I Don't Care!...I Won't Do It!

 It's hot outside. We set a record temperature for our area yesterday (92) and might do the same today. Still, I had made up my mind to mow the back yard lawn today because in some places the grass is mid-calf high and there is rain predicted for the next four days. Some of my neighbors will probably mow later today; others not. We've all got different philosophies on how and when to cut grass. There's a couple of other differences between me an them. They've all got riding mowers. I don't. They all wear shorts. I won't. I don't care if it's a 120 out there, if I'm stupid enough to be cutting grass I'll be doing it in jeans. 

My attitude toward shorts has about 75 years of history behind it. In the late 40s and early 50s on Milwaukee’s South Side we all wore shorts, because our mothers made us. We didn’t want to, but come summer vacation out came the shorts. “You’ll feel cooler, and besides they look good on you” was the explanation we’d get in response to our protests. We knew the real reason was that there were no knees to wear out and they stayed cleaner a little longer. It was these same unreasonable mothers who made us wear rubber boots at the first hint of a snowflake, and not only wear them, but completely buckle them up which eliminated any chance of salvaging a cool guy image. The only situation that could possibly be worse would be shorts and rubber boots. Nobody could have survived that humiliation. You’d have to move to like Idaho, or someplace like that. 

The above photo taken of me in 1946 is what I'm talking about. I was probably kneeling down to make it look like I was wearing long pants. That obviously didn't work. Could I look any more like a geek? I guarantee that if I'd had long pants on I would have been standing tall with my best tough guy look on my face. That's what wearing shorts did to us guys.

I think mothers felt it was their duty to make our lives miserable when we were under 10 to 12 years old. Maybe they viewed it as character development. The problem with shorts is they made you look and feel like a sissy. I’ll bet in those days shorts were the reason for more bloody noses than anything else. We didn’t have any problem within our gang, because me, Ed, Baldy, Eddie, Pinky, Norb and Eugene were near the same age and all in shorts. It was when we crossed paths with some other gang who had slightly older guys wearing long pants that the insults would come and the fists start flying. If you were in shorts you almost automatically got called a ‘twerp’ by other guys. “Your mother dresses you funny” was a standard taunt. You could either take it and be labeled a sissy, or you started throwing punches. Even if you lost the other guy was less likely to mess with you next time you met. It’s probably not possible to understand the resentment we felt toward shorts if you weren’t there at that time.

We’d see photos in magazines like National Geographic of teenage guys in England, France, and Germany wearing shorts and laugh our heads off. Teenagers!! How could they expect a girl to even look at them without laughing? We thought mothers must be really strict over there! And then one day we saw photos of British soldiers fighting in Africa. They were wearing shorts. Soldiers in shorts! Can you imagine John Wayne leading his platoon in an attack on an enemy beach...in shorts? Forget the beach...can you even imagine John Wayne in shorts!? Or Wyatt Earp facing a dozen outlaws at high-noon on main street in Tombstone...in shorts? The outlaws would have been rolling on the ground laughing so hard that the gunfight at the OK Corral would never have happened! One of us suggested that maybe the British government issued shorts to make the soldiers mad and fight harder, but we finely decided that the war was causing shortages of everything and probably they didn't have enough material to make long pants for all of the soldiers. We felt sorry for the guys who were issued short pants.

Going from shorts to long pants was sort of a rite of passage. There wasn’t anything that triggered it. It wasn’t like...”Okay, you’ve reached a certain age or height so now you can wear regular jeans.” It was just…one day a guy would show up in jeans, and you knew he’d crossed over. In our gang Norb was the first. Nobody said anything and nothing really changed but things were never quite the same. If I remember right the following year Ed was next, followed soon after by Eugene and then Baldy. Then there were only three of us left – each of us hoping it would happen to us early next year because none of us wanted to be last. I don’t remember how it worked out. All I remember was there came a time in my life when I was finally through with shorts; an attitude and feeling that remains with me to this day. I could not force myself to go out in public wearing shorts.

