Going Outdoors

A few day ago I disposed of some of my 50-year-old camping gear (all still in excellent condition, if well-worn) as a gift to a friend. While we were sorting through the gear he asked, “When did you start camping?”

The answer depends on what you call “camping.”

His definition was “Sleeping outside, overnight, in a tent or on the ground.”

That would be my answer, too, but that puts my solo camping age at about 13. My parents were fairly fundamentalist Methodists and insisted that their motley hoard of kids and step-kids to go church every Sunday for a minimum of 3 painful, pointless, irrational hours. I was functionally an atheist from about 9 on, after my mother died painfully and terribly from liver cancer at 34. I particularly disliked my parents’ church because the members were absolutely cynical about the contradiction between the “money-changers in the temple” and the cars, appliances, houses, and other crap that was being bought-and-sold before,during, and after the services. Kansas Christians are, at best, a confusing lot.

Not long after my family moved to a new development in the north end of town (the far north at the time), I discovered that the two “adults” in our family were what I would later learn are “classic Republicans.” They had, literally, no sense of proportion; especially when it came to punishment. From being beaten to being grounded to losing various privileges (of which there were few-to-none), the punishment was pretty much uniform relative to the crime. Leave a sock on the laundry room floor, get smacked, screamed at, and banished to your room. Skip school for a day, get smacked, screamed at, and banished to your room. Run away to Kansas City for a long weekend to watch jazz bands on 13th Street until the cops caught me, called my parents, and put me on a bus back home,get smacked, screamed at, and banished to my room. I learned fairly early, might as well go big if I’m going at all.

There were a collection of the remnants of abandoned and demolished buildings, from the Saint Mary of the Plains College that was destroyed by a tornado in 1942, across the highway from our development. One side of the highway was a bunch of middle class houses and the other was a field with some scrubby cottonwoods and lots of weeds and a scattering of exposed basements from whatever building was there before a tornado ripped it down to ground level. Once I discovered those hiding places, it was only a matter of time before I decided to risk the uniform-punishment-treatment for a peaceful evening and a day without religious nonsense. My room was in the basement and I could easily scramble out my bedroom window late Saturday night, shut the window from the outside, sneak into the garage and snag my Boy Scout sleeping bag, my binoculars, a flashlight, and a canvas tarp/ground cloth, and run down the street and across the highway where I hopped the fence and headed for one of the basements that I’d previously made ready for habitation. Earlier in the week, I’d scavenged a short wooden ladder and an end table from a neighbor’s trash and a bunch of candles from our garage and had set out a pile of comic books for entertainment.

I’d spend the night reading comics until I fell asleep in my bag. The sun or cold would wake me up in the morning and I’d watch the street in front of our house until the family station wagon rolled out of the driveway and headed south to church. After a safe margin of time, I’d sneak back home, put away my gear, have breakfast, mess around for a couple of hours, and go to bed and pretend to be asleep when the crowd came home. When one of the “adults” wandered down to look in my room, I’d get smacked, screamed at, and banished to my room. Sometimes there would be an additional chore added to my long list of tasks. No matter what the punishment, it was never as bad as going to church would have been. Over the years it turned into a game, but I could usually outwait my father; and my step-mother didn’t really care if I ever came back. Eventually, they gave up, allowing me to stay home if I cooked Sunday dinner; usually fried chicken.

The summer I turned 15, I had found a farm job that gave me a whole summer’s cover and a place to stay for the first few weeks of spring. I’d be at the farm for winter wheat harvest and spring planting and guys from the band I was in could come by around mid-May and pick me up for the summer’s tour. During my senior high school year, I stayed in a collection of places from my step-grandparents’ basement to the 20’ trailer I rented when I was working road construction, to a lean-to I built about 5 miles west of Dodge on the Arkansas River. Being underage, I was occasionally hauled back to my father’s home by the cops, but I wandered off fairly quickly and found a new place to hide out during the brief hours the cops would bother looking for me. After my senior year, everyone quit worrying about me and I was on my own from then on.

“Where Did They All Go?”

In a discussion that turned weirdly (hysterically similar to the stuff that used to go on in my parents’ home whenever they suffered any kind of cognitive dissonance sneaking inside their very conservative western Kansas news-blinders) an acquaintance shrieked “Where did they all go, then?” and “nobody wants to work anymore.” This was at the end of an interminable last-of-its-kind (I hope) dinner where pretty much everything finally went off of the rails with little hope of reconciliation. That had been a long time coming, but when it arrived it was a little startling. Still, the conversation (screaming match?) inspired some investigation into a topic I’ve wondered about.

A lot of “where did they all go” question is old news for me. Friends working in a dozen different industries have kept me sort-of-in-touch with manufacturing tech, and support work after I retired in 2013. All of them, by the way, are making more money in today’s dollar than I ever did at my peak income. Pandemic and supply lines stuff aside, people with skills are in huge demand and everyone else can, at least, find a job if they want one.

Tech and other sorts of parts in the supply lines were coming unglued in lots of manufacturing in early 2018 as Trump’s “trade” fuckups scared some of our economic partners, like Canada’s forestry production, into finding more predictable/rational trade partners. At least one guitar manufacturer in California started using “urban forestry” to supplement their diminishing access to “tone woods” like red and yellow Canadian cedar. Lots of the raw materials we used to get from South America is now going, first, to China, Japan, and the EU. Those infamous ”chip shortages” that suddenly appeared in the media as “lost in the supply chain” during 2020 and 2021, were actually vanishing about mid-2019, again thanks to Trump’s trade off-again/on-again weirdness with China, Taiwan, and India where almost all of that stuff has been made since Reagan purged the US of manufacturing investment in the 80s with his bizarre and foolish Dribble-Down Voodoo Economics. If we didn’t want it, lots of other buyers did. Now, we’re nobody’s preferred customer. When you’re building (or working in) a service economy, many of these problems appear insignificant. In manufacturing and engineering, they are show-stoppers.

As far back as mid-2018 a friend who was working for a company that supplied most of the automotive industry with design and production of high-tech headlights complained about the fact that Chinese suppliers no longer felt obligated to stick to their price quotes for manufactured parts for which they knew the US (and EU) could no longer provide alternatives. Not long after that, the company began shutting down the parts of their production that relied on semiconductor manufacturing and my friend was prewarned that he’d need to get out while the getting was good. It took him less than a week to find a better paying job in medical tech and he left Detroit in early-2019 for Minneapolis.

As for “nobody wants to work,” justifying that claim with our current 3.1% unemployment takes some hard work or simple denial. Our acquaintance chose denial, which made for an entertaining song-and-dance and an amazing display of ignorance when it comes to how employment works. It helped that neither of these folks were ever skilled labor (Unless you call being a junior college adjunct anthro “skilled?”) and neither have any sort of employment record worth talking about. If you haven’t been involved in chasing this country’s economy from one area crash to the next during the past 50 years, it’s hard to explain job hunting. I, on the other hand, have never experienced the kind of job opportunities available to today’s employment-age workers. I’m getting hit up at least a dozen times a month, through my LinkedIn page, for jobs I’m qualified for and some that aren’t even in the vicinity of my experiences.

Oddly, this Chamber of Commerce article, ”Understanding America’s Labor Shortage,” is surprisingly informative (for a group sadly known for its corporate propaganda output and disconnect from much of reality). Thanks to a variety of issues—from early retirements to Covid deaths and long-term Covid effects, to the long-standing child care problems—“in 2021, employers ended up adding an unprecedented 3.8 million jobs. But at the same time, millions of Americans have left the labor force since before the pandemic. In fact, we have more than three million fewer Americans participating in the labor force today compared to February of 2020.” That isn’t including what anyone who has followed numbers in national disasters knows will be a much larger than the reported 1,2M US citizens dead from Covid.

Speaking of killing us with Covid, thanks to the MAGAt nitwits and their “fearless leader,” almost 20% of the US healthcare workforce quit during the pandemic and another 12% were laid off, about 1.7 million professionals gone from hospitals and clinics, The people left in that overstressed, underpaid industry are considering quitting, too: 31% of them, in fact. They are not having any problems finding alternative work, either.

The Chamber’s survey found that of the many people who have yet to return to the workforce, “Twenty-seven percent indicated that the need to be home and care for children or other family members has made the return to work difficult or impossible. More than a quarter (28%) indicated that they have been ill and their health has taken priority over looking for work.” That survey found that many of those folks are not returning to the workforce because they are “concerned about COVID-19 at work, indicate that pay is too low, or are more focused on acquiring new skills and education before re-entering the job market." Some of that last group are taking advantage of the fact that many skilled labor unions are providing free and paid education for highly paid skilled in-demand jobs such as electrician and plumbers.

Retirements are kicking the workforce’s ass, too. That same article stated, “As of October 2021, the pandemic drove more than 3 million adults into early retirement.” At the other end of “ where they went,”Over the last two years, nearly 10 million new business applications were filed and in 2020 alone more than 4 million new business were started.“ This is exactly the kind of economy, except for the booming job market, where I started my Wirebender Audio Systems business after a layoff in 1980 and various good and bad times kept that going until a few months before I retired. So, good for them.

