Editor's Note: What better time than a global pandemic to revive a languishing blog? Hi, I'm Karen, the new editor of Salmon River Blog. The author, avalonjeff, has a lot of catching up to do, and I will endeavor to get through to him that he should regard me with more seriousness than his last editor, who-let's face it- was a bad influence on him. What's more, there have been pandemic-related occurrences at the river that need addressing, unexpected occurrences in his fish tank, and general state-of-mind updates for which I will take him to task, while trying to be sensitive to the elephants in the room.
Recent interactions with cultists have brought back memories and insinuated a theme. To be blunt, nearly every other car in Pediddleville and the surrounding environs has a New York license plate, and this concerns me. There was a time two years ago when I was an interloper in their state, and had some encounters with a pair of Trump supporters that have haunted me since then, and recently had another two encounters while on the job back in Connecticut that have haunted me as well. It occurs to me that both the exodus from the city due to the Covid-19 pandemic to my and other's Pediddlevilles, and my experiences in their state are colored indelibly by one common thing: dictator wanna-be, science denier, compromised patsy, business failure narcissist dirtbag The Donald Trump, POTUS
In the summer of 2018 on two separate occasions, I lived in hotels in New York State while working my usual job loaned over as a field technician for a telecommunications company. The first trip in the early summer was to the Adirondacks, which I really enjoyed exploring. I had a nice hotel room in Queensbury, near Lake George, worked all over the Adirondack Park area and to the west, north of Glen's Falls, and was getting paid meals, per diem, and lots of overtime. I call these trips "Adventure Time" because every day is absolutely totally new. Usually the rut I'm stuck in doesn't come into play. I don't mind working sixteen hour days on Adventure Time, but I'd never do that back home. Maybe some day when I'm in a better mood I'll write about my time in the Adirondacks because I did enjoy my time there, but the second trip to the southern tier area, which is very red, where I stayed in a dismal motel in Norwich, was not so enjoyable. The work was difficult, there was little around of much interest, rural, but not pretty, and in the end I spent the last week and a half with Overtime disallowed and not allowed to go home early. It was a long summer coming to a bummer, but Adventure Time always provides some form of experiential gift for the taking and I suppose these stories are those gifts.
The hamlet of Mount Upton, New York has a Valero gas station convenience store, an abandoned school, a little restaurant, and a telephone company central office where I would sometimes go to eat my lunch. A block away on a repair call I stumbled upon the forgotten old train depot now being used as a construction garage, and next to it, a gigantic marble headstone marking the grave of a horse named Lady Upton, who died aged forty eight years in 1907 a local hero-a work horse who won every harness race ever entered at the county fairs.
It figures I would find something like this by chance. It must be something about Adventure Time, being away from Pediddleville on my own that opens me up to having surreal, almost mystical experiences. After a couple of weeks working further away from my base in places like Walton, Roscoe and Downsville, I was reallocated to nearby Mount Upton area. I wasn't happy about it because it meant much less time getting paid to merely drive, and I found the area to be much less interesting the further away from the Catskills I got. The convenience store had terrible coffee, but I was in there once for some reason and was bemused to see a young Amish man in line to buy a slice of convenience store pizza and a Pepsi. Thinking back on this, it acts as a good foreshadowing device. I noticed a house across the intersection had a Yard Sale sign out, so I thought I'd have a look. As I walked down the driveway toward the back yard I saw a lady putting items out of boxes onto tables. "I'm sorry, just setting up, everything's so disorganized." she said. "Oh well, good reason to have a tag sale." I replied. "Wait, what did you just call it?" she asked, seeming surprised. I realized I had just used a colloquialism peculiar to Connecticutians. "Oh, tag sale?" I said, "I'm from Connecticut." "So am I!" We had a good chuckle about it. She grew up in Westport. I looked around and found a CD to buy; The Allman Brothers "Brothers And Sisters", and when I went to pay for it she held out a coffee mug. "You get a free mug with every purchase- want one?" I took it to use in the Keurig machine in my depressing motel room rather than the provided styrofoam cups, and I still have it to this day, though I dropped it and glued it back together, and now only use it as a pencil and pen holder on my desk. On one side, the side you see when holding it, in maroon lettering it says "Robert G. Ingersoll Memorial Committee, Dresden, NY - Buffalo, NY" and on the outward facing side a portrait of the man himself with a quote: "The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here." It was just the kind of advice I needed.
