Who cares that the only nominee the left leaning party has is a lying old sack of what was once debatably estrogen who, during her stint as Secretary of State was incommunicado to the point that her people couldn’t reach her when they needed her and they all died and she has lied for over three years to cover her own ample ass when one could be watching three seasons of The New Girl instead?
The New Girl is much more fun than the Old Bag.
Who cares that the right leaning party has been pirated by a reality television blow hard who doesn’t seem to get that you can’t say that and be politically successful? Of course, the more he trumpets his anti-immigration, misogynistic, xenophobic positions, the higher his numbers go…but the rest of the neutered field still insists that everything he says is political suicide.
Time for me to re watch Fringe.
Is it possible to care too much that there are monsters among us who dice up infants and sell them for parts? It’s quite obvious than plenty of people can care too little. If you think it’s not possible to make that reality even worse, we, the tax payers are forking over a half a billion dollars a year to fund these monsters and their chop shops.
I was never that big a fan of American Horror Story.
Meanwhile, one brave wannabe candidate has truthfully answered that he doesn’t think electing a Muslim as POTUS is a good idea and fools (even right leaning fools with MDs, with whom I agree 90% of the time) have accused him of wanting to rewrite the Constitution. No, there is certainly no clause pertaining to religion in the Constitutional requirements for running for president. There’s also no clause regarding political ideology but I will never vote for a communist, Satanist, socialist, anarchist or adherent to the great religion/political mashup known as Islam, despite their Constitutional right to run.
Time to re watch Rescue Me.
I’ve read several books in the past few weeks. One was highly recommended by my sister, Margy and my Mom.
Life After Life is a novel about a woman who is reborn over and over to live her own life until she gets it right.
I found it tedious. What did this poor girl ever do to deserve having to live through WWII and the London blitz over and over again?? Not only that, but the neighborhood she grew up in was plagued by a serial killer for a year. Fun! Who wouldn’t want to do that over and over?
I get it. It was grim.
In the end, she isn’t supposed to save the entire world from Hitler (she offs him in one failed iteration) she’s only supposed to save her stupid little brother and his girlfriend. Why? Who knows. More importantly, I don’t care.
Then I read the second novel by Ernest Cline. I loved Ready Player One; it was original, lots of fun and well written. Armada, his second book, isn’t. In fact, it felt like a really long prologue to the real story.
Then I read The Prisoner in Cell 25 by Richard Paul Evans. It’s the first in his Michael Vey series for young teens. Hey, don’t knock it! Some of the stuff written for kids is really fun reading. The Hunger Games may not have been the 21st century’s answer to the Chronicles of Narnia but they were hard to put down! Holes made me cry. In this genre, you almost never have to deal with authors who are trying to show off their vocabulary; kids won’t stand for pretentiousness. Just get out of the way and tell the story. I liked PC25 much better than James Patterson’s Maximum Ride books. Both series center on kids with unnatural features and abilities but Patterson (or whoever wrote those books under his name) gets lost in the weeds and never gets around to telling the reader how his heroes got to the dire straits in which we find them. Evans seems to understand that kids with wings or the ability to manipulate their electrical fields are the story.
A few weeks ago, Jay and I ducked into a used book store down near our favorite chop house. On a whim, I went looking for titles by Owen Francis Dudley, who wrote The Shadow on the Earth, one of my favorite books of all time. I found one! A first edition of The Last Crescendo (the story of Paul Gray). That’s what I’m reading now. I’m not very far into it; I hope it gets better.
I also want to read The Martian, which Zack was reading but having just seen the movie, said I could take. That’s fair, since he took my copy of Hamilton, which I haven’t finished yet.
I just finished Submission by Michel Houellebecq. I had a hard time putting it down but in the end, not much actually happened. It’s a chilling tale about the not too distant future and how easily a university professor and his colleagues bend to the will of the political majority once the Muslim Brotherhood is the elected majority in France. I guess the fact that France crumbles without a fight is what makes the story so scary.
Watching the news these days, I’m coming to the conclusion that Europe really didn’t survive the two world wars. The wounds they suffered are turning out to be mortal after all.
I’m in a morbid mood.
Most likely that’s because in the past week, Jay and I attended the funerals of two good friends.
T had been one of Jay’s best friends since they were kids. He was into extreme sports before they were a thing. T was a diver for the University of Minnesota way back in the ‘70s and he looked like it, even into middle age. While all the rest of the guys lost their hair and abs, T was still fit and strong well into his fifties.
He could have died in our backyard when he was 47. It was the summer of ’03 and straight line winds had knocked over our silver maple, taking the power lines with it. T showed up in our yard the next morning with his chain saw, ready to take the tree apart for us. If Jay hadn’t been there to stop him and show him that the live wires were still in the grass and that the tree was hot, our cat wouldn’t have been the only casualty of that storm.
That wasn’t T’s first brush with death. Back before I knew him, he lost his brakes driving a semi through the Rockies. I’ve seen pictures of the cab afterwards. Now I know what those grassy ramps beside the mountain highways are for.
Two years ago, T was diagnosed with a rare condition the doctors came to simply call “Multiple systems atrophy”. Imagine if ALS and MS had a baby. That’s what got T.
P, on the other hand, had recently been diagnosed with cancer. We have so many friends who’ve had cancer and survived! One of our favorite couples have both survived cancer scares in the last five years! So when P told Jay about it in August, he said not to worry; he had a type of cancer that was very treatable and his prognosis was excellent.
It was the last time he and Jay ever spoke.
An infection during the first round of chemo proved fatal.
Both were good men, successful in their fields, happily married for decades to the love of their lives with kids who adored them and friends who would drop everything to be there in a pinch. Both deaths were shocking but in different ways.
It was hard believe that T, always strong, athletic and active could so quickly become completely debilitated. His initial prognosis was that he might have five years but they would be increasingly difficult. Multiple systems atrophy. Every part of his body would simply shut down. He was determined to do as much as he could for as long as he could. On Wednesday, he went for a bike ride with friends. On Friday he suffered a stroke and he died early Monday morning.
It was a blessing.
T was never going to get better, we all knew that. It was only going to get harder and more painful.
But P was supposed to get better. This wasn’t supposed to kill him. I still can’t believe it.
He and his wife were two of the first friends that Jay and I made as a couple. He was the first to call Jay “Piv”. Before that, Jay’s buddies had a different nick name for him. Not a good one.
Back when we were all young and starting out, we had a lot of fun together. I remember once, when Jay and I lived in Jamestown, the four of us met for a weekend in Fargo, at a hotel with a casino. Jay and P planned to gamble the night away. They lost their stake in about twenty minutes. So much for the high rollers!
Life got busy and while Jay and P always stayed in touch, we didn’t see each other much. Christmas cards and the occasional 4th of July. I guess I just took it for granted that eventually the guys would get off their respective merry-go-rounds and we’d have time to get together again. I thought there would be more time. Everyone thinks there’s going to be more time but Jimmy Buffett is right: Twenty four hours or sixty good years, it’s not that long a stay.
Both of our friends got sixty years and they weren’t just good, they were great.
But 60 is really not that long a stay.