, and as I crossed from the bathroom to the kitchen I would glance at the door where the light peeking in underneath it would be broken by the heft of my papers, freshly delivered, which would be waiting patiently for my perusal.  I would fix my coffee and my yogurt, take them, along with the papers, to the computer, where a posting (perhaps two) of some goodly length would be awaiting my opportunity to set things straight.  I was ready to start my day.  Life was good.

Newspapers, as we know, are not what they once were, a mere shadow of themselves, particularly national and world news is sketchy, which is a pity, but I always liked the features, the columns and best of all, tucked like a creamy nougat center into the middle of the Sun-Times, the comics.  Three full pages of them, half of which were decent.

Maybe a month ago there was an article tucked in a corner of maybe the third page about changes to be made in the Sun-Times, and one of those changes was that they were cutting the comics down to one page, and a few others spread out through the classifieds, a shrunken, spattered, less creamy, nougat center. 

And the papers no longer arrive at five.  My regular steady paperwoman, who I always gave forty bucks (forty bucks!) every Christmas, so appreciative was I of the steady early arrival of the paper, essential to me for starting my day, has apparently found the grind too grinding and taken on a relief worker who has not the same devotion to punctuality, and on her days who knows when the paper will arrive.  Yesterday we crossed paths as I was accompanying Sweetie on her dawn patrol in the hallway at seven AM.  (Seven AM!).  I spoke sharply to her about the hour, but she, like so many of her frivolous generation was just like la de da, so it goes. 

We boomers know that our parents were The Greatest Generation because they whipped the Krauts, and I like to think of us as The Pretty Good Generation because even though we failed to whip the Viet Cong, we did keep them from landing on our California beaches.  At least I could expect, in the midst of my shattered morning routine a post of some length (though often misguided) from the freehold of Beaglesonia. 

But what is this today?  A single paragraph, and a short one at that with a link to an article about something that I read about in the (shrunken) paper of late yesterday morn? 

I would think he would be glad that it was landing in California, even further from him and that it was easily turned away by the local border patrol without even those thousands of troops sitting in barracks tossing cards into hats in Texas, but I reckon he is still fearing illegal immigrants under his bed.  Something I fear not at all, because right here in The Kingdom of Uncle Ken, the world is going to hell.