Complex Characters

Val's Story is interesting.  The protagonist is a little more complex than the kind of people traditionally associated with drug use.  I suppose drug users in real life are like that as well, the 60s have been over for a long time you know.  I remember once telling my daughter about the Libertarian Party and postulating that the reason they are not more popular is that they advocate more freedom for everybody across the board.  In my experience, most people want more freedom for themselves and their friends while they want more control over everybody else.  For instance, the gun owners want the right to bear arms and the pot smokers want the right to smoke pot, but the gun owners don't support the right to smoke pot and the pot smokers don't support the right to bear arms.  My daughter disagreed, reporting that she knew lots of people who both own guns and smoke pot.  I had never heard of that before, but I suppose there's lots of things I have never heard of before.

Speaking of complex characters, how about that Michael Bloomberg?  He's one of the richest businessmen in the world, and he's running as a Democrat!  Well, I just looked him up on Wiki and found out that he has been a Democrat most of his life, although he became a Republican while he was the Mayor of New York City for some reason.  His positions on most issues seem to be compatible with the liberal agenda, although he considers himself to be a fiscal conservative.  Then again, most Republicans don't seem to be fiscally conservative anymore, so maybe the Democrats could assume that position by default.  It wouldn't be the first time that political parties have reversed themselves like that.

Val's Story

Since there is nothing over the transom this morning, I'm going to put in a short short story I wrote a few years ago.

So she liked to smoke dope, was that a crime?  Apparently, since it got her kicked out of her rocky mountain high to this patch on the banks of the muddy Missouri.  So it goes, so it goes, she was not the sort of girl who got all weepy about things that were under the bridge, she would make her way, just fine.

Her way right now was to Speedy's, she had just scored a dollop of dope from an old pal and now she needed just the right flavor of Doritos to enhance the experience.  She was thinking cool ranch, but when she approached the array, the jalapeno cheddar caught her eye, that cool ranch was kind of bland and she needed something to put a little rocket into her pocket.

Everything had been so drab since her expulsion from the garden of legal dope.  Her old friends were fine but you know how it is when you appear on the doorstep with empty pockets, things are a little cool at the ranch.  She needed something to lift her spirits, to put a little strut in her step, so jalapeno cheddar it was.

They sell produce at Speedy's, but it's mostly just crap, all wilted and shrunken and just plain pathetic, and she couldn't believe that that sap was picking out a head of yellowing lettuce.

She had to step in.  "You can't do that." she told him grasping his wrist gently.

"I was just going to, to make a salad, for the kids, you know something healthy," his voice trailed off as his look went down, She was glad she was wearing her shorty shorts.

"Not with that you aren't," she told him, maybe a little forcefully, but it was okay, she knew she could get away with it.  She could easily have hit him up for a fiver, a tenner, maybe even an Andrew Jackson.

But that wasn't the mood she was in.  She was frankly not all that eager to go back to her friend's place.  She would have to share the dope, and the Doritos. 

So she steered him to Mother Nature's, walked down the aisles with him filling his grocery cart with good healthy food.  He had some sad story about his ex-wife, Jenny, who maybe she was a bitch, or maybe it was his fault for not being sensitive enough.  Either way she didn't care.  Hey we all have problems, you didn't hear her going on about Bear, that bastard.  She was just killing time before having to share her dope and Doritos.

But when she saw his face, so downcast, so helpless, even worse than when he was telling the sad Jenny-O story, as he looked at the big sack of groceries that he would never be able to cook.  She was like Fine, Fine, I'll cook you up a meal.

Arms crossed across her chest, she looked at him exasperated, but what was this, a shy little spark of gratitude in his humble brown eyes?  It touched her a little, she was surprised, but then you never know.  What if he got a decent haircut?

And she wasn't crazy about moppets and there were two of them, one of each sex, and Gramps, a dirty old man if she ever saw one.

But she did like to cook and she wasn't half bad at it, the frying pan was sizzling and a couple pots were boiling, and those moppets and Gramps had eyes like in those paintings, and here comes the sap out of the bathroom, and oh my goodness, did he comb his hair?

And you know she just felt so great, so fucking great, bringing the food to the table and the sap and Gramps and the moppets with napkins tucked into the fronts of their shirts, like a bunch of baby birds.  Well a gal has feelings you know.

But what about desert?  She remembered her little dollop of dope, as yet untouched.  Brownies sounded like a great idea.

Uncle Ken's holidays

In my youth it it was de rigor to get drunk as hell on New Year's Eve.  Well the less said about that the better.  Anymore I just take myself somewhere out to dinner around seven, maybe do a bar or two, no more than a couple drinks at each one.  I have friends on the 53rd floor and if they have a party, just a few old folks sitting around flapping their jaws, I'll go there.  The year before last at eleven I didn't want to wait another hour and went to bed then, probably the only time in my life that that has happened, but last year I stayed up for the beautiful fireworks.