Now, I do have a couple of pairs of Reebok shorts with matching tank tops that I wear for my morning exercise workout. And sometimes I'll wear them in the house if I'm just lazing around watching tv or whatever, but to wear them outside?...never! I know damn well that if I did that I'd hear voices from the past shouting, "Hey twerp - your mother dresses you funny!"

Christmas comes early!!

 My wish in my previous post has come true. Tucker Carlson is gone! One of THE WORST causes of divisiveness in this country will not be spewing his misinformation and outright lies in the evening on the FOX network. One can only hope that he will not resurface on another media platform. 

And Santa has given us a bonus. Don Lemon...Tucker's spin doctor left wing counterpart on CNN was also canned. It seems almost too good to be true. Could these moves away from extremists on both sides be a prelude toward a centrist movement, where truth, reason and civility reside? 

What will the MAGA crowd do now without Tucker? Who will tell them what to think? Sure, I know that there are plenty of  right-wing extremists, each churning out their pet conspiracy theories and character assassinations but Tucker is the king, and the king has fallen. The Emperor has no clothes!

Now, if only Chris Christy would step up to the plate.....

Way to go Dominion!!

 There hasn't been a lot to feel good about lately. Broadcast news is a parade of depressing reports...senseless shootings, countless numbers of illegal border crossings, the political arena is still a game of party over priorities, nurse shortages, drug use skyrocketing, teacher strikes, confidential secrets being leaked (defended by Marjorie Green as a patriotic act), the war in Ukraine, and Biden and the Dems going mostly in the wrong direction. 

There is one small ray of hope. There is the possibility that Chris Christy might run for president in 2024. He is a rare politician; a person who looks at issues from an objective perspective and applies reason versus party position to form his opinions. He would be a candidate that, for the first time in many years I could vote for and feel good about it. The problem is that I don't think that he's electable. He doesn't fit the mold that we've come to expect from candidates. He's not a speech maker nor a slogan machine. He's the 'guy next door' who speaks his mind without fanfare and fluff. And in my opinion what he says makes sense. For those reasons and others the Republican Party heads would not rally behind him. Trump would insult and denigrate him which would cost Christy the votes of those who still cling to the notion that the election was stolen and that Trump is the greatest president this country has ever had.

Speaking of the stolen election, it was with a glad heart that I learned that FOX had thrown in the towel in the Dominion defamation law suit. I don't think that $787.5 million will have much of an effect on Fox, but any reasonable person is going to know that the settlement is an admission of guilt. I would have liked to see the settlement include an apology from FOX stating that the network knowingly perpetuated false information, but the Smartmatic defamation suit against FOX is still out there so maybe an apology will result from that. 

Also in the settlement I would like to have seen a stipulation that Tucker Carlson had been removed from his television show and had been appointed head of janitorial services at the network headquarters. That would be a good fit, because there is a certain similarity between the content of his show and the content of toilets.

Thoughts While Chopping Wood

 We have a huge water oak in our back yard. The trunk has a diameter of 4.5 feet, is 75 feet tall and the canopy is as wide as it is tall. It is an estimated 240 years old. As time passes there are many branches and some hefty limbs that die, and some healthy limbs that have grown over our house. We often have days with strong gusty winds, which means I'll be in the yard picking up branches and a few medium size limbs. Every time I do that I think about those limbs hanging over the house. 

I called a guy and told him that I wanted the tree's canopy to be cut back severely all the way around, both to open up the yard to more sunlight and to eliminate the hazard to the house. He did exactly what I wanted including cutting the trimmed wood to 20 inch lengths for use in our fire pit. I way underestimated the amount of logs there would be. He helped me stack the logs inside our shed, and when that was full against an outside wall of the shed. The trouble with the logs is that to be burnable they have to be split. As Shakespeare said, "Ay, there's the rub!" 

