Rose died for awhile.

I just found out from one of the older residents that the limestone that the old Montgomery County court house, downtown, is built of came from the quarry under ‘my’ lake back in the 1800’s.

Rose is in the hospital and everybody has a story.  I’m confining my information to what I know is true.  She lives around the corner from me in 206 and borrowed a postage stamp from me a couple weeks ago.

She has been depressed since her sister died in the spring.  She recently was diagnosed with some kind of cancer and won’t take her medicine because it makes her sick.  She wants to die. She has had some less lucid moments in the past week where she believes that she and her family were going to be burned at the stake on December 30^th.  She has also taken to strolling behind her walker in the snow, in the median of Wilmington Avenue which is a large arterial thoroughfare.

Yesterday at 5.30 pm Rose jumped into the path of a moving car around the corner on Patterson Road and was killed.  She was clinically dead when the medics arrived.  They brought her back in some fashion after she was loaded and she’s now in Miami Valley Hospital with three serious fractures of something or other, head trauma, two severe concussions and extensive everything else..  When she is conscious she vows that she will do it right the next time.  She likely will.

The woman driving the car, who was not cited, has been left with nights of terrifying dreams and some kind of early meltdown from all this.  So would I.  Rose can have visitors if we lie about being family and then only for 5 minutes at a time.  She is 72 years old and a tall girl.

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and I am going to try to pry a trashy 20-year-old free for an evening of fudge and hors d’ oeuvres with the old ladies and gentlemen here.  Maybe the music will drown out the shriek of brakes.  Ta!

Smell That ??

It’s a couple days after Christmas and they tell me it’s going to warm up for New Years.  These are the same weather people who told me that Christmas was coming in on the heels of a gigantic winter storm.  New York was fooled right?  We will see. 

There are prints of human shoes on the lake ice, walking and skidding.  I think that’s ok if you trust the ice over 80 feet of water.  That’s an old quarry pit down there.  If  somebody dives in, I will have a front row seat to watch Emergency Services roar in and haul them out.  I will take pictures, my right knee limits my ability to rescue people these days.

I watched the nightly news this evening while I was eating supper.  I only watch it for something to do while I’m scarfing down the dish of the day.  It’s on a tray on my lap and I can’t really do a good book and eat at the same time.  But I think I am going to get a music stand to put the book on anyway.  The commercial news features lots of video and talking heads which are supremely useless to me because I can still remember how to make up my own mind about things.  The PBS news stations seem to grind down a 10-year rut of apologizing for Islamic people and their culture and religion.  I probably could get more intelligent programming watching The Simpsons. 

Payday is soon and I will be stocking up on some Estleman books and some Arnaldur Indridasson – fine bloody murder items and excellent reading for a good night’s sleep.  Also a bottle of Tabac by Maurer and Wirtz of Germany because the current bottle is just fumes, and fumes don’t create pheremones, don’t you know.  Prada would be better but that will have to wait until I win the lottery.  And some of the girls I run around with now and then still respond to diesel oil so there.  They are cheap dates too and live in trailers.  Ta!

Competition

On Monday mornings a truck from the Kroger Company delivers several trays of day-old specialty breads, rolls, English muffins and a large box of donuts and pastries to this place where I live.  The driver puts all this on the big table in the library and leaves.  And the fighting spirits from eleven floors of humanity gouge their way to their fair share.  There is one woman from the seventh floor who looks like a butchy prison guard and wears her muscular fatness behind a wide black leather belt.  We call her The Prison Guard.  And there is a guy who is the head of the Lakewoods Senior Citizens Club who is bipolar and doesn’t like to take his medicine on donut days.. 

There are several other fighting spirits and they all go for the donut box at once without a word, elbowing each other in the ribs and the nose and left breasts.  If you look at the remains of the donut box after they’re gone you see fragments of icing and broken corners of Long Johns and you know that forty people at once have been digging for their favorite sweeties.  One morning at 7 a.m. when I was going out, I met a grossly obese woman from Texas sagging over the sides of her electric go cart and asked her if she were waiting that early for the donut delivery.  “Yes,” she said, “I sure as hell don’t want any of those other bitches getting my donuts.”