I kind of like groundhog day, just for its silliness and it's kind of like that rundown gas station in death valley, nothing for a hundred miles before it, and nothing for a hundred miles afterwards. 

Memorial Day I used to visit a friend in St Louis, and then we would drive to the middle of Missouri to visit some other friends where the guy is a home brewer and we just sat at this little round table in the middle of their huge garden and, as a friend used to say, eat and drink our asses off.  We did that for maybe thirty years and last year the guy in St Louis suddenly died.  Shit,  I may take a long Amtrak out there this spring.  We'll see.

Easter is my annual Eggstravaganza in the building.  I hard boil ten dozen eggs and buy a bunch of dye stuff and candy (the building reimburses me) and people just come by and dye eggs and eat candy.  I love little kids.  I didn't realize that until I subbed my first Kindergarten class.  K's and 1's, the natural aristocracy of any elementary school.  Not many kids in the building but people bring their grandkids or whatever, lots of kids.

July 4th I always go down to Champaign to see my old beer drinking buddies.  The party gets smaller every year.

Labor Day I used to also go to the middle of Missouri, don't know what I'll do this year.

Halloween is my annual Punkin Palooza.  I make a deal with one of the guys at the farmer's market for forty punkins.  Early in the morning I go out to where they are setting up and help guide the truck through the labyrinth beneath the street level of the building to the loading dock, and then me and one or two of my confederates haul them up to the twentieth floor where the party is held.  Again little kids, carving, candy, costumes a few beers towards the end.  The big adventure however is bringing in the pumpkins, it's a daring mission in the predawn hours and a feeling or real accomplishment to see those forty punkins lined up on the wall of the twentieth floor.

The best Thanksgivings were down in Champaign when all my friends were living in crumby apartments and the bars would be closed so we put together some ramshackle meal and a lot of beer and it was a good time,.

I think it's five, maybe six, years ago when I had decided not to bother trimming my beard anymore, and then when my sister's husband dropped me off in front of my building there was a Santa hat lying on State Street.  I put it on and with my full white beard when I looked at my reflection in a storefront I was the real deal.  So I wear the hat from Thanksgiving (never before!) to a day or two after Christmas.  Kids smile, people call out Hey Santa, sometimes they take photos with me.  I carry around a pocketful of red and green Hershey's kisses to hand out.  It's the most wonderful time of the year.

One of the first things I learned when I got my fat state job was that I would be getting Columbus Day off, and after that Casimer Pulaski Day, and both Presidents, and MLK.  Oh it was wonderful.  Anymore all those decidedly lower level holidays are just days when there is no mail.

Holidays

Our belated Thanksgiving went well.  We had sunshine all the way to Charlevoix but, of course, it was dark on the way back.  With the clear sky and little wind, the temp was down to 14 by the time we got home, and it bottomed out at 6 degrees by morning.  It was back up in the 30s by the time I started snow plowing today, but no more sunshine.  My grand daughter and her people had braved the storm and showed up on Sunday, so we ate leftovers. Nothing wrong with that.

I think that Thanksgiving is a fine holiday.  What's not to like?  I like Christmas too, once it actually gets here, it's all the hoopla that leads up to it that I find tiresome.  The way I deal with it is that I refuse to think about Christmas until after Thanksgiving.  We don't do anything for New Years, but that doesn't mean we hate it, it's just that we don't do anything about a lot of things anymore.  Then there's Ground Hog Day.  I don't care about the silly groundhog, I just like the idea that winter is about half over on that day.  Coincidently, Groundhog Day is also the anniversary of our wedding.  We try to go someplace nice for dinner, but sometimes the weather is bad or one of us is sick or something. If that happens, we make up for it around Valentine's Day, but not on the day itself because all the nice restaurants are too crowded then.  Easter is okay, but it's on a different day every year.  It's supposed to be about spring, but often our weather is anything but spring like then.  Mother's Day is cool, usually too cool to put that potted plant you bought for the occasion in the ground.  It will likely be Father's Day before you can do that with confidence.  Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Labor Day are good days to stay home because there's too much traffic on the roads.  Halloween is my least favorite holiday ever since the age of 11, which was when I first saw Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible".

We don't watch a lot of TV, but we do check out the Science Channel occasionally.  I like "How it's Made" because it's about real stuff on Planet Earth, which is where I spend most of my time.

the end is near

On the technology front I have gone back to Adblock.  It turns out that the ads on the pages that forbade me entrance due to my Adblock, and the ads I had been blocking before on the pages that allowed me on with my Adblock, took so long to load that I couldn't look up anything.

