What I've Been Doing - Vol IV

If it's really Vol IV or something maybe I'll change it later. Anyhow this is just a sample of the sort of madness I have to deal with politically all the time with the far right. Although yesterday it kind of reached new heights. I did not watch last night's Republican debate but heard that the dialog there was just about as nutty. There is still stuff I'm leaving out in this pasting that I'll cover later in my personal file. Anyhow I hope you all found us OK.

Ok this is Friday morning December 16, 2011 and since I will probably be pasting this paragraph to [Al Owens] I guess I’ll leave out certain things like that porn site I visited last night. (Just kidding) Anyhow yesterday afternoon I was cold much of the day so I wore my red jacket. It never warmed up much at all. While we were down there they had a thunder storm and the rain was pouring down and the lights dimmed a couple of times. [Pete] was almost fifteen minutes late. I was out there right at 3:30 but Judy ran into phone delays in ordering parts for my new computer so that is quite understandable. It was kind of an Orwellian experience talking with Judy about politics because issue after issue I brought up things I thought we could agree on and every time Judy threw me a curve ball. I mentioned Michelle Bachman wanting to insure the safety of Social Security, and Judy says we don’t need that anyhow because we should save our own money. I mentioned the stock market crash of 2008 and she said “Well, it’s still better than letting the government do it”. Judy almost qualifies as a Chinese embassy spokesman and is very at odds with my own “Economic Nationalism”. She says it’s “unreasonable” not to expect people to export jobs out of America because in her book greed is a part of human nature and is as American as apple pie or something, and to deny this is foolhardy. So she’s against Donald Trump or Mitt Romney saying we should “get tough with China”. She’s not even in favor of “Buy American” for government contracts. She keeps saying nobody dare attack China because they loan us money. Of course I mentioned the whole thing about “some want to level the playing field and envision a world where every worker makes a dollar and a half an hour”. I said “That isn’t America”. All she said was that it was only “good business” to pay a living wage, and therefore labor unions were unnecessary and wrong. I brought up Gingrich’s attack against Romney on his record with buying businesses. Judy just said “Well at least he tried to save businesses- - he just couldn’t always do it”. Yet at the same time they attack Obama for rescuing General Motors successfully. And I said “You realize if one of your guys were elected president the United States would immediately cut government spending by forty percent” and Judy just said “Then we’ll have to live with it”. She even defended the idea of corporate personhood. At Moms I was saying the fourteenth amendment had nothing to do with corporations since that ruling didn’t come till 1886. Judy just said “Well corporations are an extension of property rights so of course it should be legal”. And of course she was in favor of that Canadian pipeline to Texas and says that it’s absurd to think that Americans will ever give up oil consumption and no alternative energy source is viable. She then went into attacks against high speed rail saying there was a conspiracy to restructure America into “urban corridors”. And there was the usual “Obama is a Marxist”. I explained to her how Rush Limbaugh misquoted the President but she didn’t care. Judy even thought it was silly to bring up marital fidelity in a Republican debate. She said “That remark is as irrelivent as point out that Obama is Black”. She also hated the fact that the questions weren’t ultra slanted to the right wing like they were in the other debates. And also she defended that preventative detention portion of the Arms bill where we could be like Russia and throw American citizens into jail without charges. She said “Well you know these terrorists are a whole other category of people”. She then had the audacity to say that the right wing was more humanitarian and compassionate than liberals- - and there was a lot of stuff about liberals secret agenda for eugenics, euthanasia and “eliminating unproductive people from society”. She threw in a plug for giving birth to Mongoloids because “they are really such nice, sweet people”. She talked about Jesus being born poor and says “All Jesus ever did was love people and give, and all the liberals want to do is take”. After practically kneeling at the shrine of money and greed then she said “Actually, Christians care about important stuff- - like the soul- - but all that liberals care about is money and materialism”. And the political zingers just keep on coming. We encountered just a bit of heavy traffics near the turn-off.