I went to Home Depot, lifted a splitting axe with a 5 pound head and immediately knew that this 82 year old body couldn't handle it. I bought one with a 2.5 pound head and hoped that it and I could do the job. It took me 3 1/2 weeks working 3 to 4 hours each day to split all of the logs that were outside of the shed. A 5 pound head would have split most of those logs cleanly with one stroke. With the 2.5 head I usually needed 3 to 4 hits. I'm sure that in my younger days I would have done better. 

You don't need to do a lot of thinking when you're splitting logs. The mind is free to wander where it will. My mind often wanders to subjects that surprise even me. 

In one of those Avenger movies Thor's mother tells him, "Everyone fails at who they're supposed to be, Thor. The measure of a person, of a hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are." When I heard that line it sounded interesting if not profound. I assumed that some philosopher or poet had written the gist of it so Googled it to see who that person might be. There are well over a million hits on that line, but I found nothing that attributed the quote to anyone in particular. Apparently the line is original to the movie and originated from one of the script writers. Thinking a little further about those words, the profoundness started to lose its luster. Everyone fails at who they're supposed to be implies pre-destiny; that there exists a blueprint detailing our various qualities...personality, characteristics, moral code, actions, capabilities, etc, and that we are destined to deviate from that blueprint. Who drew up that blueprint? Whose expectations have I failed to meet? Whoever it is has done a lousy job because according to Thor's mother not one person has met the expectations. In the end what initially sounded thought provoking to me turned out to be nonsense. 

The second part of that quote, "The measure of a person, of a hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are" is also nonsensical. In my view you can neither succeed nor fail at being who you are. Who you are is fixed, whether you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or a down-and-out junkie. You are who you are. Period.

Thor and the rest of the Avenger gang do a lot of time traveling. Every time I read or hear the term 'travel back in time' it always bugs me. I absolutely, positively believe that time as a separate entity does not exist. What exists is change. Time is a man-made construct the purpose of which is to measure rates of change. If there were no change, and I defy anyone to name something that doesn't change, there would be no time.  

In what may seem to be a contradiction, there is past, present and future, though it could be argued that these terms are merely arbitrary designations of time/change. I imagine a sewing needle, standing erect with thread being pulled through the eye. The thread that already passed through the needle is in the past. The thread in the needle is the present, while the thread approaching the needle is the future. The past is gone. You can remember, read and talk about it but you can't live in it. It's gone. 

You can imagine, plan and talk about the future but you can't live in it now or ever because when it enters that needle it is the present. It logically follows that we can only live in the present. Which raises the question, what is the duration of the present...what is the width of that needle? Because a definition of the present has no practical value we're free to label it whatever we want, from a zeptosecond (a trillionth of a billionth of a second) to an hour, a day, a week or whatever. For me the present is the period from when I awake in the morning until I go to bed at night. It seems natural and works for me.

One measure of change that is bothering me is the rate at which people I know or knew are passing on. I know that in our age range it's natural and inevitable but it doesn't seem right that you've run the marathon and at the finish line, instead of a trophy there's loss of physical and mental abilities accompanied by suffering. 

Obituaries often read that the decedent "died a peaceful death surrounded by friends and family." Maybe so. Others read of the decedent "passing on after fighting a courageous battle" against cancer or Alzheimer's. Nobody fight a battle against those things. The best you can do is take whatever options are available to you and pray for a miracle. In the end, after messing with you for a while the diseases kill you. Even if you go out quickly with a heart attack or stroke, you've still had your share of health issues that make living a little more difficult and unpleasant. It ain't right.