And that is where they all went. Any questions?

Memorial Day

For me, this is a weird “holiday.” “Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for mourning the U.S. military personnel who have died while serving in the United States armed forces.” Or so says Google and Wikipedia. “Serving” in the US armed forces in the last 70 years has been an odd perversion of that word.

My father-in-law “served” in the Air Force between 1946 and 1966, enough to put in his 20 years and at a time when he mostly flew in a B52 from one US base to another pretending to be a “Cold Warrior,” but mostly drinking, partying, and making the most money he would earn in his lifetime plus a retirement salary that just kept growing until he died. My father served in the US Navy from 1942 to 1946 and saw more of WWII than he was ever willing to talk about and didn’t talk about it at all until he was in his 80s. He was mostly a confused small town kid being ferried from one end of the world to another on the credential of his college degree and officer status. He was an LST officer during both the North African and Italian invasions and saw a boat load of Marines he’d crossed the Atlantic with gunned down in the first few yards of the Normandy landing. He was never one of those guys who wore his WWII uniform or a hat full of medals and patches. When he ran into one of the guys who had spent a year with him on an LST, at a part-time summer job in the early 60s, they had nothing to say to each other.

Friends, some really good friends, were forced to “serve” in the Vietnam War and three of them did not come back and one came back so damaged that he was never functional again. That may not sound like a lot of people to you, but I have never had more than a half-dozen people I would call friends in my life. Losing four of them in a few years to a pointless foreign invasion was significant to me. Oddly and somewhat embarrassingly, I tried to join the Navy, like my father, when I was 18 in 1966 and thanks to a recruiter’s screwup I ended up being classified “1-Y” due to asthma and my Navy recruiter’s intense desire to stay out of combat.

The last two years have changed my perspective on who is serving who and who we should be memorializing. Covid hit the 1,000,000 US citizens killed mark in May of this year. “In some states, medical staff account for as many as 20% of known coronavirus cases.” The “Great Resignation” is loaded with men and women who have decided to leave the US healthcare industry because of the risk, the disrespect, and the fact that qualified and experienced doctors and nurses are more than capable of handling any job a business student might try to tackle. There is a lot more money in bullshit administration jobs than in healthcare. As of February, the estimate was that 1 in 5 healthcare workers have quit and at least one survey found that 1 in 3 plan to quit before the end of 2022. Most of this is due to crappy, over-paid and totally ruthless mismanagement. Hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies are mostly owned by large corporations with multi-millionaire CEOs and the rest of the totally useless “Cs” and while they publicly whine that they’re somehow worth the money they suck out of healthcare they are not. As a physician said in the Atlantic article, “We need to say to the next generation of doctors and nurses, ‘We got this wrong, and despite that, you’re willing to invest your lives in this career? What an incredible gift. We can’t look at that and change nothing.’” Will we? Probably not.

If Memorial Day were to mean something other than the flag-waving “moment of prayer” bullshit honoring the fools and occasional patriots who gave their lives for corporate profit and political maneuvering, we need to refocus on the word “serve” and give credit to those who gave their lives for a higher purpose and war is not that purpose. There was a brief moment, before Nixon abandoned the draft and the Vietnam War, when there was a lot of talk about expanding the concept of serving the country to everything from healthcare and public education to VISTA to the Peace Corps. Instead of only providing public service benefits to those who carried out the imperialistic plans of oil companies and the other international corporations our military has served to slavishly, the country would also honor and reward service to the country. In the 80s, California’s Alan Cranston was on a roll, trying to convince the country that broadening the range of service we honored with healthcare and education benefits when he managed to get himself tangled up in the Keating Five fiasco and prostate cancer (hard to tell which was worse) and decided to retire from politics.

For myself, Memorial Day is personal, not national. I try to remember the faces, the voices, the words, and they times with friends and family who are no longer among the living. At 74, my list is long and growing but there are term limits to how many I can lose before I’m lost. Sooner than later, I’ll be the one being remembered, if at all.

When “Owning” Isn’t Enough Different from Renting

This is pretty funny, “How the pandemic housing market spurred buyer's remorse across America." I’ve been predicting this almost from the moment house buying became a trendy thing to do. Looking at those lines of young people stacked up in front of some obvious “fixer-upper” provided me with many moments of entertainment in the last couple of years. The couple interviewed for the start of this article said, “Every time something does come up, I say to my husband, 'Maybe we should be renting.' Like, if only we were still renting, then the landlord could deal with this." Go figure, houses need maintenance and a generation who have spent much of their time complaining that every other generation had it easier while living in their parents’ home are discovering what every other generation knew early on, “Life is hard, then you die.” In the middle, there is maintenance.

I get bored sometimes and start prowling Zillow, almost randomly. Today, I decided to look up my parents’ first house in Dodge City, Kansas, an 800 square foot place built in 1950 that they moved into when I was 3 (’51). I believe they paid about $5,500 for it. Dad’s teaching/coaching salary at the time was $2,200/year plus he had various summer jobs that probably added another $300-$350 to his annual salary, at best. The minimum wage was $0.75/hour then and most jobs, especially part-time jobs, paid that. Supposedly, that house is worth $75,000 today, although the only house for sale in the immediate neighborhood is selling for $60,000 and has been on the market for more than 100 days. Asking price and selling price often differ in rural areas. The house is for sale is larger place with a larger lot, so it’s probably worth at least $10,000 more than my parents’ first home. The “rich family” in our neighborhood, lived diagonally across from us in a 1930’s 1100 square foot, 4 bedroom, 1-bath house and there was a small “park” in the lot next to us (it was a corner house). Our rich neighbors had the first television I ever saw. We didn’t have a TV in our family for another 5-6 years.

The cool, interesting thing I found today was the official Dodge City “rich family’s” house is for sale now. The family that owned this place had been in large scale construction since the 20’s. They built this place in 1938 (according to Zillow). I was in that house once, sometime around 1970 to repair a television set. I was still in tech school, but my instructor had recommended me for the job. I don’t remember how that played out. I’m sure it was a tube set. Odds are good that the repair was fairly simple. 

When I left Denver in 1996, there must have been 10,000 houses being built that were bigger, fancier, and more expensive than this Dodge City mansion, just around my neighborhood in Parker. My daughter used to give me crap for owning a “tiny” 1,400 square foot house. I thought the place was ginormous, especially when I had it all to myself.

I also did a price search on Minneapolis, the most expensive city in Minnesota and found a lot of perfectly nice homes (800-1100 square feet, like my current house) and my parents’ house in Dodge for sale at well-under $200k, some close to $100k and a few under that. With today’s microscopic interest rates, a $150k house is about a $550/month Zillow-estimated monthly home cost.

I think the problem most young people have is that they want to start off where previous generations ended up and they keep spinning fairy tales about how easy earlier generations had it. Having worked my way through to a degree, nights and weekends, I’m not particularly sympathetic to kiddies who think their over-priced but worthless liberal arts degree/party animal school debt should be paid off by the rest of us and I really doubt that these kids are going to do well with managing and maintaining a home if they manage to buy one. Even when their parents’ do all of the up-front financing and work, these snowflakes will be overwhelmed by homeowning responsibility.

The characters who bought our house in Little Canada are good examples. When we were selling it in 2015, a realtor told me that the trick is to make it look as if nothing needs repairing. “The house should look like a ready-to-move-in apartment and a blank slate so they can imagine their own stuff in the spaces.” So we emptied the place out, painted almost everything white, and polished every surface so that they looked totally unused.

I had some doubts about selling the ready-to-move-in aspect of the 2 1/2 acre lot that came with the house. I mean, how can you make a small farm look maintenance-free? The realtor said, “Don’t worry about that. It’s part of the dream.” She was right. The buyers and their goober “inspector” nitpicked all sorts of silly stuff in the house, most of which I ignored, but they didn’t ask a single question about maintaining the large yard and several gardens. Stupidly, I left them a riding lawnmower and a shed full of lawn and garden tools. A year later, one of our ex-neighbors was visiting and among their many stories about our home buyers were all sorts of hilarious bits about those kids wading through waist-deep grass in the backyard, finally asking another neighbor to mow the lawn for them because they couldn’t figure out how to start the one I left them (the battery was in the garage for winter storage). They even rented a large lawn tractor, but couldn’t figure out how to get it off of the rental company’s trailer. Again, that same neighbor bailed them out. Six years and a divorce later, they sold the house to another young couple who immediately asked their helpful neighbor, “I heard you take care of the yard in front of our house?”

My own kids are also good examples, unfortunately. One of them moves when the dishwasher drain needs cleaning and the other will literally go without a functioning kitchen sink rather than either fix it or pay to have it done. Even maintaining bicycles seems to be a family disability. Clearly, I suck at leading by example.

