I swear I'm going to stay away from politics. I swear, I swear, I swear. But. . . you know. . . . I guess I'm going to need to identify as "White" (link). It's gotten pretty weird out there in a 1930's Germany kind of way. I'm guessing a lot of people are celebrating "The Gulf of America" today. Snoop, Dogg for instance. WTF? We who know know Trump is criminally insane. We have no doubt at all. Only fear. I should duck and cover as I was taught to do in Olden Times, but I watched too many old westerns when I was growing up and know it is not honorable to take the coward's way out.
So. . . no politics, but "Whoa, Nellie!" This boy. . . WTF?!?!? You tell me he wasn't born in Moloch's Palace or Dracula's Castle. I looked him up.
The novels recount the adventures of the German boy Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian Von Troomp, who goes by "Baron Trump", as he discovers weird underground civilizations, offends the natives, flees from his entanglements with local women, and repeats this pattern until arriving back home at Castle Trump.
I KNEW IT!
Slouching toward Bethlehem is the Beast with Two Backs!
If you don't get the joke, that's on you.
"Let it go, buddy. . . let it go."
O.K. It is probably useless to resist anyway. I had lunch with an old friend from the factory yesterday who moved onward and upward but was in town to escape the cold for a few days. She is a political scientist turned administrator of a factory in Virginia, a millennial liberal who has a bit more sense about things than many of our Woke crowd. We ate at a favorite restaurant and avoided the coronation. But we talked a bit about it. Mainly about the hand wringing of our friends who want to move out of the country because they can't go to drag shows any more. My friend and I both giggled about that.
"Where do they think they are going to go?"
We were in agreement about that.
"You know why Trump won," I sort of asked/said.
"Yea."
"It was our snowflake friends."
"I know. People are sick of the whining and stomping of the feet."
Then we talked about what was going to happen now. We agreed that within two years people were going to be sick of Trump and the dems would take both the House and the Senate. We were in agreement, but there was doubt in our four eyes. Then we talked about how the dems need to change.
"I really like AOC," she said. I kind of rolled my eyes.
"What? You don't like her?"
"She's smart and well spoken and is usually well prepared with data. She is good at taking down republican nonsense on the floor. But some of her issues are just the same stuff that got Trump elected."
"She needs to focus on economics," my friend said.
"Yea, but she doesn't. She and Pelosi don't get along because Pelosi told her years ago that she needed to tone it down or Trump would be the next president. You see how that worked out."
The conversation turned to travel and friends.
I'm reading Patti Smith's award winning memoir, "Just Kids," right now. People raved about it. Much of it is a little repetitive, and I'm kind of sick of the whole Mappelthorpe finding his sexual and artistic identity thing. I was hoping to get more of the Sam Shepard affair, but that is given a kind of short shrift treatment. I much prefer Shepard to Mappelthorpe. I think Smith does a pretty sympathetic job of saying Mappelthorpe was a whore in both life and art for nearly 300 pages, but again. . . it gets tired, I think. What surprises me most about the novel is how she comes off as a normal girl in a twisted world. Kind of surprising, but so many things are. She certainly had quite the life circulating in the inner circles, but the book is leaving me with a greasy feeling. Too much weirdness and too many drugs. I like it for a moment, then I want to go back to Leave It to Beaverville.
I walk the line.
Yesterday, I met my friend at the record store before lunch. I said that I went there to buy books. When we got to the book section, she asked me to pick out something for her to read. Now picking out a book for someone is difficult. I know she wouldn't like most of what I read and so I tried to divine something without heaviness by running my hands over the stacks like a shaman. I landed on "Bad Monkey" by Carl Hiaasen. I haven't read it, but I saw the show, and Hiassen is just a hoot, so I figured she would enjoy it.
I can roll that way. And I need to keep it in mind. People can only stand "heavy" so long, and that time is getting briefer and briefer. Winky emoji.
The sun will be up soon. Maybe. It is another cold and rainy day here in the Sunny South.
And of a sudden, I think of the last paragraph from James Joyce's great work, "The Dubliners," from the last story in the collection, "The Dead" (link).
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
For Joyce, Dublin was a labyrinth from which few could escape. It seems a general worldwide condition now.
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