At the next vacancy for ruler of the universe, if I'm elected I'm going to implement an amendment to the death process. I'm going to call it the 'tranquil passage for seniors' and here's how it works. An older person dies. No pulse, no brain wave activity. They're gone. But, for a period of thirty minutes their awareness and consciousness continues. And they immediately become aware that they have no pain, no aches no discomfort of any sort. Their hearing and sight is perfect. They have their own teeth. They are in all regards physically and mentally 100%. They have no worries, no responsibilities or obligations. They don't care about Ukraine or climate change. Rising gas prices don't affect them. They can put aside forever the regrets that have been bothering them for all these years. They don't have to be nice to that aunt they hate. They will never have to take another pill. They'll never again have to take from their mailbox a pre-approval solicitation for a Capital One credit card. It will be thirty minutes of pure bliss...utopia Then a chime will ring softly and they will be gone. That is a proper ending.

A Can't Miss Career Opportunity

If I had it to do over again, vocation wise that is, until recently I thought that I'd like to be a pizza delivery guy. Or else the guy that puts those little oval labels on fruit. But not a shoe salesman. I tried that once during summer vacation in my high school days. I didn't do too well at that. It was easy when guys came into the store. They already knew what they wanted. All I had to do was find the right size and bingo!...I had a sale. I cringed when a woman would come in. Mostly they didn't know what they wanted. They'd give me an idea of the colors they preferred and sometimes the type of heel, but that was it. I knew that when the ordeal was over they'd walk out empty handed and I'd have a dozen pair of shoes to put back in the boxes and return them to the storeroom. Some of the other guys were pretty good at convincing the women that the shoe they had just put on their foot might as well have been designed especially for them. I couldn't get the hang of that. I'd usually say something like, "Mam, I'm sorry but I have no idea what you're looking for." Which resulted in no sale and a few weeks later no job.

But I can't go back in time and it's too late for me to begin another career, and besides that I've changed my mind. Today I would advise any young person to pursue a career in investigations. I haven't read or heard anything about it but I'm sure that there has to be a tremendous shortage of investigators. Think about it. Pick a news item, any news item and I guarantee that the word investigation will be attached to it. Anything that is said, done or even contemplated is or will be investigated. 

A school crossing guard in Nowhere Georgia shows up two minutes late and an investigation is immediately launched regarding the school's road crossing policies, the municipality's hiring practices, the company that manufactured the guard's alarm clock, and Trump and/or Biden's possible malfeasance in this "...horrendous neglect of our children's safety!". Civil investigations will be triggered by attorneys representing the parents who have filed suits due to the severe mental anguish they have suffered. It is a documented scientific fact that large doses of money combined with valium greatly reduces mental trauma. And in the end the crossing guard will be fired, write a book, and do the guest speaker thing on various commentator's programs.

The biggest demand for investigators is in politics. Politicians are not sent to Washington to conduct business, but to call for investigations. In the case of the Democrat and Republican parties, they employee an army of investigators to investigate each other. The committees appointed to oversee the investigations are themselves investigated. The investigations have little to do with the pursuit of truth. Rather, the intent is to place blame...to smear the other side of the aisle 

There are many universities, both on-line and brick and mortar offering degrees in criminal investigation. I did a quick search to see if I could get an estimate of open political lawsuits. I found one (a questionable site I will admit ) that says that the number of political suites in process exactly equals the number of miles between the earth and the moon (when the moon is at its perigee). 

I don't know what the starting salary for a new investigator would be, but I'm sure that it's more than a pizza delivery person or the guy who puts labels on fruit. It could even exceed that of a shoe salesman. So to you young readers, if there are any of you, don't hesitate. Get into investigations, and especially political investigations. Besides the big bucks you get to meet fascinating people like Trump, Biden, Santos, Harris, MTG, and AOC. Well, you may not see that as a benefit but it could get you some publicity.

I just may hire an investigator myself. I have been seeing a number of powder blue cars on the road lately. Or sky blue if you prefer. And the paint looks like the chalk paint that is so much in vogue these days. They look like custom paint jobs. Why would anyone do that? It is the ugliest car color I have ever seen. In fact I haven't seen anything uglier since the days when women wore colored pantyhose. There were black, red, purple and every other color legs under the sun. To me the women looked like they were on their way to audition for a clown job in a circus. I might even hire a investigator to find out who was responsible for making women wear those pantyhose. I can't believe that they would do that voluntarily. So here's an opportunity for a fashion investigator to solve the Great Pantyhose Caper. The trail may even lead to Washington.

