Almost there.

 So here we are, the Inglorious Ninth of June, wherein I celebrate the 39th anniversary of my employment here at the egregious mold-pit wherein I labor for my daily bread. Next year there will be parties and perhaps an interview with the local media, although I wouldn't bet on it, and I will no doubt go home afterwards and weep into my pillow at the waste I have made of my life.  But as I said, that is next year. This year, I can only contemplate the noisome mess that I will be in one year and wonder how the hell I got myself into this situation.  I didn't want to be a minor bureaucrat; I wanted to play center field for the New York Yankees, a common life fantasy in these parts and one that I could never realize given my complete inability to hit a curve ball. How swiftly was ambition crushed, my life torn from its preordained path and sent down the loathsome path to the lower depths of the bureaucracy! How wretched are the cruel twists of fate that lead some to the pinnacles of glory and others to the soul-sucking monotony of life in triplicate!  Life is not fair, which what I will be annoying everyone I know with for the next year. By the time the 40th anniversary rolls around I am sure that everyone will be sick and tired of listening to me and will be conspiring to hit me over the head with a shovel and selling my carcass at the weekly farmers' market for meat. I have great things to look forward to this year.

Stating the obvious.

I should write more often, I should. In the amount of time since the D-Day post, the Allied armies had smashed their way across Europe and had just entered or were about to enter Germany, and here I am, without any great psychological pressure about whether I am going to live or die in a loud and altogether grotesque military manner, still unable to produce serviceable prose about the adventures of the denizens of our happy little burg and our ongoing war with those most unhappy inhabitants of Connecticut, the low and utterly loathsome crew of degenerates known as Nutmeggers. Our town is a clean and moral place--you can ask anyone--and there will be no megging nuts in public here if the citizenry in general and the Reverend Cornelius Van Vlack has anything to say about the matter. The Reverend Van Vlack is the former pastor of the First Dutch Reformed Church and then the Second Reformed Church, which is actually the same denomination using the same church building that the first Dutch Reformed dominie, the Reverend Jan DeWitt, built in 1709—the church fathers changed the name about fourteen years ago when they decided that the Dutch had been reformed enough and now it was time for the church to reform everyone else whether they wanted to be Reformed or not. The rest of us, being the sinners that we are, decided not to reform, and so the church building is now a pizzeria, pepperoni and prodigious amounts of garlic being better for encouraging penance in sinners than almost anything else you can think of.  Despite his church's conversion from Calvinism to calzones, the Reverend Cornelius Van Vlack has still not abandoned the cause; the moral rot that permits pineapples on pizza will never gain such sway that megging nuts in public will ever be acceptable behavior, even from people from Connecticut who don't know any better.  To advance that cause, the Reverend Cornelius Van Vlack and his militia patrol the mountains that separate our happy little burg from the envy of less happy lands (except Connecticut, of course), keeping a sharp eye out for all would be megging miscreants. We, and by we I mean the good people of our happy little burg, can sleep soundly in our beds because the good reverend and his merry crew of public-spirited citizens are keeping us safe from megging nuts and less safe from poison ivy, which they get all over themselves as they wander through the mountains wondering why they volunteered for this abuse and then transmit into our homes by not wiping their feet when they come into our houses. I am fairly certain that they do this just to annoy people.

In any case, I should write more often. 

Gulf of America: not an oil company ad.