There is a “1% home maintenance budgeting rule” that few people want to acknowledge. (The formula is something along the lines of “Annual maintenance costs will run about %1 of the value of the house.”) From my experience, that number is conservative for landlords. Renters are destructive, often entitled and spoiled children, and sometimes outright crooked. I don’t think I ever escaped paying only %1 maintenance costs on the two rental properties I owned. 5% was probably closer to the real number.

Obviously, I know a few young people who are doing fine with all of the adult life stuff, but none of them are bawling about how hard their lives are compared to earlier generations. They buy “starter homes,” fix ‘em up, and trade up when they have some equity; like most everyone did before them.

Yeah, I know the major cities are expensive, especially in the ‘burbs and the desirable urban areas. And they always have been. In the 80s, I could barely afford a 750 square foot, 2 bedroom apartment in Huntington Beach, California on $80k/year ($1600/month no utilities included when I left in 1991). That is why I left, among other unaffordable things. Just like every generation in the last 150 years, young people want to get out of the country and move to the cities where there is stuff to do and jobs to pay for the stuff. With an additional 100 million people in the country, from 1983 when I moved to California, there is a lot more competition for city housing everywhere. As someone recently said, “Housing prices in coastal California are almost comical.” Finding a house that costs less than $1M almost anywhere urban along the coastline from San Diego to San Francisco might be impossible. Just like it has been my whole life, everybody wants to live in California, even the rubes who pretend they don’t (because there is no way in hell they ever could).

Not even a little bit surprisingly, it costs a lot less to buy a house in a small town and there is no shortage of rural housing. Also, there are a lot more ways to make a living in those places; even Kansas! So the argument seems to be “It’s too expensive for me to live where I want to live in the kind of luxury I expect.”

Well isn’t that sad?

Life does suck for unskilled minimum wage workers, especially the ones who imagine they deserve better; the theme song for white entitlement. My aunt, my mother’s younger sister, lived in Minneapolis in the 1950s with her 1st or 2nd husband. They were both restaurant/bar employees, and that was her “career path for life.” All she remembers about Minneapolis was being cold all the time. They lived in a drafty apartment, barely able to keep the lights and heat on and always scrimping to get by. I don’t think they were in Minneapolis a whole year before they retreated to small town Kansas and she didn’t leave her hometown until she remarried in her 60s. Minimum wage in 1950 was $0.75/hour ($28/month at 40 hours).

I moved to Dallas in 1967 and the minimum wage was $1.40, but my department store job wasn’t covered by minimum wage and I made $1.10 ($41/week) as a drug department manager. Ms. Day and I lived in a very small, single-car garage “apartment” that cost $10/week for the first year we were together. $10 for rent, $10 for my tech/computer school tuition, $10 for food, and $10 for taxes, transportation, and everything else was a budget I will never forget. The first time we had a meal in a restaurant together was a half-dozen years later, in Hereford, Texas. A friend who had a field service job with one of my ex-employers would come through Hereford and take us out to dinner at a hotel restaurant, on the company dime. (They wanted to hire me back.) That was roughly when our first, Holly, was born in mid-1971. That restaurant meal was a big deal for me, although Robbye’s family (military and government jobs) were pretty used to travel and restaurants. She married way down and I was way out of my league. A few years later, we were dining out at McDonalds, Burger Chef, and the occasionally truck stop restaurant once a month at most.

We bought our first house in 1973 for about $8,000. It was a ramshackle, two-story 1920s frame house in Central City, NE. I was making a red hot $126/week at 40 hours, but I worked 80-100 hours a week. So, with overtime, I was usually bringing in close to $200/week by 1976. Our house payment was probably about $70-80/month but the place was a wreck and I rebuilt it from the plumbing in the crawl space to the 2nd floor bedroom ceilings; or from below-ground-up to the roof. About my only real memory of the place was holding ¾” sheetrock up to a sloped 2nd floor ceiling with one hand and pushing nails into the sheetrock with my right hand thumb, followed by driving them in the rest of the way with a hammer I gripped in my teeth. Today, I can barely drag a 4’x8’ sheet of 5/8” into the basement by myself . Mostly, I slide it along the floor.

You could buy that Central City house for $35,000 today and we sold it for $16,000 in 1976. Our next house cost $20,000 in ‘76 and when the ag floor collapsed around 1980, we sold it for $20k. However, I had to give the “buyers” $5,000 under the table so they could fund the down payment. Between cost of materials, sweat equity, and an actual $5,000 loss, I don’t want to think much about how much economic damage home ownership did to us then. We moved to a small town in northeastern Nebraska where a friend rented us a ramshackle 1900’s 2 bedroom house for $80/month plus bills. That house had actual “central heat,” a large natural gas stove in the middle of the house that barely kept that room and the kitchen from freezing. The windows on our bedrooms, the bathroom, and the mud room regularly had a 1/4” layer of ice on the inside panes. I replaced our washing machine pump several times when the room froze and split the pump and hosing. 

I didn’t have a shot at owning another home until I moved, as a single guy, to Colorado in ’91. Denver, as is usual for that town, was the first to crash in Reagan’s recession, crashed the hardest, and was among the last to recover (lucky for me). I bought a home that was built in 1981: 1400 square foot “3 bedroom,” two bath, single car garage house for $71,000 (It sold for $180k new, a decade earlier.). I put the 3 bedroom in quotes because one of the bedrooms was sized about right for a dresser, a lawn chair, and a military cot.

I desperately wanted to keep that house for the rest of my life, but we moved to Minnesota and I tried renting it for several years. After being a landlord, it’s pretty tough for me to generate much sympathy for renters, though. All three sets of mine were given a lot of latitude and all they ever did was shred the property and whine. The characters I was stuck with for renters wrecked the house badly enough that I gave up on it and sold it in 1998 for $108k. I had zero luck finding a Denver rental manager who wasn’t a total deadbeat and crook.  Supposedly, that house is worth a half-mil now, but the house and the neighborhood are dramatically improved now. It has gone through a few owners since and I suspect I’d have given up on it in the Recession for lack of rental income, the low quality of rental candidates, the long-standing problems with lack of active policing in the area and the resulting squatters/vandals/meth cooks, and the fact that I was marginally employed in those years.

I almost owned the place, when I sold it; having made double and triple house payments for the 5 years I lived there and putting all of the rental “income” straight into the principle for the next 4 years. Even getting screwed, as usual, by realtors I came out of the sale with about $70k in cash. As much as I liked the house and regardless of how well that area of Denver has done in the last few years, I did even better with the investments I made with that $70,000. Denver is so overgrown, under-resourced (especially water), and crowded I wouldn’t want to live there now, anyway.

Over the several houses I’ve owned in my 70 years, I’ve learned a lot about home ownership, maintenance, and unanticipated problems and costs. None of it has been painless, most was expensive and time-consuming, and a little heartbreaking. Homeowning, like life, “is hard, then you die.”

The Rat’s Rules: #4 Friend or Not-Friend

The Rat's Eye Business Rule #4: Friends can call you on your “bullshit” because they know something useful and they care about you. Everyone else is an acquaintance or just a face in the crowd.

These days, it feels like we’re all being pushed into polar positions. One of those poles is “friend or not-friend(ly)” and that, I guess, is nothing new. In my memory, I think I remember people with different views and politics remaining friendly, if not friends. Today, that seems so long ago and so impossible that it’s entirely possible I’m deluding myself. I have certainly had many Republican friends over the years, but now that being Republican means being a member of the Trump Cult, not so much. My tolerance for that kind of gullibility, racism, sexism, corruption, and treason is near-zero. As someone much wiser than me explained recently, my “bandwidth” for a lot of things has been reduced dramatically by both Trump and his Republican enablers and the cult drones.

One of the qualities I’ve always valued in my friends (of which I only have, and want, a very few) is the ability and willingness to call “bullshit” in both directions. We all get off-track multiple times in our lives and run the risk of crashing and burning or heading down a trail that we’ll either have to backtrack out of or we’ll dead-end into and be stuck. If you get more than a couple of chapters into You Are Not So Smart, you’ll have to face the ugly truth about yourself and, if you are even a little bit introspective, you should hope for a few friends in your life who will gently help you recalibrate. Or, sometimes, not so gently if what you really need is a kick in the ass.

Probably a qualifier for friendship must be a decent match in corrective styles and reasonable expectations. You can’t hear “you’re full of shit” from just anyone. That takes a background of credibility, honesty, competence, and at least a little affection before criticism amounts to anything more than mindless contradiction. If you can’t take hearing criticism from an acquaintance or you don’t feel comfortable giving it back to them, it could be that your styles are so different that you can’t get that close; and you may not ever. So, it’s very likely that, if you use this requirement for a “friend” you might discover you don’t have many friends. Maybe lots of acquaintances, but damned few friends. Don’t be discouraged, most people don’t have any actual friends.