Looking Back

 I had lunch the other day with a friend in Chattanooga at the Pier 88 restaurant. I like Pier 88. Their specialty is hot boiled shrimp. You're served a plastic bag containing shrimp and some of the liquid the shrimp were boiled in, a plate for the shells and a large bib. I never order that item. I prefer cold shrimp dipped in a tangy sauce. And I don't like the greasy face that is unavoidable when eating from the bag. It lacks dignity. That's the same reason I don't order cuy (guiney pig) in Peruvian restaurants. It's served whole including the head and oozes with grease. The head is left on to show you that it's not a rat. Or so I've been told. And the skin is so thick and tough that it could be used to replace the metal on booster rockets shot into space.

I order the fried tilapia basket. Pier 88 does great fish. The meal includes fries, cole slaw and either two or four tilapia fillets. Two is not enough for me so I order four, and then complain for the next hour when I have that bloated feeling. 

During lunch we were talking about shopping and how different it is today, and how Internet buying has had a devastating effect on brick and mortar businesses. We were recalling how many businesses from the old days were gone. I told of how my mother would send me to the corner grocery store...Lindner's Groceries really was on the corner and right next door to our house. She'd give me 25 cents with the instruction to get some lunch meat for dinner. Emil, the butcher (most grocery store owners cut their own meat and wore a long white apron so were always called butchers) knew that my mom wanted equal amounts of liver sausage and bologna so he would start slicing the meat while asking me how school was going. I'd walk out of that shop with a paper bag containing a hefty amount of sausage. It was always liver sausage and bologna. There was an old joke about a woman who walked into a grocery store and said, "Give me 25 cents of lunch meat, easy on the boiled ham." Boiled ham was over fifty cent per pound. Nobody in our neighborhood ate that.

Sitting there in Pier 88 I guess I was talking almost non-stop when my friend interrupted me by saying, "Tom, you're living in the past." Her comment was not meant as criticism but as understanding. The conversation switched to what each of us was going to do with the rest of the day and then we went on our separate ways. But I didn't forget her comment about me living in the past.

What does living in the past mean? Is recalling the past the same as living in it? It seems to me that I'm living in the present, though I do spend a lot of time thinking of and enjoying the past. After all, I'm 82 and the vast majority of my life is in the past. That thought led to my wondering, what does living in the present mean? Is there a present? The question that I just typed now is in the past, isn't it? If the past and present are nebulous, what can be said about the future?

Albert Einstein said, "The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly held illusion." The noted theoretical physicist Sean Carrol has seriously posed the question, "Why can't we remember the future?" I'm not going to say that I understand what the two of them are getting at but it seems to me that they're saying that time exists without past, present and future and that time doesn't flow, though Carrol talks about the "arrow of time", seeming to indicate that time has direction. It's hard to make sense of it, though in the end I think it doesn't matter what labels - past, present or future are placed on time. We're here, we exist at this moment and that's the name of that tune. 

For practical purposes we have to recognize that there was a yesterday, there is a present, though the boundaries we place on the present (a minute, hour, day, week, month) are of our own choosing, and there will be a future. The future is important, especially if you're young. If there is to be any sort of quality life, the future has to be planned for. Goals have to be defined and plans to accomplish them need to be formulated. Those are not small nor easy tasks. For better or worse, people my age and older don't have to be concerned about planning for the future. In fact, I don't have any concept of what planning for the future means at my age. All of life's milestones have been passed. There is nothing major remaining that needs to be planned for. The trips to Rome and Egypt that I always meant to take but never did seem now to be trivial. I could still do them but I've been to many places and have learned that people are people and places are places no matter where you are; it's just that the color and flavor is slightly different. I think the same can be said for most experiences in life. 