Fortunately my sole interest is specialty breads which are ignored and mostly untouched and  I get a couple loaves of multi-grain Home and Hearth, or a couple dainty batards full of sunflower seeds each week and I haven’t bought any bread since I’ve been here.  I was remarking to a friend that many older people have refined their tolerance of others to a great degree as they’ve aged.  I don’t think any of them are at the big table in the Library on Monday mornings. Two friends and I are attending with cameras next week.  Ta!

No Wheels for Cats.

Tonight I watched an episode of CSI.  A man was killed by a parrot trying to escape from a cat (man fell and banged his head in the shower); a woman was killed by the parrot (surprised by bird, fell on her butcher knife);  There were at least two logical suspects (not the parrot or the bird)  and everybody went back to their original safe venues. Except the dead people. Totally new and catchy but it made me wonder if TV viewers are so jaded by commercial television that they need the occasional red herring, locked-room goodie to keep them watching.

It was the Full Moon last night and I took a picture of it just to make sure it didn’t get away.

And I can have a pet while I’m here.  It’s a fairly simple process.  I provide management with $500 and do everything they say.  Get a small pet. (So much for my Pit Bulldog…)  Make sure it doesn’t damage anything.  Take it out to do it’s business on a regular basis.  Oh, and carry it out and back to my apartment.  Animals aren’t allowed to walk on the floors in here, except for service dogs. They must be carried unless they have wheels.  Everybody can have wheels in here.  Wheeled walkers, chairs, shopping carts, roller skates, I guess.  Do they make cats with wheels?  Perhaps I could get a Pit and call it my Anxiety Dog?

I came in from shopping yesterday and there were three Police cruisers parked out front.  Turned out there was a death on 3, a death on 7 and a couple old duffers going at it on 10.  One of them is bipolar and doesn’t like to take his medicine.  They provide everything here, even the excitement.

Now I am going to have some more coffee and think about all this.  Ta!

Three Pickup Truck Loads

I moved on Saturday October 2nd.  And on the 3rd.  And on the 4th.  And then a little on the following Wednesday and Thursday.  We were supposed to have nine people to help with this and it should have taken about 4 or 5 hours and three pickup truck loads.  However some were sick, some just forgot and we wound up with self (no good for anything but supervising) three old guys like me and a lady who had to leave at 3 the first day.  Sorry, two ladies.  Once I figured out the probable logistics, I went into an anxiety mode that lasted three days.  

On about the fourth of the month the landlord called to say that I was taking too long to become absent and he had pro-rated the days since the 2nd and I owed him $137.  I sent him  a letter about the time I paid full rent while he dallied about fixing a gutter on the back of the building, which caused rain to come into the bedroom and onto my head while I was sleeping.  I also told him that I couldn't afford any more of his pro-rates so he would have to remove anything I left behind.  And you can be damn sure I left a mess for him:  junk, boxes, a useless clothes dryer...about three pickup trucks worth.  And then I told him  what he could do with his pro-rate.  I haven't heard a word since.

He used to live in the apartment before I moved in and back at that time he was using drugs and beating his wife thoroughly a couple or three times a week.  He doesn't pick up anymore and the lady stuck with him.  Since I sent him the letter I haven't heard a word from him.  I didn't expect any rainbow of feelings about this moving business and I was pretty startled by it all.  I figured..you just move from one place to another and there it is.  I was scared and anxious during the move, lonely and sad for the first couple weeks here.  Now that I've been here a month I've been slowly feeling better and better and now pretty good.  When I return to the apartment about suppertime it feels like home.  Things are pretty normal now, I am almost arranged in here and, oops!, I'm late for the evening hen party with the 70-year-olds!  Ta!

Honey I'm Home !!

This is not a pretty building.  It reminds me of a 1953 Tupperware that got hit several times by a low-flying missile. It would fit more suitably in Miami Beach.   