Another important quality a friend should have is “usefulness.” Useful people are the only rational candidates for a practical friendship. My wife has a long history of acquiring housewives for “friends” and discovering how perfectly useless they are when she actually needs a friend for practically anything more complicated than a borrowed cup of sugar. There is no performance measure for either a housewife or a househusband. The only requirement for that job is finding someone dumb enough to carry your lazy ass while you do all of the family adult tasks. Housewife and househusband are just a couple of politically-correct words for “unskilled and unemployable.” My wife found this out the hard way several times, but like the majority of women she is intimidate by women with marketable skills. So, her friendships are lightweight and too often based on being the wives of my friends.

I don’t have a single friend who isn’t smarter than me, more skilled than me, more interesting and well-spoken than me, and who doesn’t have an assortment of skills I will never master or even comprehend. Why would I be otherwise? What would be the point in putting any effort into the relationship with a dumb, untalented, foolish person? What would anyone get from that, other than a misplaced sense of superiority? The world is full of stupid and ignorant people and if that is not a disqualifier for you, you have 99.999…% of the planet to befriend. Of course, if you actually ever need something useful from those relationships good luck with that.

Post Mortem: I Just Wanted a “Family Day”

Monday 2/26/2018

My wife, Robbye, and I are having one of those classic “quiet days” after her day-long plan to drag me into the Cities for a day of being ignored by the kids, buying stuff, and waiting around for her visit to end stalled when she learned I had no interest in going. She tried the guilt trip, the anger trip, and the "I’m not talking to you” trip and we’re still in the last phase. She decided, yesterday, that she wanted to go into the Cities for a political meeting. Later, she decided she wanted to visit our daughter and her family before the meeting. Sometime after that, she started saying “we” when she described her plans and, this morning, I had to remind her that I had other plans for the day and had no interest in the 100 mile trip just so I could sit around being tolerated until she got back from the meeting. 

I’m just not into all of the family hassle any more. I’ve been everyone’s daddy for 60-some years and it hasn’t been particularly rewarding. I was a pretty terrible parent and only slightly worse as a grandparent. I tried, but I don’t have the necessary skills. I disappoint people on a constant basis, mostly because I do not understand them . . . ever. I don’t know what people want from me and I don’t know what I’m supposed to get out of most relationships. 

About the only line I’ve managed to draw in my life has been on funerals. Even that one gets crossed far too often. Once someone is dead, I’m convinced they no longer need anything from me and I would rather not attend funerals as a rule. I went to my step-mother and father’s funerals and those events were as baffling as being hit on the head from behind by a stranger. I don’t know why I was there or if anyone cared that I was. If my goal in life is to bring comfort to others, I’d just as soon they kill me and eat me for that purpose. 

Robbye and I are at the point in life where we are considering what we’d do if we were suddenly alone. She likes to think she’d do something independent, for the first time in her life. She imagines herself driving places towing a camper, a dog, a cat, and a house full of stuff. Or she might put all of the crap in a storage bin, where it will rot and be infested with mice, rats, and insects. The exploring part is the dream, though. I suspect she will muddle along in our Red Wing house for a year or so, get tangled up in some sort of home repair scam and lose a bucket of money, panic, and sell the house, camper, furniture, and the rest of our stuff for a huge loss and move into an assisted living facility. I like to think that I’d observe a reasonable period of mourning and hit the road. I’d probably sell the house to be sure I have nothing to come back to and simply disappear from my past life. 

The obvious directions are west or south: west coast or South America, that is. The past three years in Red Wing have made it pretty obvious that the “home” we thought we’d discovered and built is a myth. We’re about as established here as we were when we moved from Colorado to a rental house in Roseville in 1996. The “communities” that we imagined we were part of are all illusions. People say you aren’t a Minnesota resident until you are at least 3rd generation and, apparently, that is true. Likewise, once your kids no longer depend on you for support and sustainence, your relevance to their lives vanishes. That’s normal, if unexpected, and healthy for them. Sticking around to see if they might still need you is, however, insane. 

So, my wife’s dream of a “family day” is something she and we are going to have to get used to not having from here out. The kids don’t need us, probably don’t like us much, and get bored quickly when we are around. We always feel like we’re imposing when we visit them, their busy lives go on hold while they put up with us, and that’s about as satisfying as a pizza that has everything you don’t like sprinkled on top of the things you can just tolerate.

They Are Hurting? Who?

In one of the many conversations I’ve had with a local friend, I presented the proposition that Trump supporters, and most of his voters, were motivated by racism. In fact, many are primarily motivated by racism.

He responded with, “I don’t believe that. They are hurting and they voted for someone who promised to give back what they’d lost.”

Of course, what they imagine they lost was racial entitlement.

I have thought a lot about the phrase “they are hurting” since that conversation. I hear that phrase from liberal and wingnut commentators often, too. Living among the white working class my whole life, I’ve seen plenty of their hurting. When they pretend to be Christians and to care about the “unborn,” they are intentionally hurting women’s rights and liberty; even when it is women doing the hurting. When they “support the troups,” they are intentionally hurting the world by providing fortune and bodies and minds to the terrorism of whoever our “enemy of the moment” may be for the profit of the military/industrial complex and the 1% who profit from that industry. When they deny the overwhelming evidence and common sense scientific conclusion that human carbon output is the primary cause of rapid and destructive climate change they are hurting future generations of humans and the entire planet. When they pretend that athletes taking a knee in protest of police murders, racial targeting, and societal racism they are hurting everyone who doesn’t look like them. When they agree that building a Great Wall to stop immigrants from fleeing the political and environmental consequences of American exploitation of South and Central America they are hurting people who have no alternatives. So, it’s true that they are “hurting,” but who they are hurting is the real question.

I don’t believe that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist. As Lincoln once said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time.” I figure that “some” is about 5-10% of the population. You can also “fool most of the people some of the time” and that might add another 10-20% to Trump’s voters. The people who go to Trump rallies and who cheer for his racist crap and his mindless corruption, however, are not in Lincoln’s benevolent estimation. They love Trump because he says exactly what they think and believe. That doesn’t let the other 20-30% off of the hook, though. They are hurting exactly the same people who are the targets of Trump’s fascist policies. Ignorance and stupidity do not excuse fascism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. When you claim you are “hurting,” you need to at least admit that the hurt is something you are inflicting, not something that causes you suffering.

A Better Story Than A Pretty Good One

As good a movie as “Catch Me If You Can” was, the real story is far, far better. Being a parent is one of those things that our fractured, disloyal, unappreciative, corrupt, and uneducated society either devalues or corrupts out of superstition. The real story of Frank Abagnale's father and his relationship with his father to the moment of his parents’ divorce is amazing. The real story of how Abagnale became the criminal that he was well-punished for being is incredibly funny, sad, and amazing. His recommendations for how you protect yourself from cybercrime are insightful and valuable and I am going to stop using my debit card for ANYTHING once my nitwit credit union figures out how to quit screwing up their website.

And God Said

The gods don’t do a lot of talking, except to crazy people and other “prophets.” Nature, however, is pretty communicative; if you bother to listen. Early human religions were slightly more realistic than the clown shows we’re stuck with in modern life. Humans used to pray to the sun, the moon, the winds, rain, and good or bad weather. In other words, they begged nature not to kill them or their families. If you are going to be begging some greater entity for survival purposes, you probably ought to at least aim your questions and requests at something semi-real. Of course, even the most deluded theist or deist knows that nature does not give a damn about the existence of individual humans or even the entire species. We are just one lifeform, out of many, that has accidentally through evolution managed to turn into a marginally sustainable species. If we manage to kill ourselves off through stupidity or viciousness, nature will crank out another attempt at sentience (or not) in a few million years.

So, to an outside non-superstitious observer, what does all of the praying to various representational gods look like? It looks silly as hell, that’s what.

Re-imagine this, “Do not add a thing to what I command you nor subtract from it, so that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I am delivering to you. Then the Lord said to Moses that same day” with “Do not add a thing to what I command you nor subtract from it, so that you may keep the commandments of nature that I am delivering to you. Then nature said to Moses that same day.” Nature is never that wordy, so maybe that line will have to be left to the comedians.

How about this one re-written for sentience, “Then nature told me about some men from Anathoth who were threatening to kill me. They had threatened, “Stop prophesying in the name of nature or we will kill you!” That one is pretty much what Trump and the Trumpanzees are saying to the EPA, National Parks Department, and NASA. Maybe this biblical revisionism has a future? Even though humans probably don’t.

I sort of like this one, too: “The law of nature is perfectand preserves one’s life. The rules set down by nature are reliable and impart wisdom to the inexperienced.  Nature’s precepts are fair and make one joyful. Nature’s commands are pure and give insight for life.  The commands to fear nature are right and endure forever. The judgments given by nature are trustworthyand absolutely just. They are of greater value than gold,than even a great amount of pure gold;they bring greater delight than honey,than even the sweetest honey from a honeycomb. Yes, your servant finds moral guidance there; those who obey them receive a rich reward.” If a society made this substitution and practiced it, humanity might have half-a-shot at sustainablity. And I might have a dramatically higher opinion of my species.