I guess the original sin (I am working this thing to death) there is when they discovered that there was no way they could physically charge people to listen to their radio programs.  I suppose the internet, back in the mists of its time could have found a way to make money without ads but that time has long past.  I suppose I could pay for some of those sites that offer an ad free viewing, but you know, when you get something for free, you really hate paying for it later.

Speaking of which I have been corresponding with a new friend lately who swears by Roku.  I have been content for years with Netflix and have even come to enjoy the little ritual of getting the DVD in the mail and dropping it off in a mailbox when I am done.  But Netflix is on to newer and more lucrative things and doesn't want to bother with this horse and buggy enterprise of its youth.  I get DVDs that skip and sometimes rinsing them off under the bathroom sink does not do the trick, and the wide variety of selections has shrunk, and I'm ready for new things.  I examined one of those Rokus at Target yesterday afternoon and it looked reasonable and I probably will go that way, but as long as I'm here at The Institute this morning I thought I'd inquire of Old Dog who knows some things about tricky ways on the internet what does he think of this device?


The Science Channel had a thing about seven planets circling a dwarf red sun last night.  A few of them were in the sweet zone where water is wet.  I don't know why the channel has to pad it's schedule with all that alien crap when the real thing is more interesting,  Anyway they are only a hundred light years away.  A hundred years ago I think radio was just beginning to succumb to commercials so those red dwarf planeteers should be able to pick up our first broadcasts from then .  Though I suppose since their planets are seven billion years old to our youthful four and a half, we should be picking up theirs.

I don't know what kind of technology it takes to pick up radio signals from that far away, but it seems to me, and I may well be wrong here, that we should be able to pick up something, something that we could tell is not the usual racket of the universe.

But we haven't heard anything, and I am thinking that you need civilization to be able to send out those things and that the same force that gets you to civilization is the thing that destroys you,. probably not to long after you discover radio, so friends, the time is near.

why we live in Nod all by our lonesomes

Nothing much over the transom this morning.  Thanksgiving, has there ever been a more useless holiday?  It's kind of like getting that big round orange in your Christmas stocking.  Oranges, who cares, you can get one out of the fridge whenever you want, why is it taking up valuable space in your stocking?   As a kid I supposed fresh citrus foot was a rare treat in the winter for my folks in the olden days, but in these modern times of television who cares?  Same with Thanksgiving, maybe in The Depression, that we heard about all the time, all the time, a full belly was hard to come by, but in these modern days of refrigerators and super markets we could do it anytime.

And it's right near Christmas which is so much bigger so it's not like it's filling any vacuum.  And that whole dinner with the table full of crockery and whatnot and passing it around crash bang, who needs it?  Not me.  I am happier eating a chili dog with cheese fries in some dump with a newspaper to read.


Mostly the Science channel shows crap, but maybe once every other week they have something cool, usually about those space probes.  I love the space probes, how much better a way to spend money than having some galumph trodding dead dust and trying to think of something soaring to say.  Last week they did two hours on the moons of Saturn.  How exotic, seas of methane, underground oceans, gravity waves tearing at cores and sending spumes of water vapor into skies crossed by Saturn's rings.  That's the real stuff man.

And you'd think that the planets would be boring, one colder than the next, some bigger than others, basically made of the same stuff because what else is there?  But not that way at all, and in the mix, lots of water and lots of organic chemicals.  And we used to think that planets were pretty rare, but now we know that almost every star usually has a few, so there has to be plenty of life out there.  Probably most of it is is just bacteria like occupied Earth for so long before well getting its act together and crawling out of the ocean and going from that stooped over guy to the guy in the business suit with the briefcase and the snappy fedora, and why haven't we met any of those fedora types from other planets?

Original sin of course.  The first was when the first protozoa became an animal by eating a plant, and the second would be when the first animal ate another animal, and the third would be when our dull but affable forefather decided he wanted to have a gargantuan brain so he decided to kill animals to fuel that desire.  The fourth would be when the first man killed another man.  Strangely enough this corresponds with Cain and Abel.  And that's how we were driven to the land of Nod, which was probably not as nice as it sounds.

Strangely enough Abel was probably a bigger sinner than Cain because he invented agriculture which led to property which led to gummint, and to technology and well progress, which I contend leads to wars and environmental damage and unsustainability, and that's why the bug-eyed guy in the fedora from the other planet has not dropped by to shake our hands.

Well a lot of holes in all this.  I'll try to fill in it tomorrow.

Thanksgiving Postponed Again

Today was supposed to be our belated Thanksgiving, but the near blizzard conditions caused us to reschedule it for tomorrow.  My daughter had the turkey in the oven when we called to cancel, and she hadn't heard from our grand daughter yet, so maybe there will be two Thanksgivings this year.  That's all I've got, will be back Tuesday night.