The inside is much nicer.  The apartments are nice, the kitchens are small but have twice the storage space I’m used to.  There is a lake in the back and you aren’t allowed to feed the dux, so that they don’t become dependent on people and leave presents all over the sidewalk.  You are not allowed to shoot them either but you can pull bass out of the lake night and day if you want to.

There are mostly women living here and they are mostly old and a couple seem a little loopy.  Maybe a couple to the 10^th power.  But if you can take care of yourself you can loop around all day long with the approval of the management.  The women are not all named Amanda, Amber, Courtney or Brittany.  They have real names that you can remember like Faye, Maizie, Mabel, the ubiquitous Mary, Geraldine and Rosie.  On days they can’t remember their names, they come over to my place and I remember for them.  I am also very handy at opening vials and bottles of medicine for the shaky girls.

What they don’t tell you when you sign up:

The women like to match-make.  I am obviously here to find the love of my life and they keep introducing me to likely possibles.  Their choice is not necessarily mine.  I think I would rather have three of the ones they haven’t thought of, including the 60-year-old who used to work for the CIA.  And who has marvelous and impossible stories.

Awhile back there was a spate of outsiders entering the building at night, getting into apartments and stealing money and other valuables.  This was because several of the girls ‘hid’ their apartment keys in a safe place,  under the taxus bushes out front.  Thieves knew just where to look for a dandy assortment and residents were leaving so fast vacancies were created, which is why I wasn’t on any kind of waiting list.  Management got together with the police and the old ladies and did something with locks and new keys and some entrances permanently locked from the outside and the problem is resolved.  If they find my key under the bushes now, it will cost me $50 and supper for 8. Donna, down the hall has a 10 millimeter handgun and if she tries to shoot me she will surely hit you.  She used to prowl the corridors after midnight, locked and loaded and I believe a couple shadows got dead with 10 out of 10. I am grateful for the locks.

Sorry for leaving you but it’s almost 2 and I have to take my place at the 2^nd floor women’s Hen Party.  Amazing the things you find out!  Ta!

Next time:  Moving and Paranoia.

Duck Issues

I have a resentment against ducks and geese.  They settle in a place for the winter, now that the winters are warmer around here, and they leave stuff.  Months of stuff.  Sometimes year-round of stuff.  In Mt Vernon, Ohio there is a beautiful reflecting pool at the state hospital surrounded by a concrete sidewalk.  Guess why most people don’t go to the reflecting pool? 

Softball diamonds around here work the same way just as soon as a low spot and winter puddles develop.  Then when you rip and grade it with a tractor in the spring, it’s hard to breathe.  Also during rainstorms.  Makes me want to quit enjoying driving tractors. 

If I were King I would get a good Savage .22 with some long rifle ammunition and…….well.  It would be a lot more fun to shoot them out of the sky.  They’re flying along and  there’s a kind of spasm and then they drop straight down like rocks!  Trouble is they’re too damn greasy to eat.

Pigeons belong in this category too.  Besides having an IQ of 4 they try to nest on my upstairs front porch in the winter.  I do shoot them.  With a pellet gun.  Enough is enough!

No I won’t shoot your deer.  But I have to admit that venison is very tasty and very (low fat) healthy.  Especially makes totally awsome chili!  Yo Bambi!  Ta!

Older !

I am playing poker with a deck of insurance cards.  Having reached the magic age of almost-65 they are descending on me like rain.  Up until last month I had an Anthem medical card and an Anthem dental card.  Then I was told I had to sign up – again – with the government (how many times in my life have I done this for one reason or another?  If my file is thick imagine what the Mayor’s file looks like…) 

Now I have a Medicare card; a Humana medical card; a something-or-other eye care card and a dental card – still Anthem.  Oh, and a prescription card from some outfit called Express Scripts.  Almost enough to play a good game of Euchre with. 

In addition I have received at least twenty pounds of advertising from everybody from Gecko to AARP wanting me to sign up for their supplemental insurance programs.  While trying to convince me that all the cards that I now have certainly aren’t going to cover everything.  (They won’t.  That’s the nature of insurance recruitment, sales and deception.)