 Lucius Cary, the second (or third, I'm not sure which) Viscount Falkland, has always been one of my favorite philosophers.  I doubt he would have thought of himself as a philosopher; he was a soldier and a man of action, a loyal servant of His Majesty King Charles II during the English Civil War (His Lordship’s side lost, in case you were wondering), and I believe that he would have thought prolonged philosophical thinking a bit of a bore when compared to the less intellectual delights of hacking and slashing His Majesty's enemies into a thousand tiny bloody pieces.  Lord Falkland never wrote a philosophical treatise of interminable length, unlike so many other philosophers then and now, who insist that entire forests come crashing down and get pulped into paper so that they can inflict their deep ideas about the meaning of it all upon a long-suffering and not terribly interested humanity.  No, indeed, Lord Falkland was an Englishman of the empirical school, whose entire philosophical output comes down to us in a single sentence, an observation that he made in passing to a friend. “When it is not necessary to change,” Lord Falkland said, “it is necessary not to change.”  That’s it, that’s the whole of it, and his lordship packed more philosophical depth into that one sentence than many philosophers can pack into tomes so physically and philosophically dense that I could drop said tome on a mouse in the absolute certainty that the annoying little rodent would not survive the encounter.  

So why am I subjecting you to all this philosophical beating around the bush about the subject of this screed? This is an exceptionally good question, and I am sure it might have something to do with my being a royal pain in the general posterior, but there is, in fact, an exceptionally good reason.  If you follow the news at all these days, and who isn’t, given that the current president is much more entertaining than the previous president, you will know that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, said change of name being the product of a presidential executive order brought on by a case of excessive pique at the current president of Mexico. I do not know why The Donald chose this name when there are so many more evocative names that come to mind: the Sea of Margaritas, the Bay of Spring Break, the Bay of Babes, or even the Gulf of Dixie for the politically incorrect . The Gulf of America suffers tremendously by comparison. The Gulf of Mexico is tropic heat and long white beaches, palm trees and the sound of Latin music, sweat trickling slowly down your sides into the small of your back as you sit in your beach chair with your margarita in your hand, watching the towering pastel clouds gathering on the horizon and the tanned bikini-clad senoritas, all smiles and laughter, strolling slowly by at the water’s edge, the sultry breeze coming off the sea, and the taste of tequila on your love’s lips as you kiss her in the moonlight. That is the Gulf of Mexico.  The Gulf of America, by contrast, is a gas station. 

The fires this time

 You know, I remember back in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina almost moved the city of New Orleans into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, a reporter asked General Honore, the head of the Federal task force coordinating the response  to the catastrophe, a question about the shortcomings of the earlier state and local responses the general had been brought in to correct. General  Honore cut the reporter off, telling him to not get stuck on stupid.  There would be a time for such questions once the disaster was over, but the current moment was neither the time or the place; people needed rescuing, the levees had to be shored up, the city had to be saved.  First things first.

Twenty years later, the city of Los Angeles, California (is the state even necessary in this sentence? There is only one LA, and everyone knows where it is located) is not only stuck on stupid, the city and the state's leadership class is firmly and proudly stuck on stupid, stranded in the muck of its own progressive delusions and doing its best to remain stuck there while simultaneously getting the rest of the country to pay for the cleanup (unlikely) and avoiding responsibility for the fires in the first place (even more unlikely). But hope springs eternal, so there will be no change in the city's forest management program and the reservoirs will remain unfilled and the snail darter will remain protected.  Los Angeles firefighters will have to check the right demographic boxes in order to get a job in the first place and will have to spout the progressive movement's DEI bromides with tremendous enthusiasm in order to keep the job they have.  Insurance companies will not be allowed to make money for their own good and poorly insulated electric wires will remain above ground for reasons that surpasseth understanding. So the more the fires destroy, the more things will stay the same. And Los Angeles, the city and the county, and state of California will not lower taxes on the population in their time of affliction, which makes the city and county of Los Angeles and the state of California look a lot less like modern governments and more like a poorly run protection racket operated by the Mafia's not so best and brightest.  All of them will probably be re-elected. 

Elections

 I have not written much about the current election season, which is to say that I have written nothing about the election at all, for which I do apologize. The comic possibilities raised by the lives and thoughts of the two main candidates are endless and I have chosen not to use them because I am very lazy. Therefore, I am resurrecting a post from 2004. No one liked it then; frankly, I am not sure if I like it now; but it is what it is and I am going to resurrect it from the Blogger boneyard.  Enjoy!!!