We could add “the environment” to “nature” and really get some value from bibles. “But you who remained faithful to nature and the environment are still alive to this very day, every one of you. Look! I have taught you statutes and ordinances just as nature told me to do, so that you might carry them out in the land you are about to enter and possess. So be sure to do them, because this will testify of your wise understanding to the people who will learn of all these statutes and say, ‘Indeed, this great nation is a very wise people.’” Indeed, that would be a great nation full of very wise people, instead of being a brainless pack of morons driving headlong into oblivion.

Parent Propaganda

Recently, a young woman on LinkedIn.com wrote about the pleasure she is deriving from her childless life and how other friends and family don't believe her. Her problem isn't that she is delusional. Her problem is that misery loves company and is intolerant of happiness. Many people have been coerced into parenthood through guilt and social pressure and have discovered it isn't a fraction as positive an experience as advertised. Once the little darlings become teenagers, the last of what pleasure existed vanishes; leaving only the desperate hope that some sort of adult compromise will end the wars.

Some people are naturally smart enough to see through the breeder marketing, but that won't save them from guilt trips and myths and propaganda. A few of us realize that having a family is a choice that eliminates a host of other possibilities. People who are successful in business or who become expert in a field of study or who master an art form are not multitaskers. Parents are primarily multitasking amateurs for at least 18 years; mastering nothing except, ideally, their own tempers and lowered expectations. If having kids makes us so “happy,” it must be really hard to explain the repeated results of marital satisfaction surveys that demonstrate just how unhappy kids make their parents (see the survey chart attached to this paragraph).

In one of his many excellent routines on the human condition and delusions, Jim Jefferies asked his audience to “put up your hand if you truly believe you have a stupid child.” Seeing no response, he yelled, “None of you? Well guess what? It is statistically higher than that!” He chased that down with, “You child isn’t stupid. Your child has a ‘learning disability.’ That’s the definition of stupid. If you have difficulty learning, that’s what stupid is.” Humans desperately want to imagine that their offspring don’t fall into the 50-something-percent of below-average nitwits (and “average” isn’t an improving characteristic in our dumbed-down society). The only way to cling to that delusion is to keep the little nitwits in constant motion through sports and other activities so that the school system will value them mostly because of your participation in functions that would otherwise require teachers of school administrators to manage alone. As someone who spent a dozen years teaching at a for-profit college that, eventually, dumbed-itself-down to catering to momma’s little rejects, I can tell you that many of your children couldn’t outsmart a pet rock. And if that is not an unfulfilling way to spend your life, I don’t know what is.

But your mileage very definitely may vary.

Recently, I have decided there are a couple of categories that people fall into: 1) people who have something to do with their lives that obliterates all other options and 2) people who have unfocused and scattered interests and who just need stuff to burn up their time and years. If you are the first, having a family will slow you down or defeat you in your life’s purpose and you will burn up your years searching for that mythical “balance” bullshit that is no more real than fiction’s “true love.” If you are the second, you will fill your life with kids, pets, trivial activities, and lots of friends who share these likeable non-passions.

In saying this, I am not making a value judgment. If everyone were the focused and driven type, the species either wouldn’t reproduce or reproduction would always result in either the single-parent or the distracted parent model (No, they aren’t substantially different.) People who are not driven to accomplish some specific thing in their lives make good parents, committed pet owners, family member caretakers, and community contributors. Those are among their best qualities and activities. At the other end, the undriven are often called “slackers,” but the driven are just as likely (or more) to end up burned out young and useless thereafter.

The thing most humans don’t comprehend is that we can’t have it all. Type 1 driven folks are unlikely to have anything resembling a happy or healthy home=life. The choices are either follow that passion all the way to the logical conclusion or flail away unsuccessfully at having a “balanced life” and fail at both hitting your goals and succeding at your chosen field while you raise unhappy and dysfunctional children and do that ridiculous serial monogamy thing every few months or years at a time. Type 2 undriven folks often want to have the money, power, and recognition that only Type 1’s ever achieve and their jealousy turns into a dysfunctional society that attempts to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Very much like what is happening right now with the Trumpanzees and their Tangerine Misleader.

Free At Last

Listening to comedian Rory Scovel on the January 20th Live from Here show, I realized that he’s right: the freakin’ world is gonna end with Trump in charge . . . and that is, weirdly, a good thing. During the show, John Prine even did a song with a lyric that emphasized that thought. They’re both right, we’re free, we’re finally free. Nothing matters any more. Everyone is going to die at pretty much the same time.

The religious right made it clear to anyone who knows anything about traditional Christian theology that the only remaining Christian “value” is the Supreme Court interpretation of the first amendment that exempts “churches” from corporate or personal income tax. That’s it, for them. End of moral discussion. Nothing else matters. Yeah, they babble about “right to life” in their 13th century hustle to get women back into the kitchen and delivery rooms, but that yak has been going on since the first European immigrant wet-backed into “New England.” The right to an abortion is one of the first marketing ploys the "New World” promoters used to con women into risking the wilderness. Face it, Republicans don’t care about any lives but their own and the Koch brothers’.

For decades those two groups, Republicans and faux-Christian evangelicals, have held the high ground in the cultural war’s labeling and marketing game; with phrases like “family values,” “Christian values,” “American (‘merican) Values,” “traditional values,” and so on. Now, thanks to Donald John Trump, those days are long over for several reasons. The first would be that the evangelicals and the uneducated and the self-appointed moral guardians of “conservative values” elected Donald John Trump; a vulgar, hedonistic adulterer, a sexual and economic predator, self-aggrandizing narcissist, a child-molesting, serial bankruptcy con artist, and all around near-perfect anti-Christ. If they can vote for him, nothing they’ve ever said about morality has meant squat.

Guys like me, who used to think it was polite to save “special” words for the garage and basement, have been cut loose. George Carlin would be amazed. All seven of his “words you can’t say on television” are now on television almost every night. Just from the language Donny John has let loose on the public, all bets are off. “Fucking,” “motherfucking,” “fuck,” “shit,” “shithole,” “shithouse,” “pussy,” “son of a bitch,” “bullshit,” and pretty much any other collection of words that used to be considered obscene and unfit for public use are now spouting from the President’s tiny pursed mouth. Boorish and bigoted behavior is now the model we’re showing to the world from the White House, But if you think Trump’s language is mean and obscene, you ought to hear what his minions are saying.

The only words Donald John Trump seems to think we all need to avoid are “vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based, and science-based.” Who knew what “obscenity would be in 2018? George Orwell would be writing a whole new 1984 if he’d lived to see Trump’s America.

But the real gate-buster is the fact that, not only are we all likely to die while Donny John is President, but that we are all going to die at very nearly the exact same time! Think about how liberating that knowledge is. One of the disgusting values most liberals hold dear is “What kind of world are we leaving for our children and grand-children?” Republicans, pseudo-conservatives, and fundamentalists of all stripes and denominations never worry about the future: they either don’t care or they and their death cults sincerely hope that we’ll all die soon. Well, we’re leaving those kids absolutely nothing, which means we don’t have to worry about their struggle and suffering from the mess we’re going to leave them. We won’t be there to slut-shame and they won’t be there to do the slut-shaming. We’ll all be dead!

Isn’t that awesome? Seriously.

I’m not kidding.

We’ll all be dead, every one of us within a few seconds of every other: barely time for the last ones left on the planet to say, “Oh, shit!” And we’ll all be dead and gone and, afterwards, there might not be much left of the whole planet’s ability to support life.  At the literal least, when Donny John is done, it will be at least 100-200 million years before the alligators, crocodiles, rats, cockroaches, bottom-of-the-ocean amphipods and echinoderms and foraminiferans, and/or houseflies evolve into something capable of being pissed off at us for blowing up the world. 

How is that not liberating?

We might as well legalize practically everything that isn’t directly and intentionally murderous: only because we don’t want to short anyone out of their 1-3 years max life-expectancy. Drugs, all of them, all of the recreational ones, anyway, get legalized. Screw waiting for lazy, incompetent Republican congresscritters to get around to shutting the door on the DEA. This is a states’ rights issue. Just legalize anything that can get us high and make federal law enforcement stay in Washington, D.C. (where weed is already legal). We’re good with the totally bonkers right-to-lifers; everyone dumb enough to get pregnant gets to be a mom just in time for both mom and the kid(s) to be blown to bits! What’s the worst thing that can happen to new moms? 1-2 years max and your troubles are over. Of course, drug manufacturers get to sell their latest male and female sterilization and birth control drugs without any sort of FDA approval process. Over-the-counter, for crap’s sake. Who wants to be pregnant or a new dad if the odds are lousy that the kid will even live long enough to be born?

Nothing you can say, nothing you can do (excepting the murderous boundary), no words are obscene, no sexual behavior, and no financial crime matters. Because we’re all going to be dead in the same moment. And it’s going to be soon!