And I am getting ready to move.  A big life change for me, I’ve lived happily here for 16 years.  And I am going to live happily elsewhere with significantly less possessions and for about three hundred dollars less a month then where I am at now.  At a place on a lake where I can look down in the morning and watch the ducks shitting on the shore.  Sorry, I have a resentment against ducks.

The big change is that everybody in this place is fifty-seven or older.  Nobody is 21.  There are no young girls or guys.  I will hardly know how to behave (until one of those old gals invites me over for supper….).  My life is a lot older.  I don’t see this place as the last stop before I die and I intend to frolic happily there for a long time.

But time passes.  In spite of me.  I am corresponding with an elegant lady from my grade school days who is the same age as I am.  The last time I saw her was in 7^th grade and I think I was in love with her, until I was able to buy my next bag of marbles.  Attention is so fleeting!  Thinking back that far is almost going back to World War Two and I’m not sure all of my own kids know what that was exactly.  It truly does take my breath away, that was so long ago.

I take pills in the morning and walk around the block for exercise, instead of getting up at the crack of dawn and going to work to get trim and tanned and make money doing it.  If my warts and blemishes keep growing I will look someday like Franklin Roosevelt.

But I take life a day at a time.  Most of it has been rewarding.  Some of it was the pits.  It has all been interesting.  I am not guaranteed a tomorrow, could get hit by a bus.  But I have today and, creaky or not, I will frolic in the sun on my gimpy right leg for my todays until it’s time to shut it down.

And I have changed the color of this blog to Virginia Tobacco just because I can!  Ta!

Green !!

I had Fruit Flies.   I must have brought them home in a bunch of bananas and in two days they had taken over the place.  They are little and don’t make noise.  They sometimes try to get into your eyes or your nose.  I never saw them in any foodstuffs but they are so small I wouldn’t have known the difference.

in little circles they fly and then plunge dramatically into things that are not good for them.  Like hot coffee.  Or butter, where they get stuck and soaked.  Fortunately they LOVE flypaper.  Yes, that old-fashioned, sticky stuff, kind of brown.  Smells like 1950 vintage Watkins Beef Iron and Wine tonic.  I put some out one night knowing they would laugh at me in the small hours of the morning.  And by sunrise there were probably about 300 on the flypaper and almost none airborne.  It is just hard to find the flypaper, it is not Modern!  I got mine in a bazaar run by a couple Arabs and a Mexican girl.

Green?  But of course.  If you don’t know that word and the definition, you flunk high school and your SAT’s.  Sorry to be a Grinch but we’ve had green since Reagan was president.  And we had it before that in California and the Mother Earth News.  Back then it was called Ecologically Sound.  Then it was called Eco-friendly.  Like the Italian opera of the same sound.  Green is about creating new hierarchies of jobs for your relatives and friends, and new hierarchies of money for all those people to spend, including in their paychecks. 

Hell, we even have Green busses now racing all over the City spreading their very limited pollution in the streets.  We also have electric trolleys and have had for years and they are greener than green.  But painted yellow.  I always thought Green was about St. Patrick’s Day but I must have been mistaken.  Ta!

Journalism Frenzy

  Cast  I have quit watching TV except for old repeats of Are you Being Served which was made in England about the time I got married.  40 years ago.  This is new enough for me.  It just puzzles me that news stories that purport to be of great relevance disappear just as soon as something else interesting comes up on the horizon.  This is not something I learned in grade school.  Apparently continuity is a lost language today.   Let’s see, awhile back the Senate was divided into fighting factions and didn’t get anything done.  For a long time.  They still seemed to get their paychecks somehow.  Which is why I am not voting for any incumbents this time around.  Even a second-grader could do a better job than the respected Senators. Some of the new guys actually may be second-graders, intelligence doesn’t seem to be a requirement.  Then a renegade, terrorist, Major, psychologist in Texas shot up a bunch of soldiers and the senators went away.  An airplane crashed into an IRS building in Texas and the Major went away.  Then the oil well blew up and burned in the gulf and for weeks we were treated to subsurface pictures of oil gushing out of the broken valve.  The economy of the southern US was going to die, the fish and octopus population was going to glow in the dark and couldn’t be eaten.  And BP and a whole lot of others were making millions off the thing anyway.  Then the White House announced that things weren’t nearly as bad as they could have been, the well people pumped mud and recycled trash down the pipe and the well stopped running.  Now Al-Quaida has a new leader who lived in the US for some time and the well has virtually disappeared.   I have a song for all this and it may help you to understand why I spend time watching old reruns of Are You Being Served or not watching TV at all.  The link is somewhere in this blog.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpn_xu81ySo   Sex, love and rock and roll and somebody else can do the drugs and the booze.  But if it all doesn’t really matter, and disappears when something more interesting occurs, what’s wrong with that?  Ta!  +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Loopy in the Heat.