Well, the silly portion of the political season has finally arrived and not a moment too soon, I think; the voters can always use some diversion. This year we are all a-buzz about election signs and posters vanishing from roadsides the length and breadth of our happy little burg, vanishing with the rapidity of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies off the top of your grandmother’s oven. There’s no apparent pattern to the thefts; signs for Republican and Democratic candidates alike are disappearing during the dark of night with equal speed, with each side declaring that they are the injured party and blaming the other for the political pilferage. The local constabulary is now hot on the case, the gendarmes declaring that they will get to the bottom of the mystery posthaste and once again make our streets safe for politicians to annoy honest citizens.

Frankly, I don’t care if the signs ever reappear; the streets look just fine without them. I can remember the day when one such sign was put up on a telephone pole near a busy intersection on South Cedar Street, announcing that the gentleman running for office was an outsider, new to politics and, unlike his predecessor, who'd been in office for the better part of thirty years, not at all susceptible to the blandishments and corruption that come with political power; the poster finally weathered away halfway through the man’s third term in the state legislature.

And if the posted signs were in any way protected from the elements then they would never go away, remaining year after year until they became an embarrassment. One famously bald local politico had to paper over a poster like this at a bridge underpass; it had been there for years, reminding the voters that when they first voted the man into office he’d had a full head of hair and only one chin. Some politicians, on the other hand, do that sort of thing on purpose. You can save a lot of money on signs recycling last election’s signs for this campaign. It’s good for the environment as well.

I can see the point of stealing some signs. I’ve read somewhere that there are approximately 86,000 governmental bodies in the United States, the vast majority of which hold elections to determine who gets to run things. There’s so many state senators, assemblymen, aldermen, mayors, school board members, town supervisors, and library board trustees running at any given time that no voter can keep track off them all, and before long they all start to blur together in one's mind. The first time you really know who the candidates for some of these offices are comes when you see their names on the ballot. You have no clue who some of these people are, what with their signs disappearing left, right, and center, and in that case why not just vote for the incumbent, since you really don't want to waste your vote on someone you've never heard of and who was obviously not clever enough to steal his opponent's signs. Letting someone too dumb to steal his opponent's signs anywhere near the public coffers is not a good idea, I think; if he doesn't notice his signs are missing what else won't he notice when he actually has the job?

You don’t always need signs or posters to run for office. A few years ago my brother became the president of our local volunteer fire company, elected for reasons that surpasseth understanding, as the Good Book often says of the Lord when He goeth about smiting the hips and thews of passersby for no immediately discernible reason. My brother was a write-in candidate; he agreed to run because a firehouse faction, and yes, we have those here, needed a warm body in the race. My brother won, which everyone in the family found very odd, and makes one question the wisdom of the whole concept of universal suffrage. In the United States, candidates for public office run for that office; in the United Kingdom, a more politically sedate country, candidates stand for office. My brother is one of the few political candidates anywhere who sat on his ass on a barstool for office. He has since retired from the presidency, laying down the onerous burdens of civic responsibility and returning to a richly deserved private life, ending all too early a none too promising political career. He remains firmly ensconced on his barstool, however, offering sage political advice to all and sundry, which is what got him into trouble in the first place.

So for some, but not all, political races, stealing signs is not at all a bad idea. This, however, brings up the question of why anyone would steal the signs of the presidential candidates? Signs or not, it’s not like the populace doesn’t know who’s running, what with those two guys all over the evening news every night of the week and twice on Sunday. Still, you can never be too careful. I bring my Keep Cool With Coolidge sign into the house with me every night. You never know when you’ll run into a John Davis Democrat; better to be safe than sorry. People were awfully bitter about Davis' losing back in 1924.

Short note to a vendor.

 

When June shows up, sunshine is sure to follow.