Obviously, if someone doesn’t want to wait for Trump to poke his “really big red button” with his tiny little fingers, they should have all the resources necessary to take an early exit. Pfizer and the companies that make sodium thiopental should get to be as rich as they can be in the 1-3 years they have to sell death-row drugs to the general public. When someone does manage to off themselves, relatively painlessly, we’ll be done with dreary, teary funeral ceremonies. We should celebrate that kind of skill and research. Most likely, we’re all going to fry in a blast of several-thousand degree evaporated atmosphere and radiation. Who knows? Trump’s apocalypse might be incredibly painful and the successful suicide will seem like the smart choice. We should all be jealous, rather than selfishly-sad. Every death will be cause for one of those drunken Irish wakes where at least another half-dozen mourners get killed on the way home from the party. Life will be like non-stop frat parties, which we’d think was irresponsible and shortsighted if we thought there was going to be any sort of future to worry about.

So, I say it’s time to celebrate the Age of Trump. We’re all going to be guilt-free and that’s no easy thing these days. In fact, if Trump doesn’t kill us all, the smart move will be to follow Trump with President Rock or Nugent. On their first day in office, either one of those two drunken nitwits would stumble into the Oval Office and fall on Trump’s “big red button.” Otherwise, our kids and grand-kids are really going to hate us for the mess we’ve left them and we’ll probably live long enough to hear about it.

Trump-Colored Glasses

On a short camping outing this weekend, we met a couple from the Twin Cities who seemed to have a lot in common with us: the same camper, the same age, roughly the same education, and similar life and work experiences. The surprising major difference was that they are committed Trump fanatics. The guy wanted to talk about mythical “antifa” atrocities he’d witnessed while he was participating in Trump rallies at the state capitol. The woman kept chanting “You should listen to Donald’s whole speech in Poland. It tells you who he really is.”

I did that and, relatively speaking, Donald was reasonably impressive in his ability to read the Teleprompter without too much self-congratulation. However, he followed up that performance with Tweets demonstrating his usual insanity, "We will fight the #FakeNews with you!" over the moment when Donald tried to intercept President Duda’s wife who was on her way to acknowledge Donny’s wife. Apparently, he didn’t want to miss the opportunity to pat himself on the back because he followed that weirdness with “My experience yesterday in Poland was a great one. Thank you to everyone, including the haters, for the great reviews of the speech!” He was really proud of his reading ability, apparently.
However, my takeaway from the camping experience was that Trump’s fanatics are completely mesmerized with The Donald. They are somehow entranced with something about his personality. My wife speculated that many of these people had a “favorite boorish uncle” Trump reminds them of and that familial memory is the link that draws them to him. It’s a weird kind of charisma that loses most of us, but conservative white people appear to be drawn to it like moths. Like moths, they are totally uncritical of whatever it is that attraction is about.

One of the stranger things said that morning was the wife’s conviction that if Hillary had been elected we’d be on the way to war with Russia. I have no idea where that night terror came from and she wasn’t at all clear on its origin, either. I’d vote for “fake news” if I had to speculate.


We had our brief encounter the morning after the Las Vegas massacre, which made one of the morning’s conversations seem surreal in retrospect. My wife and I hadn’t heard the news about the shooting. The couple repeatedly talked about how sad they were that so many of us felt disconnected from our fellow Americans. I said that the fact that public places were becoming so dangerous thanks to the many nutjobs who feel the need to go everywhere armed isn’t doing honest conversation much good. He said, “we need to get the guns away from the nutjobs.” Obviously, that is the NRA’s distracting chant. It’s also a non-starter. I suspect the most sane people in the country are unconvinced that wanting to own a gun is an indication of sanity. The things people use guns for are the best indication of why they want to possess them: suicide, murder (mostly family members and friends), and fear. I don’t know where you would start if you decided to take guns away from crazy people. At least one in five US citizens experience mental illness in a given year. Where would you start in identifying who is “mentally ill” and who is just a pissed off son-of-a-bitch? Do you worry about the difference?

Among the things this couple used to justify their love of Donald Trump, consistency and rational thought weren’t on the list. They just desperately want Trump to be their fearless leader and don’t want to be judged on the merits of that desperation and irrationality, “We’re not Nazis!” Like most of that crowd, they absolutely hate President Barack Obama. They hate Hillary Clinton. And they absolutely believe nothing about those positions make them bad people. I came away from the conversation feeling even more like this is 1933 and that Canada probably isn’t even close to being far enough away from the United States when this all comes to a head.

Always Visitors, Rarely Visited

When my wife and I were young, we lived in a variety of hell-holes from Dallas and Hereford, Texas to mid-sized and small towns in Nebraska. When none of our family or friends visited us in those places, it was no surprise. We didn’t want to be there, so why should anyone else want to visit? However, when we moved to Omaha in the early 1980’s that should have changed. But it didn’t.

Omaha had more recreational resources than any of the places we’d lived previously and dramatically more than where our friends and family lived. Still, we did the visiting and no one came to visit us . . . ever. We moved to southern California and had three visitors in ten years. Part of the SoCal problem was that our $1600/month apartment was tiny and we had no room for anyone other than us. We moved to Colorado and my brother visited a few times and our daughter, once, but we were pretty much left on our own there, too. As always, we travelled to visit my family. Next, we moved to Minnesota which is a world more interesting than Kansas, Missouri, or Texas, but we’ve pretty much been left alone here, too. Even our daughter’s family, who live less than 10 miles from us, rarely make the trip to our place. Instead, as always, if we want to see the kids and grandkids we travel to see them. I’m not sure what that means, but I think it means my wife and I are hermits. Maybe not by intention, but certainly by lifestyle.

When my parents were alive, we'd make the miserable pilgrimage to western Kansas, often fighting out way through blizzards during the holidays. After we'd been "home" for an hour or two, my parents would settle back into their normal life, as if the effort we'd made to visit were inconsequential and expected. After a few years of that, my wife decided to quit travelling to Kansas. I should have wised up sooner, but I didn't. I guess I wanted my kids to know where I'd come from and had wild hopes that my parents would want to get to know my children. We were always from different planets and that was never going to be likely, though. We're not much for visiting these days. Travel, yes, but travelling to see family or friends, not so much. And, as always, no one travels to see us. Even as old fucks, we're expected to go to them, whoever "they" are.

So, in the fall of 2014 Robbye and I are moving to Red Wing, Minnesota, where we know no one and would be starting life over at 66 and 64. It could be intimidating, but it is only a little because we’re not giving up much. We’ll be leaving the city, but that’s no real sacrifice. I’ve had all of the urban noise and traffic I need for a lifetime. We’ll be moving about 40 miles further away from the kids, but since we see them once or twice a month that’s no big obstacle. Their visits to us are so infrequent that we won’t notice any change in that area. The grandkids won’t be staying overnight or on weekends during school months, but they don’t do that much now, anyway. Most of the good friends we once had in the Cities have left or drifted away. It's not unusual for us to go for a month without seeing anyone but strangers in stores. With that in mind, we might as well be where the cost of living is lower, somewhere quiet, less pointlessly busy.

I am curious as to why we’ve always been visitors and rarely visited. Maybe we’re not good hosts? Maybe our home is not comfortable. When I worked at the school, we had a fair number of parties during the summer and, sometimes, people came. Often, they did not. More often than not, I’d have enough food prepared for the party that we’d be eating on the leftovers for a week afterwards. I never thought much about it at the time, but in retrospect it seems to be part of the story of our lives.
I’m writing all of this, of course, in the fall of 2014 and I expect to be long dead when Google “publishes” this addition to my blog. Of course, I might live longer than two more years but it seems unlikely at this moment. Google might not be messing with Blogger in 2016, so maybe no one will ever read it. Maybe people will be so involved in basic survival in 2016 due to climate change, revolution, or societal collapse that even if Google still pukes out scheduled blog entries it will be unnoticed. No problem there. I’m used to it by now.

Is the Gap too Far?

Not long after the “election,” I brought a Xmas pie to our young neighbors. I’ve talked about “Dan” before, when I discussed his argument (“I don’t believe that.”) against the evidence that market forces, congressional lawmakers’ opening the world market to our ammunition manufacturers, and gun hoarders like him who have driven the price of ammo up. Dan doesn’t vote, so nothing that happens “is my fault.” His wife, someone who works for the Veterans’ Administration and holds a BS in microbiology, like her family voted for Trump. She earned that degree at the University of Michigan, where she claimed “the professors were terrible.” I don’t know who’s who in microbiology, but I do have to wonder what someone with a science education is doing voting for Trump. Maybe her education really was terrible.

When we talked about her reasons for voting Trump, she said “there are books” written about Hillary Clinton’s corruption; which is true. A few of them are written by reasonably credible writers, but most are financed by the Koch idiots and the right wing propaganda machine. However, her family is all Republicans and Fox News fans and her propaganda saturation was complete. She said she even cried as she left the voting booth, but she was convinced that “Hillary lied” and she followed that statement with “but I believe in Jesus Christ.” I do not get the connection. I don’t get how people who imagine themselves to be any kind of Christian could find a way to voting for Trump. While there appears to be no evidence that Christians feel any obligation to behave decently it always seemed to me that the point in being Christian should be to do at least a few of the things that make the Jesus character appealing.