Last week the trial of a transportation cop in California ended with a verdict of involuntary manslaughter.  A trial by a jury of his peers as mandated in the Constitution of the United States.  He was due to be sentenced to a few years, three or four or something.  But family and friends of the deceased took issue with the perceived ‘lightness’ of the verdict and the sentence and made loud public noise.  Some people who objected demonstrated, and some of the demonstrations included breaking into a couple stores and looting them bare.  As a result of the perceived dissatisfaction the guy is now going back to court, Federal this time, to see if he somehow violated the deceased’ civil rights, for which he could get a universally more satisfying punishment of many more years.

They did this in L.A. some years back with the Rodney King trial after some rioting convinced City government that the verdict wasn’t ‘good enough.’  They succeeded only in totally gutting the morale of the Los Angeles Police Department making it one of the most inefficient and paranoid police departments in the country.   With an oversight committee of mostly black people and an appointed chief who probably hated cops anyway. 

I guess this is part of the new law enforcement in this country.  If you don’t like the verdict, you go out and commit criminal actions and damage and destroy public property.  Then the government will have a whole new dog and pony show to make the results fit the intensity of your protest.  I’d rather have my constitutional law back.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Summer Flood. 

Concerning the new place I’ll live beginning October.  Back in the 40's and 50's there was a mom-and-pop quarry operation there that provided limestone and dolomite for building.  Down at the bottom was a little foreman's shack and a derrick and trucks would go up and down carting limestone to builders.  The whole outfit closed for vacation one year and while they were gone, a hidden spring burst out and when the folks got back they had a 70-foot deep lake.  Later people built houses there, and the New Place was also built, originally as retirement housing for Union members.  It's still run by AFL-CIO but all you have to do to live there now is be 60 and have nice manners.  Hence Lake ShoreLake Shore is right beside it. apartments. The derrick and shack are still down under the lake but it's a wondrous place to sit and catch the sun, or the wind, as you prefer.  The lake is in the center of the aerial, I did a composite from MapQuest and

Ta!

Pipe Cleaner

That's me. I restore old pipes for money, or to sell or, sometimes to keep. During tight times that provides me with a play stash that I wouldn't otherwise have. Guess what I usually buy with play stash money? Yep. More pipes. Some tobacco. You guys collect shotguns, James Bond movies, statues of old Indians, I do pipes. But I thought I would give you a quickie glance at how this goes. It's always a relaxer for me and sometimes dirty and sometimes clean and always creative.

Here's a bunch of old pipes, not too damaged or crusted with dirt just the way I received them. The little pictures get big if you click on them.



Next step is the dirt. Carbon and ash are reamed out of the bowl. Old tars and goober and crud are cleaned out of the shank and stem (the long part that goes in your mouth). The outside surface is cleaned with mild ammonia solution or alcohol. The stem (mouthpiece) is disinfected with alcohol. Then the whole business is dried overnight.

After drying the bowls are sanded, if necessary, with very fine 1500 grit paper, then oiled with nut oil, or waxed. Sometimes a light coat of colored stain goes on before the staining or waxing. The waxed finish pipes get an additional coat of hard carnauba buffed in ('burned in' we say) on a buffing wheel.



When it's all said and done you have a set of bright, clean, refurbished pipes ready to smoke your favorite tobacco in. Like the next photo.



Now I'm tired. I'm going to go smoke some Country Doctor in my pipe. Ta!