This is the Red State part of New York State. When I got to the house at the top of a long hill, there were political signs in the yard, for Trump and Claudia Tenney, who was running for US Representative, and one that said, "The person who lives here is Politically Incorrect. If that offends you, too bad!", or something to that effect. I went to the door after testing their internet out in the box and finding no trouble. Dave, I think his name was, invited me in. He was a big guy and a heavy smoker. "You're not going to be able to fix it, believe me." he said, "Have you been here before?" "No, actually I'm here temporarily from Connecticut." "Connecticut? Jeez, maybe you CAN fix it. None of the local guys ever can." he said, "Have a seat, I'll tell you the whole story." I sat on a sofa and his wife brought me a bottle of water. He told me how their internet speed was not as fast as they were paying for, though at the moment it was, but it would drop and then every time a technician would come out, they'd go to a nearby cabinet, which would fix the problem, but then his neighbor would be out of service. The neighbor would have a service call soon after, then Dave's service would go out. "Maybe you better not go down to that cabinet today since it's working." he said. His wife had been placing a call as he said this, and said, "I figure while you're here I'd call them again about the bill. Maybe you can answer any questions." She was on hold and explained that they were owed money but they can't find the right person to call...hours on hold, etc... "Here we go." I thought. "Connecticut, huh?" Dave said. "Don't even bother trying the pizza around here." "Not good?" "No! Jesus, how anybody could fuck up pizza as bad as these fucking inbreds around here, I don't know." Hmm, inbreds? I thought maybe he was talking about the Amish. "You mean the Amish?" I asked. "No, the Amish are cool. It's just the regular white people who grew up here. They're all inbred. See, I'm from New Jersey originally, so I've had good Italian food." I told him I had lived in New Haven so I'd had the best pizza in the world many times. "Yeah, don't even bother. Fucking inbreds!" The phone call was still going on and I had to speak to representatives briefly, to no effect, over the speaker phone. A very big, kind of ugly white cat jumped up next to me to be petted. "That's the big boy. He's the boss." said Dave. "I rescued him from over in Guilford, enough said. " (I think this may have been a reference to a murder-suicide that had taken place in a restaurant there.) "I rescue cats." he continued." I have about ten of them around here someplace." There was a big cat play structure in the corner of the living room. One small cat slept on one of the platforms, and one or two cats would wander in and out of the room as we chatted. Dave was a hunter and he told me he hunts for the cats and they all live on fresh venison rather than crap commercial cat food. I was relieved that we were talking about cats rather than politics. This guy was smart and pretty funny. He knew he was amusing me and it egged him on, making for an unexpectedly enjoyable visit. Here was a guy who I figure supported Trump for what I would call "the right reasons" (though it was all lies). Of course, the big TV in the living room had FoxNews on. It's hard to imagine why a guy who was such a softy for cats, despite his rough exterior, would lean that way. It's always a shame when someone you could potentially be friends with otherwise, would lean that way. Two orange cats strolled in. "Hey here they are, the new cats. I just rescued these two about a month ago. Somebody told me these two guys who worked for me were abusing cats. I drove over to their place and I made them give me the cats and I had to fire them. They were a couple of fucking inbreds anyway." Eventually I got out of there and was on to the next job, having accomplished nothing but having a few laughs. I have hope that Dave eventually didn't vote for Trump in 2020.
If the last encounters with the Connecticutian tag sale lady and Dave the cat hero were a way of easing me into this defiled Ingersoll territory, then it worked temporarily and I was in for a lesson in what Dave meant when he referred to the people as inbreds. East from the intersection and across the Unadilla River I had a real head scratcher. I arrived at a double-wide set down a hill from the road where I parked my truck in a pullover spot. There were Trump and Tenney signs all over the lawn, and a flagpole with three flags, from the top, the American Flag, then "Don't tread On Me", then a Confederate flag. I went to the front door, noting a security camera aimed at me, and knocked. Big loud dogs barked from inside but there was no answer. I knocked again with another glance at the camera, then still in the scope of surveillance, went to the interface box on the building and tested the line for data errors and noise, finding none. I closed up the box, went back to the front door and knocked again. Again there was no answer but dogs, so I sneered at the camera and climbed the hill back to my truck to sign off the job "No Trouble Found". A few minutes later while sitting inside the Mount Upton central office eating my lunch, I got a call from my dispatcher. "Yeah, the customer called in from the house you just left." Said the dispatcher. "He's very upset. He said you pulled up to his house and never got out of the truck, and then you left and he's still out of service." "REALLY?" I said, incredulously. "So we were wondering can you go back?" I wasn't willing at first and was debating with myself about mentioning the camera to her, but I gave in and said I'd do it, but was determined if the customer gave me shit about it, I would have him review his footage.