Apparently, Christians (especially the televangelist millionaires) are really on board with anything that ensures their “churches” never have to pay taxes or behave in any fashion resembling “Christian”: as in putting those millions to use doing anything other than packing their pockets, buying mansions and airplanes for their personal use, and fleecing the gullible. That is the religion I’ve always known and been disgusted by. One of the hallmarks of this brand of Christianity is a desperate desire to instigate “Armageddon.” Not because they really believe they are going to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, but because it absolves them of any responsibility for future generations so they can carry on with their perversions and avarice without guilt. Again, what would be the motivation for an intelligent person to follow that sort of philosophy?

Of course, Dan’s only response was, “Hillary wants to take my guns.” He and I have had the conversation about how Reagan and Bush I were the only presidents to do squat to his gun rights with the Brady Bill. He’s still terrified that Democrats and 63% of his fellow Americans want some sort of gun control to slow up the decline of the country into gun nut chaos. Dan, of course, is afraid to travel anywhere, even in Goodhue County, MN without a weapon in case he gets his chance to be a “good guy with a gun.” Didn’t we used to be “the land of the free, home of the brave?” We also used to be a world leader in science and technology and we made stuff the rest of the world wanted to buy. That was then and this is the country that deserves Trump and has earned the ridicule of intelligent people worldwide.

I have to wonder if reasonably intelligent Americans, some with moderately decent educations, can be so easily fooled by low-rent propaganda and idiotic arguments, is there any hope for the country? The gap between the Tea Party know-nothings and people who actually make the country run, do science, make products and invent things, and demonstrate some level of creativity is growing so large it seems like humans are splitting into two incompatible species. That’s probably not a bad thing, since the left-behind species is superstitious, uneducable, and dangerous to the planet’s survival. The problem is that they are the overwhelming majority in the world and, especially, the majority in the USA.

Red Wing, MN Real Estate Market 11/25/2016

I check the real estate market fairly regularly, mostly to see what the rental business tells me about my hometown’s economy. I was more than a little surprised to see how much of Red Wing is up for sale this Thanksgiving weekend (154 total homes for sale, with 2 forclosures and 11 for sale by owner properties). When we started looking for a home in Red Wing (population 16,000) in 2014, there were only a couple dozen homes for sale and practically none in the $200k-and-above territory. Today, there are 59 $200k-and-up homes for sale with a surprising number (13) of $500k-and-above homes available. Two-thirds of the Red Wing homes for sale are $100k-and-up, which is middle class and upwards in a city this small. More than one-third of the homse for sale are $200k-and-up. If that doesn’t make the city council and government very, VERY nervous, they are braindead.

Are the rats leaving the ship? Post-2016 election, I am certainly thinking about bailing out of Trumpland. The only thing to think about a city and county that votes overwhelmingly for a bankrupt, mobbed-up, Russian-financed con man is that there is a whole lot of stupid here and that is not a good sign for the future of the area. This palace belongs to one of my rich neighbors and they are asking “$699k” for the property. If I owned a $700,000 home in a place that was suicidal enough to elect Trump and Jason Lewis, I’d be panicked. (Maybe, if I could afford a $700k castle that wouldn’t be true, so that could be beyond my imagination.)

However, I can easily afford the home I’m living in and the self-destructive citizens of this county and city are making me nervous. I’ve lived in a town this size when industry and the people who make things happen fled. In the early 1980’s, right after Reagan was elected, Nebraska’s farm economy crashed and I lost all of the equity I had in a home in Fremont. When we moved to Fremont, there were a half-dozen houses for sale. When we crashed and burned, there were several hundred and prices were rock bottom. A smarter person would have bankrupted and walked away from the property, but I paid the downpayment for my buyers, took a $5,000 loss on an $18,000 loan, and left town broke and in debt. Today’s situation in Red Wing feels suspiciously familiar.

The south end of the Twin Cities appears to be in a similar economic situation. While Ramsey and Hennepin County properties are still pretty strong, Dakota and Washington Counties are well-decorated with bank owned homes and auctions. There are too many nice looking properties selling for under $100k in areas where the non-foreclosed properties are selling for $200k-and-up. This is some kind of economic indicator, but I don’t know what kind. Could be a good time for rental propertyinvestment or it could be time to cut and run from the stupid parts of the state.

Dropping the Bar Further than Ever

Minnesota’s second congressional district, my new home town, elected a character right out of America’s worst nightmares and history: Jason Lewis. Our old representative, John Kline, wasn’t much better, but he at least pretended to be a local representative rather than the corporate shill he has been since 2003. Kline mouthed the Republican code words for racism, economic inequality, corporate rights over human rights, and the usual litany of bullshit Republicans have spewed since Nixon. Lewis doesn’t bother.

Jason Lewis thought the US was mistaken in actively deciding to banish slavery. In his steaming pile of gibbering monkey drivel, Power Divided is Power Checked: The Argument for States' Rights, Lewis wrote “In fact, if you really want to be quite frank about it, how does somebody else owning a slave affect me? It doesn’t. If I don’t think it is right, I won’t own one, and people always say ‘well if you don’t want to marry somebody of the same sex, you don’t have to, but why tell somebody else they can’t. Uh, you know if you don’t want to own a slave, don’t. But don’t tell other people they can’t.” So, Minnesota’s proud Union heritage has been blasted into history by electing a quasi-modern pro-slavery half-wit. Yeah, he’s anti-civil rights, too, but that’s just a given for what passes for “modern” Republicans.

Not surprisingly, Lewis has an elevated opinion of his own sex. Lewis called women “simply ignorant of the important issues in life” and “non-thinking” during one of many mentally-deficient moments on his hate-jock radio show. Of course, if you can tolerate his bullshit book for even a few pages, you’d discover that Lewis is the poster boy for historical delusion and technological incompetence. You might even be tempted to call him “non-thinking.”

Most hilariously, he has referred to himself as John Galt-like, which is pretty amazing. This child of the idle upper-class a couple of party animal degrees: a master's degree in political science (University of Colorado at Denver) and a BA in education/business (University of Northern Iowa). With that background, he’s barely equipped to manage a Dollar Store. Galt was, at least, a fictional character who had some ability to create and utilize technology. Lewis needs help identifying his microphone in a radio studio. Like most of the pseudo-conservative nut jobs in the Republican Party, Lewis will demonstrate his job killing skills in Washington, but his nitwit voters will blame his incompetence and laziness on Democrats.

Minnesota foisted one idiot, Michelle Bachmann, on the US political scene, which made the state a world-wide laughing stock. Here we go again.

Trump’s Election Upside

Buying local is expensive and a hassle. Most conservatives don’t bother with spending their welfare and social security money on local produce or on local products or services. Without progressives, liberals, and moderates there wouldn’t be any local businesses outside of second hand stores.

In 2016, 1,322,891 Minnesotans voted for Trump and 55% of Goodhue County residents voted for everything Minnesota Nice was supposed to oppose. There were worse places in the state, some voting as high as 74% for Trump (Morrison County, where 32,000 barely-educated, 97%-white, timid Fox News-misinformed souls live in rural isolation) and many of the non-urban counties citizens voted Trump in 60% or greater numbers. Morrison County is typical of those outstate Minnesota ungrateful wretches, where unemployment fell from 12% in 2009 to about 4% in 2016. “Thanks, Obama,” said no one while they voted for a guy who relished their displacement and economic destruction in 2009.

So, when I go to buy groceries, household products, building materials, appliances, furniture, services, or anything locally, I have to think, “I have a 60%-or-better chance of subsidizing a Trump nutjob with my money.” Obviously, if I buy from Target or Wal-Mart there is a 100% chance that I’m handing my money to a corporate fascist but I’m spending considerably less money (For example, $0.89 for eggs vs. $4+ for locally grown eggs). The premium I am paying might be for the expectation that I’m buying chemical-free produce, but I wouldn’t trust a Trump supporter to be half-honest as an organic food supplier. I wouldn’t trust a Trump supporter not to be a slave owner, for that matter.

This puts local suppliers in a tough position. They advertise they are not Republicans or Trumpeters and alienate 60% of their neighbors but self-identify with 90% of their customers? They don’t advertise their political positions and people like me assume they are part of the 60% and we pass on gambling that they might be sentient humans? Not my problem. My job is to avoid the Trumpeters as much as possible and that means I either go with known quantities or avoid local producers because they are expensive.

#155 Making Death Personal (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

This month death got personal.  On the scale of suffering that people experience, I admit my experience may be trivial.  My dog died.  I didn't lose a child, my wife, a sibling, a parent, or a dear friend.  Just a dog. 

I've suffered losses before, more substantial losses, but not more personal ones. 