Magic

Cara -- this post is for you and your drop-dead magic freckles!

I’m old enough not to take computers and cell phones and androids and the other electronic spaghetti for granted. I always thought androids were some kind of alien. Apparently they captured them and they’re all in this little box you can hold in your hand and do things with. If you pay big money. Before the age of computers I got incipient arthritis because we had to do complicated math problems on abacuses (abaci?). At St. Mary’s school. In fact my one little finger is so curved from doing multiplication of fractions on an abacus that I can’t play the pinky-on-the-coffeecup thing anymore. But after the new age dawned I bought a computer and dived right into it. I left the cell phones and androids alone since I think they’re noisy and invasive. I think it’s some kind of magic, still, that I can dial up Copenhagen and have a good look at the Mermaid in the harbor, or watch live traffic crashes in the freeway tunnels in Moscow at night, which gets old pretty quickly. I’ve watched the Queen’s Christmas message once or twice and I Instant Message my daughter in South Carolina a couple times a week. I’m still totally amazed at all this clear, static-free worldwide communication. My kids grew up with computers. In school. I remember long distance calls that faded in and out and heavy bakelite phones that you could kill a large dog with, and Movietone newsreels...

...But last Saturday I treated myself to the topping on the cake. I watched the Royal Wedding of Daniel and Victoria of Sweden, live, on STV television from Stockholm. Clear as a bell, every word immensely audible and it was a nice marriage as those ceremonies go. There were four archbishops including a woman lesbian (of which I heartily approve – if you don’t like it go read something else), and the Archbishop of Stockholm who grinned in between the lines. Daniel had a tear or two and Victoria just stood there and smiled and looked pretty damn good. So God bless ‘em. And thanks for the computer. You all can have the cell phones and all that other noisy expensive junk, but I like my computer-window-on-the-world. Ta!

Pulse

• The Daily Yakomat
• 
  
• Booze-fueled mayhem in Twin Towers neighborhood
• Father, son, knife and bat vs. a neighbor and his belt
• 1 shot, 1 hit with bat in East Side robbery
• Downtown gunman holds up four
• Eye-in-the-sky foils thief
• Relative of twins charged with robbery threatens victim, police say
• Knife and a note no match for bullet-proof glass
• Man accused of trashing optometrist's office
• Teen wanted for allegedly shooting at house
• $2K mistakenly put in Taco Bell customer's bag

Another 166,100 people had a peaceful

And relaxing Saturday evening

In the Big City. Without headlines.

Memorials and the Day

I had a morning meditation today, you know, Jesus and Buddha and one-page-a-day and that kind of thing. But at sunrise I decided, this time, to read Who in the Hell is Tom Jones? Out of a book of poems by Charles Bukowski. It made me laugh out loud and I think that is a fine beginning to any day. I can’t reprint it here because

- it’s copyrighted
- it has a lot of really bad words in it.

If you have been around the block of life a couple times you will instantly understand it, and if you haven’t you will run to your church waving your bible in the air and say prayers for me. Either one is fine. And you can look it up yourself in LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL. If you are not afraid.

Years ago when I worked for the Police Department I used to walk up a trail through the woods behind the Police Academy and come out in a little clearing where there was a cemetery that all the unidentified people were buried in. Potter’s Field. It was a nice place to eat lunch because few people even knew it was there. And I would say Hi to all the spirits of the old guys who fell dead out of boxcars on trains from Toledo. Known only to God, and like that.

My friend and I went there a couple days ago for Memorial Day because we thought it was the right thing to do. All those people had a life or half of one or a really bad one, but it’s my job to give tribute to the fact that they lived here and not to judge. It’s officially called Westmont Cemetery and is surrounded by Monday Prison, the Police Academy and the Sewage Treatment Plant. Which says something about it’s importance. And the Police too probably. But I think the cemetery was there first. I still think it’s a nice place to be buried. And there are woodpeckers and red-winged blackbirds.

I thought about Dad a lot on Memorial Day and I’m glad he made it home from the wars so I could get to know him. He was a fine guy and a fine Dad!