What it comes down to is this: if enjoying a good meal with friends in a restaurant and talking about the good old days...if taking a quiet walk in a park with Maribel and enjoying nature while talking about a past event is "living in the past", then I am perfectly content with the present and whatever future remains to me.

I thought I was done with this post, until it occurred to me that it may appear that I have assumed that all older people share or should share my point of view about a limited future. I didn't take into account those with a religious belief. I'm not talking about the window-dressing-going-through-the-motion folks....those who have never given any thought as to why they believe. I mean the theists' with a sincere heartfelt religious belief. For those people the future is unlimited; death is a step to something greater. I don't have a religious belief. If a label has to be put on my viewpoint, I am an atheist. 

Before I go any further with this, let me explain my flavor of atheism. If I'm going to believe in something, I want facts, concrete evidence. Regarding a supreme entity, the existence of a god has never been proven, and I can't disprove it, so because I can't disprove it I have to allow the possibility that a god or something of that nature exists. Note that I said possibility. Though something may be possible, the questions remains is it probable, and after a decade of off and on exploring religion in my early days I concluded that the probability of a supreme entity existing is near zero. That conclusion remains to this day.

In those early days of exploration I would often get involved in religious discussion, and occasionally I would be asked how I became an atheist. I would usually respond by telling them that they were asking the wrong question. We are all born atheists. Many people acquire a religious belief through the influence of parents, friends, institutions, culture, customs and social pressure. Some of us do not. So the correct question is why didn't I acquire a religious belief? I have many answers for that question, and also opinions as to why religious belief continues, but that's an issue for another day.

"The People Have Spoken"

The people have spoken...those were the words that Senator Warnock used at his victory celebration. Almost all elections are relatively close, and yet the victors use those same or similar words, as if they've been given a sweeping mandate by an overwhelming majority of the population. The numbers relating to Warnock's win don't indicate that Georgians en masse rose up to carry him to victory.

According to the Georgia Secretary of State office there are a total of 7,866,677 registered voters. The most recent numbers show that in this weeks senate runoff election there were 3,535,579 votes cast. So 55%, or 4,331,098 of registered voters were no-shows. Of those who did vote, 1,816,096 (51.4%) voted for Warnock. Herschel Walker received 1,719,483 (48.6%) votes. The bottom line is that 23% of eligible registered voters chose Warnock. Democrats and the media are touting the win as a great victory. Given the above numbers, to use the phrase "The people have spoken" is a joke. 

I voted for Warnock. I was tempted to write in Mickey Mouse but did not want to risk the loss of my vote being the reason for Walker being elected. The man is a proven liar. He did not graduate from the University of Georgia. He was not involved with the Cobb County Sheriff's department or with the FBI at Quantico. His lies and moral character are being challenged by several woman and members of his own family. His handlers kept him out of debates and off stage as much as possible hoping to avoid his nonsensical gibberish comments. That he has the intellect and knowledge of a primary school student and possesses no qualifications at all to be a United States Senator is painfully obvious. That 1,719,483 voted for him is an amazement to me. I cannot comprehend what form of reasoning could possibly lead anyone to do that. Or to elect Marjorie Greene to the 14th Congressional District with 70% of the vote. One might theorize that there is something toxic in Georgia's drinking water, but that doesn't explain the popularity of other 'unique characters' like Lauren Boebert in Colorado and Mat Gaetz in Florida.

Try as I may I cannot come up with a rationale that would explain why half of the voters pushed the Walker button. The only possible explanation is that reasoning is not part of the process. It is those on the far-right placing party over everything, automatically voting for the Republican candidate no matter how unqualified and/or extreme they may be. And by doing that they're destroying the very political party they're trying to preserve. It's even possible that these same people would support a candidate who proposes to suspend the Constitution.