When I was a kid, my mother died; after a year of suffering the failures of the American medical system that were typical of 1957.  Not long after that, my father's father, my grandfather, died.  During the Vietnam years, two close friends died in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia.  A decade later, a young dear friend died of massive heart failure, thanks to a short life of tobacco abuse and poor diet and genetics, less than a year after I'd moved to California.   My youngest daughter was nearly killed in a terrible car accident and my wife and I clung to each other for support for four awful, long days, until we had some assurance that she would survive and we could imagine our lives restarting again.  I've survived death and near death of those close to me and it was painful, heartbreaking, and bits of me left with those spirits.

I've hunted and killed animals.  I've witnessed strangers' deaths so first hand that they took their last breath within sight; once, within range of my touch.  Death isn't something I fear, particularly.  I'm not religious, superstitious, or inclined to believe that a painless death is a bad thing at the end of a well-lived life. 

My dog died within minutes of my coming home at the end of a work day.  He, Puck, had been sick for a few weeks, noticeably.  I don't think he suffered much, except for loss of mobility in his last couple of days of life.

Puck was a pound dog.  He came into our lives at a pet store, a few weeks after our first dog had been killed when she escaped our yard and found her way into traffic.  I had no intention of replacing her, but my wife somehow thought we needed to fill that hole in our lives with another life.  Puck looked like a wild dog, we have no idea what breeds he came from, but he was the gentlest of souls ever to grace the earth.  His only fault was that he loved children uncontrollably.  Any excuse, any tiny sound of children laughing, and Puck would find a way to escape his leash, his fenced yard, or just slip away when we weren't looking to find the source of child-sound and be loved by a kid.  Kids all loved him, too. 

Adults were sometimes afraid of his wild eyes, his huge teeth, and his giant grin, but kids figured him out instantly.  My baby grand daughter's first word was "Puck" and that is still her favorite word for "dog."  She lavished love and abuse on him for a year of his life.  Not that she would even think about hurting him, but she loved him so much she leapt to hug him when he'd come into the house and, sometimes, she'd practically crush him to the floor. 

There were a few, quite a few, times when I was less than a big admirer of that dog.  Puck would take off, any time we weren't paying perfect attention, chasing down the sound of kids or other dogs.  I spent too many afternoons and evenings stalking our neighborhood looking for "that damned dog" and I vowed, more than once, to beat him into a pulp when I found him.  I always found him playing with kids and he'd be so happy to see me that my anger would dissolve into something closer to disappointment.  Disappointment that he wasn't satisfied with our company, that he so desperately need to be around children, that two old people who cared for him weren't enough to keep him happy.  It wasn't his fault. He just wasn't our dog.  He was a kid's dog.

So, finally, we saw the light and my daughter's family adopted him.  He flourished, only running away a couple of times in the year he lived with them, with two in-house kids to love.  In the last couple of months, he developed a urinary problem.  My wife and daughter took him to a vet, who gave him antibiotics and said it was either an infection or something much more serious.  The bleeding cleared up and he did well, except for slowly dropping weight while appearing to have a good appetite, in the next month and a half.    Suddenly, one morning, my daughter discovered that Puck couldn't stand and was dragging his hind legs around the yard. 

She called us, my wife and I, for advice.  We aren't particularly wise about sickness, death, or doctors.  We both lost our mothers to cancer and we're fatalistic about death.  Still, I didn't want the kids to watch their pet die, so I offered to bring him back to our home, to what we still called "Puck's yard," to see if a change in place might help. 

For a day, it seemed to.  Puck couldn't walk down the porch steps, but he did take some tentative steps in his old yard and found his way up to the deck in his yard, where his dog house used to be and where he'd spent many hours listening for the sound of neighborhood children playing.  He was with us for two days and, the morning he died, my wife had spent a few moments with him before going to work.  She thought he seemed tired, but he didn't show any signs of being in pain.  I left for a department meeting that morning and didn't get out of the house in time to look in on him before I left for work. 

When I came home, about noon, I went out to see if he'd eaten.  It was starting to rain a little and Puck hated being in the rain.  If he was not in his dog house, I planned to carry him into our sun porch, where we had a mat and some blankets laid out for him.  I found him, slightly warm but stiffening, at the edge of the deck. He was probably trying to crawl under the deck, where he'd spent a lot of warm or rainy days when he lived with us.  His wild eyes were still open, his huge tongue was out, but cold and unmoving, and his constant grin was replaced by something lifeless, something not at all like the dog I'd known for almost eight years. 

Puck and I had something different than "love" between us.  He frustrated the hell out of me, running away and being the most incredibly "lazy" dog I've known.  He didn't chase balls, catch Frisbees, or play tug-a-war.  Puck didn't particularly like going for a walk and wouldn't run if you chased him with a pitchfork.  He hated water and cowered like he was being beaten when we took him to the lake to swim with the family.  He just wanted to lay in the shade and be played with by children.  Not a bad life's goal, obviously. 

Some folks will probably say we abused him by not taking him back to a vet to be prodded, probed, poked, x-rayed, hacked open, and experimented on.  Maybe.  He might have lived longer if we had.  He might have died miserably in a vet's cage or on an operating table.  Puck hated his visits to the vet, even when he was there for a few days while we traveled.  The women who cared for him on those occasions said he was "the best dog" and gushed over him like he was a baby, but he desperately wanted out of that place and acted as if we'd abandoned him for few days after he got back home. I'd have to carry him into the vet's office for his annual shots.  He was passive, didn't try to escape, bite me, or struggle, but he wouldn't walk into that building on his own power. 

I know how he feels.  I worked in medical devices for a couple of centuries, one decade.  I met lots of greedy, careless, arrogant, uninformed, unskilled doctors.  I also met a few dedicated, incredibly skilled rare exceptions.  I found that hospitals are soulless, heartless, unhealthy places to die, even though a wonderful facility (Denver General Hospital) and its amazing surgeons gave my daughter's life back to her and my family.

All I want from the medical business, when I'm dying, is whatever it takes to live as comfortably as possible for however long I have to live.  No chemotherapy, no radical surgery, no radiation, no messed-up pharmaceutical experiments, no funky plastic replacement organs or bone parts, no electronic cardio-stimulation crap, and no time wasted in a hospital bed.  Tell me how long I have to live, give me whatever I need to squash the pain, and get the hell out of my way while I finish up the days of my life. 

That's how I hope to finish this mortal coil (whatever that means).  I may fail.  I may lose courage and wallow in false hope while I make my family miserable caring for my gutless butt, but I hope to do better than that.  Besides, I'm a lousy patient. 

Puck died well.  I can only hope to die as untroubled. 

When I found him in the yard, I sat with him for a few moments, remembering how vital and loving he'd been.  Just the night before, I'd sat in the yard and talked to him while he rested his head on my leg.  We made some kind of peace with each other and I couldn't find any sign that he was in pain.  I rubbed his neck, he licked my hand, and we watched the geese in the lake and the trees waving in the wind.  Leaves were budding on the trees, it was a warm, sunny day.  I left him outside that night, thinking he'd be more comfortable in his yard, in his dog house, than on the tile floor of the sun porch. 

Now, he is dead. 

I closed his eyes, wrapped him in a sheet, carried him down by our lake, and buried him in the rain.  While I dug the hole, I put a tarp over him, to keep him dry.  Puck hated the rain and I stupidly thought he'd be "more comfortable" under a tarp than getting wet under a sheet.  When I put him into the hole, I was amazed at how small he was.  He'd lost a lot of weight, but that wasn't all.  He seemed so much larger in life than he was in death. 

Today, I'm working in the attic and it's raining again.  When I took a break and looked out the window, I had a perfect view of "Puck's yard."  I remembered him wandering the yard, looking up to see if someone was watching him, hoping someone would let him out to go look for kids to play with. Then that recollection vanished and was replaced with the memory of that dead, furry shell he'd left for me to bury.  I don't think I've yet shed tears for Puck.  Maybe I didn't love him as much as he deserved.  Maybe I'm old enough that a dog's death won't make me cry.  Maybe I'm an asshole who doesn't care about my own pet's life and death. 

What I did think about, looking out that window, was all the people who've lost more this year, this month.  Parents who've lost sons and daughters to war, terrorists, criminals, disease, and accidents.  Those who have lost a spouse, a friend, or someone or something dear to them through no fault of their own.   I thought about the people who had to bury or burn the bodies of their loved ones, because there was no one there to do it for them.  I compared that to my shallow experience burying my grandkids' dog. 

I thought about those pampered assholes in Washington and Wall Street who are so immune to human feeling; greedy rationalizing men and women who callously bomb innocents who had the gall to get between the oil coveted by the Texas Mafia.  I pictured myself as one of my fellow Americans trapped inside of nature's fires, hurricanes and floodwaters, ignored by those soul-dead bastards.  My dog's death didn't compare.  Nothing I've ever experienced compares.

What can it feel like to be treated that badly?  How much can you hate someone who causes that kind of misery?  How far would you go to "get back" at someone who dropped a bomb, carelessly and viciously, on someone you loved?  I think I feel a little of how far I'd go and it scares the hell out of me.  It scares me that this government is making that kind of enemies for my family and my country.

April 2006