I got back to the double-wide and the guy met me at the open front door. He was a squat, ugly guy with a grouchy demeanor. A cliché of a Trumper if ever I saw one. I didn't get his name but I'll call him Dick. I looked at the lights of his modem as he started in on his rant about how much my company sucks. The modem was running normally and I was easily able to connect to his wi-fi with my phone. "Okay, so I see it's working okay now," I said, "So what's been happening?" "Well, it's slow and for months and months it would work sometimes and sometimes it wouldn't. Every time you guys come out you find no problem and then as soon as you leave it craps out." "Well, there's nothing for me to look at really, since it's working okay. "I said, "I tested it outside before and it was running perfectly, but I'll run another test inside here." He continued ranting and I asked him if he was able to connect with his phone, and he was. His wife was there, and she confirmed her husband's bile-filled experience, basically reiterating most of what Dick said. She also was connected to wi-fi with her phone. I was starting to get irritated with these people, especially since Dick had lied to my employer to get me to return. He went on, "Yeah, this went on for months and months until they finally replaced the cable out here a few weeks back." Now I'm thinking, "Wait a minute, the cable has been replaced? No wonder I can't find any trouble." The test came up good again and I said, "Well, there's no trouble I can find, so..." Dick pointed at a desktop computer. "Why can't we get our emails, then?" "You're connected on your phones. There's no trouble. You mean only this computer has a problem?" "Yeah, we can't get it online." Could it be? Could this whole debacle be due to stupidity? I sat down at the desk, opened up settings on the desktop, and at the prompt, typed in the wi-fi password, and watched email notifications flood onto the screen! Now Dick had changed his tune and wanted to be my buddy, but I wasn't having it. I cleaned up my gear and got out of there, feeling dazed for several minutes.
This part of the world, though it was Adventure Time, was getting me down. The roads were terrible-I'd be driving and feel like there was something wrong with the truck, then realize it was just a bad paving job. There are ditches next to the roads rather than the modern catch basins we have in Connecticut, and I got both driver's side wheels stuck in one and had to be towed out. The tow truck driver was a genius, apparently, because I couldn't believe it was possible to get that bucket truck out. The lack of culture aside from the Amish, the run-down appearance of everything, and the political climate of the area were getting me rather down. Ultimately, the company cut off all overtime for us Connecticut technicians with a week and a half left to go of our term, and wouldn't allow us to go home early, so the whole experience soured. This was only halfway through the shitshow of the Trump administration, when most of his supporters were simply glad that they were "owning the Libtards". The daily scandals and overt mean-spiritedness were just something we were having to deal with on a visceral level. When I was there I watched the televised funerals of Aretha Franklin and John McCain. Trump behaved like a shithead around both of these important passages, but it was just another head-shaker. It took an impeachment trial and a Global Pandemic to take some of Trump's fans to the next level of cult worship. Oddly, my encounters with some Trumpers in a Red State part of a Blue State were less disturbing to me than ones I've had back in True Blue Connecticut, after my return home, after the impeachment and pandemic turned garden variety MAGA assholes into cultists and domestic terrorists.