[from an email from one of our vendors. My response follows, and yes, I know the person that I sent this to.]

Sunshine? Is that June's new boyfriend? I thought his name was Roger or Raymond or something else that starts with an R. Rudolph comes to mind as well, but that may just be because there are now only six shopping months till Christmas. Be that as it may, I hope he's better than the last one she had. I'm sure that sumo is interesting in a weirdly grotesque sort of way; after all, the Japanese love it and one hundred million Japanese can't all be wrong, except about that whole karaoke thing, karaoke being, as far as I am concerned, one of the many very good reasons for why Japan deserved to lose the war; but the idea that someone as short as June would consider a relationship with a man who is taller than she is while lying on his back boggles the imagination in ways that no well-brought up imagination should ever be boggled.  In any case, I trust that all is well with you out there in the middle of the country. Here in the Northeast, we are all melting in the heat and humidity like the Wicked Witch of the West being sprayed with a fire hose during a five-alarm fire.

 

Sincerely,

 

AB

 

And?

I do not know why so many conservatives were surprised by what happened.  A rigged trial produced a rigged result. Isn't that the point of rigging the trial in the first place?

East Coast Earthquake

 

The thing is, I did not feel the earthquake that has so discombobulated the East Coast this morning, Really. I did not feel the thing at all. I was sitting in my comfortable chair at work minding my own business and the earth moved and I did not realize that the earth had moved. Having missed the earth moving, I simply went on with my bureaucratic life as if nothing had happened because for me, nothing had. Well, better luck next time, I suppose. And that was that, or at least that was what I thought. 

Apparently, not feeling the earth move during an earthquake is a sign of diminished mental capacity. People kept coming into the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread and demanding to know how I coped with the great East Coast earthquake of 2024 and were deeply shocked that I coped with the massive catastrophe by not realizing it was happening at the time. Now, I would understand this lack of insight on my part if the quake was an event on the order of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 or the Tokyo earthquake of 1923—it would take several deep hits off of a very large bong with incredibly strong weed to ignore disasters as large as those—but it wasn’t; from what I understand the quake measured 4.8 on the Richter scale, which several people from California have assured me is the planetary version of mild heartburn and not something to be worried about at all. Trees shook, plates rattled, pets were perturbed, and that was about it. The East Coast has hurricanes that do all of that and more, and in the winter we have nor’easters that leave you and yours up to your backsides in freezing cold mucky water, an altogether unpleasant experience. I am still pumping water out of my cellar from our last meteorological misadventure.

My guess is that it was the novelty of this intense non-disaster that has impressed itself on everyone’s mind. We don’t get a lot of earthquakes here in the Vampire State; the last one that I remember hereabouts was when the Attorney General managed to push the Governor out of office on sexual harassment charges, which people tell me is not the same thing at all, although I am certain that it was the same thing to the Governor. He was planning to run for re-election for the umpteenth time, but as Mr. Burns says, the best-laid plans of mice and men aft times gang agley. For years I had no clue what an agley was; I thought an agley was some sort of French cookie before an out of breath Scottish tourist stumbled into this place looking for a men's room and told me what it meant in the post-micturation interview where I told him how to get to the train station.

Be that as it may, many of the patrons of this mycological sinkhole regarded my insensitivity to the travails of Mother Earth as somewhat odd, given their own traumatic experiences, but I must say that insensitivity to what is going on around me is something people have been accusing me of for more years than I care to remember. The accusers are usually women, for some reason or another, teachers and librarians and other strange females that I became involved with in bars who decided that they did not like me anymore. I was never sure what the problem was, but it was usually something about not paying attention to their feelings. I thought I was paying attention, but my perception was clearly off as I am an insensitive lout. I know that because people, and by people I mean women, keep telling me that I am and who am I to argue with such a widespread and deeply held opinion? I do wish, however, that my mother would stop agreeing with them. It's an uncomfortable feeling when a boy can't be sure that his mom has his back.