Speaking of Memorial Day, I got a flyer for my high school class’ 48th reunion and a full third if not half of my classmates are dead. One got murdered in 1967 and I don’t know about the rest. Holy Toledo and RIP! Now I am going to scrub my kitchen with steel wool and sulfuric acid to make sure there are no typhoid germs laying around. And I am not going to the party.

I am getting ready to pay the remainder of my money to the IRS, Compunet Labs and a dermatologist. The usual bills are already paid and I will still have some dollahs that them folks don’t know about that I am gong to spend on play. Ta!

Murder most fowl or Why I want to live with little old ladies.

I am a little cross-eyed because I have just finished watching The Naked Gun and arsing my larf off. This is an alcoholic spoof on the Naked City. Also I have new glasses which seem to make me confused when I walk fast. I cannot be held responsible for anything I write after this point.





I was shopping today for some moisturizing lotion and found a quart bottle of something called Goat's Milk that was made in Upper Volta. It comes in a plastic milk bottle and smells like old goats, and will do a teriffic job if I can get all the dogs in the neighborhood to quit following me.



More to come.....

EXPERT WITNESSES

It's been a startlingly realistic week in the Triple A's. A woman I sponsor has found that she may have cancer but probably not. Another has found out that she probably doesn't, but may. I also sponsor a guy who is a cancer survivor but has some side effects that, some days, confine him to less than five feet from his bathroom door. Today at a morning meeting I talked to a woman who, the last time I saw her, months ago, was a fine figure of an Irish lass with dense natural copper hair and full-breasted enough to raise most eyebrows most places she went. Freckles all over too. This morning she popped in to talk, looking pale, strained and thin, totally flat-chested as far as I could see and wearing a yellow bandanna on her head in place of the Irish hair. There was a guy with breast cancer too.

Life doesn't stop just because we don't drink anymore. What stops is having to drink. Period. We still need the support of others for the rest of the adventure. On the floor today it was mostly discussed how to get through the feelings and the fear that accompany such terrible diagnoses. People have left the actual doctoring to the doctors, but they share the knowledge above price about how to make it through the smelly swamp one day at a time with a reasonable amount of peace of mind.

I told 'my' two women that they needed to talk to those other people right now more than they needed to talk to me. They are. I don't do doctor, and I haven't been there.
The rooms are full of Expert Witnesses on all kinds of subjects depending on where the adventure of life has led them. You name it, it comes up in the conversation.

This is why, when my Mom says "You've been sober for a zillion years, do you still have to go to those meetings?", I say, "Yes, frequently, because I want to keep rubbing shoulders with the people I want to be like." Ta!

Something is dragging in Mudville

I'm getting a real kick out of watching the principal honchos of the Catholic Church doing end runs trying to avoid answering specific questions about child abuse, instead of being the power calling the shots. It's a laugh a minute. Their latest song is "Our enemies are attacking us again. This is all a smoke screen for a hate campaign against celibacy and the sanctity of the family." The Catholic religious authority of Ireland being totally gutted in the wake of the Ryan Report of last year must have been an accident because of the full moon. I haven't been Catholic for a long time and don't have any resentments anymore. But considering all the theological shit the hierarchy shoveled when I was a kid, it's hilarious watching what goes around come around!

To celebrate the spring this year I highly recommend Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski. What life is like for real people? This author knows it all in gritty detail. You can read it to little kids to teach them sex education and the essential four-letter words. This is short because I am reading a Pirate book and I want to get back to it. Maybe have to write more soon! Yo Ho!!

Ta!

MESSAGE

I am being fat tonight from a McDonald’s crispy chicken Ranch wrap and three chocolate chip cookies. So I am working it off by typing this blog entry. It is kind of cold to be walking it off outside. It is cloudy blue winter outdoors, or at least it was before it got dark. Not a day to inspire anything except sleeping which I participated fully in, at least three times.

A few days ago a guy named Stack flew a fully fueled airplane into an Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas. He killed himself and somebody else and injured some folks and virtually destroyed the building. He left a long, ranting goodbye note in the Internet in which he blamed the quality of his life on:

The IRS

Big Business and it’s greed

Banks

The Government

The Catholic Church

His CPA

The state of California

And others…….