So before we even got to Mom’s I was kind of in a state of political disorientation as to just what the hell “drove” drives Judy and [Pete]. The dinner at the Regency was nothing like I envisioned. It was not candle light, there was no entertainment per se (there were briefly carolers) and we didn’t even eat in the dining room but out in the lobby which was packed with noisy people milling around. Pete wanted me to sit at the “head of the table”, which I didn’t want to do, especially after I sat down at this make shift table. There was metal stuff so I couldn’t even put my legs under the table. We had wooden fold out chairs. The service was rather poor. I had to wait forever for even my first cup of coffee, which was rather cold and filled only three-fifths full when I got it. I did get a later refill maybe forty minutes later. The salad was good with balsamic viniger dressings and herbs. The bread was really good and everybody loved it with a heavy crust, which must have been tough for old people to chew. We had an adequate supply of that- and butter- - - once we hounded the staff enough for it. It was hard to hear others at the end of the table. Mom doesn’t talk as loud as she used to and there was a din of people in there. She was across from that 93 year old lady. Mom was the only person who had champaign. That was about the only thing they came around a lot asking about refills. The salmon some had I tried - - but to me it looked and tasted like tuna and not salmon, and I think I know the difference. I don’t think anyone had the chicken floentine with the spinach or whatever. I had the roast beef and it was good. It was tender and pink and almost like prime rib, and had horseradish sauce cut with sour cream. We also had broccoli, wedge cut potatoes, and other vegetables. I wasn’t really filled up. So for desert I got some heavy cream white cake and iced carrot cake, and some chocolate cake I thought was a brownie but not really. Mom had extra chocolate icing so that worked out well putting that on my cake. It was almost six when we left- - and in my mind that was too slow service. We were there almost ninety minutes. We used the east elevator I’d never used before. We went to that old lady’s room to see her cat, which we never saw because it was hiding. The whole place had a musty “cat” smell. She showed us a photo of another cat who died. She wanted us to stay longer but Mom didn’t want to so we made our way back to her place caty-corner across the hall. I forgot to get stamps I needed, and she said I’d gotten a 2012 calendar the last time I was there, but I don’t know where I stashed it. We talked about my smoking and COPD and good “positive” reasons to quit other than avoidance of illness. I actually have been smoking considerably less lately put pointing this out would have seemed argumentative. Pete said very little about himself. Mom didn’t have much of an opinion at all about the debate. Mom gave me Dee’s letter to take home. Gary Johnson’s (I'm not sure) mother died during the year but there was later commentary about “mother Laura’ and I wasn’t sure whom he was referring to. It was Gene Funkhauser's daughter and the kid was turning four. The other kid who is half Black and the one related to us- - Samuel will be turning three in January. Dee uses a very similar style of language to what Uncle Bob used in his letters. There was a lot of talk about going to exotic places in the world. Mom had a show she wanted to watch at eight. I weighed myself and am still nine pounds down from a year ago, but some of that is because her scale registers light. Mom looked great- - in the pink of health. We had some silly argument or something about money and materialism- - because of something I supposedly brought up but I didn’t- - so why were we talking about it?

I wanted to take the out door “scenic rout” like we usually do. It was told out and I estimated 45 deg when asked, but there was no wind and no rain. The road home was smooth and for once we got off at a different spot and drove near the Palm St. house. On the way home Judy talked about business and more taxes and regulations and just how obtrusive the government can be about things like lead in paint- - and even a small businessman gets buried in regulations. So I agree. What she talked about was unreasonable. I told her I was trying to keep a low profile selling coffee because both Dr. Levy and Sarah had told me not to charge for coffee, if I let anybody else have it. I made a pot when I got home at about 8:35 and Donnie asked about my “party” so he knew vaguely where I was. James proved chatty about computers- - so I just listened to the stuff he said. I only had one cigarette the whole rest of the evening, after not having hat once three. I watched “Bones” on FOX for the first time in quite a while but got bored. Bill had gotten back from visiting Olivia for the day. He never announced his leaving. Bill is notorious for not announcing when he is leaving on a major outing.