The media has quoted various personalities and talking heads who have described him as:

Cowardly

In serious distress and real despair

Never antagonistic towards his CPA

Hid his rage well

…and others

Amazingly enough, this whole thing happened last Thursday, I think, and it’s Sunday now and not a peep of the story has appeared today on any of the major Internet news sites. Except for two grieving families, one person still in a hospital, scores of almost-victims with nightmares and a lot of Austin firemen, it’s like it never happened.

People were so concerned with vilifying this guy, and with reason, that nobody paid any attention to the message he left except to describe it as a confused rant in which he blames everybody else for his problems. Much of his message was quite clear. I’m sure the morality of the wealth of the Catholic Church can be debated and I don’t want my dog in that fight. Maybe I should just quote “WWJD?” Big Business continues to get rich from the gullible and the helpless; the Government isn’t working the way it should; not much in the Noble Republic is working the way we learned in Civics class in our adolescence. Interesting that the results of a CNN poll released today show that 86% of those Americans interviewed believe that the Government is broken and that 5% of that number believe it can’t be fixed. Senator Bayh from Indiana last week has indicated he will resign from Congress at the end of his present term because it isn’t working the way it should. Are there similarities or am I loony?

I don’t believe problems should be solved by killing people except maybe in self defense. Property damage? In the case of the IRS that doesn’t seem to be too politically incorrect. And would anybody have heard Stack’s message loudly and clearly if he hadn’t done an Armageddon on a government building? Probably not. You all out there can fight back and forth over this, but I believe there’s some handwriting on the wall here.

Back in the year zero in an impoverished semi desert that was part of the far flung Roman Empire, a guy named Jesus walked back and forth between towns, socializing with low-life and high-life companions. No horse. Definitely not a carriage. Lived rough. Might have needed a shave. Stirred grave alarum among the Religious Right because they feared he was going to try to overthrow their comfortable, legalistic status quo. Got the occupying authorities up in arms because they were afraid of a coup and all they wanted to do was sleep when the sun was hot and keep their heavy armor in their lockers.

He was probably variously described as:

A rabble rouser

Possibly deluded

Got too much sun on his head, messed up his thinking

One of the Usual Suspects

They finally arrested him for something and sentenced him to capital punishment. He went through all the pain and trauma even though he had an ace up his sleeve nobody knew about. Once he was cut down the message was forgotten except by about thirteen people. If anybody else remembered him it was like the Various Descriptions listed above. But the message came to fruition over time and is very much with (and within) many of us today.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to prove here except that I’m a little pissed that Stack had a pretty definite set of complaints, many of them accurate, and nobody’s listening. Just another same-o day in the Big City. Ta!

WHO WE KNOW.

The daily news on the Internet is a laugh a minute. I start each day laughing once I get both eyes open. For instance: “Terrorism threats will decline with death or capture of Bin Laden and other top operatives.” I think that, for somebody, that’s the real world. But could it possibly be that those top honchos are very intelligent and sophisticated and that each of the most important ones has an understudy who can immediately take over in the absence of Number One? La! It must have been a Talking Head who said that.

People ask me now and then if I belong to that outfit for ex-drunks and it usually goes something like this: “You part of them Triple-A’s?” And I say “Yarp.” Being in the Triple-A’s gives me a familiarity with parts of life that most people don’t see. When I talk about it, a little, they shake their heads and start reciting that Psalm about the Valley of Death. Because they are convinced that I’m daily on the edge of danger. I do have to say that some of my best friends are:

Executives

Ex-Prostitutes (Sex Workers to put a point on it)

Jailbirds

Jail Birdies

Supervisors

Bus drivers

Working Sex Workers

Teachers

Nurses

Lawyers

Doctors

The Unemployed

The Great Unwashed (usually washed soon…)

Bikers

Bag Ladies

…all of whom are attempting to stay clean and sober one day at a time. Anything but that is nobody’s business but their own. But it makes a hell of a conversation piece the few times it comes up.

Ta!