The year 2020AD will go down in history as one of the most fucked-up years ever. Liberals were stressed-out and exhausted, and right-wingers were "standing up against Tyranny", comically oblivious to the irony. It was during this climate recently that I had another two encounters with Trumpers on my home turf, the towns surrounding the mouth of the Connecticut River. These have haunted me more, not only because of the locations, but because of how creepy they were as I have realized the full extent of the cult infection. One day I picked up another of many "frequent disconnects" internet troubles in a typically wealthy bucolic town on the east bank of the river. My call to a contact number reached a woman who was not home, but told me her husband was, and she seemed irritated with the situation. Already my red flag had gone up. The address was at the dead end of a road, the driveway continuing into the woods at the cul-de-sac. Halfway into the long driveway before I could even see the house there was a stone pillar gateway with dragon gargoyles and surveillance cameras. Signs on almost every tree warned of attack dogs and that the homeowner would shoot first and ask questions later, and of course, "Make America Great Again". It was a big house surrounded by woods and a car, truck and heavy equipment graveyard. There was a guy working in a garage who seemed uninterested in why I was there. I put on my facemask and went to knock on the door. A middle aged man was there, and an older woman, and they explained that the modem seemed to be up, but they were still having problems streaming. "You don't have to wear a mask in my house. That's bullshit!" the man (I'll call him Mike) said. "Uh, well, it's a company policy." I said. They showed me the modem in the kitchen area, and it was up and running, unsurprisingly. Mike said, "Yeah, it looks like it's working, but there's something wrong. The service sucks. I'll show you-this TV in the living room won't connect." I started to notice a theme as I walked down a hallway towards the living room and saw rifles hung on the walls. In the living room, at first I had to adjust my attention to Mike and his TV problem so that I would not appear to be unnerved by the piles of rifles and automatic assault weapons on every available surface-tabletops, cabinet tops, the backs of sofas and chairs. There had to be at least fifty deadly weapons just in that room! Trying not to react, I dealt with Mike's TV that was connected and streaming FoxNews without difficulty. Chit chat revealed that Mike wasn't as much of an asshole as I'd expected, and turned out to seem to be a fairly friendly guy. We had some things in common to talk about that I won't discuss here on the odd chance that it might reveal his identity. That's the thing-was he testing me to see my reaction to the disturbing amount of weaponry I was surrounded by, or was this just his matter-of-fact way? Did he think that my measured lack of an observable reaction was approval? I was surprised at my level of calm, and didn't feel threatened, but how completely out of my frame of reference this was! Of course, there was no problem I could find with his internet, and at the insistence of Mike's wife, who called when I was there, I promised to look along the way for any potential cable troubles that would be emergent on rainy days. Mike wanted me to look at another TV that was upstairs in the bedroom. TV's are technically not part of my job, but since I was there and these people were frustrated, I complied and followed him up the stairs. On the way down a hall to the bedroom was an office-full of guns, and then of course the bedroom looked exactly like the living room did-piles of scary-looking weapons everywhere! This TV was an older model, probably not a smart TV, that was originally hooked up to satellite, so any amount of searching menus and changing settings was a waste of my time. Mike didn't seem to get it, and typically believed this was because his internet service was malfunctioning. I reiterated that I would check for corroded splices along the cable as I went out, and relieved to get back in my truck, drove away dumbfounded, wondering if I should let the police know that this was going on in their town. "If you see something, say something." is what they say, but in all Truth, that only applies to brown-skinned people, and how did I know the white cops didn't already know about Mike and his armory? Another consideration as I pondered the potential for some kind of insane Civil War was that there was a digital record of my visit, and would I regret drawing attention to this situation? Would I see Mike on the news one day, the latest dead crisis actor in a manufactured Civil War?
As Covid-19 and the presidential campaigns progressed, some of these followers of the most corrupt, degenerate, authoritarian (yet incompetent) president we have seen, have become inexplicably more devoted, their political incorrectness a badge of honor. It was terrifying to me to think that this monster might be re-elected. People who you'd never suspect would admire Trump were being outed as supporters. The United States of America was in a deep shitload of trouble and these lunatics seemed to be happy about it. Projection, or whataboutism was the stock response for any questionable belief. I picked up another "frequent disconnects" trouble in the same town Mike lived in. I called the customer to say I was coming. "Yeah, there is a substandard repair in the cable over my driveway." said the man. "You'll see it about fifty feet off the road." "Okay, " I said, "so you're having disconnects?" I asked, trying to get info. "The cable is ripped up and needs to be fixed permanently." he said. Fine. I drove out to his address, almost missing the driveway because it was little more than a couple of tire tracks going off into the woods, but I did find that the cable had been broken at some time, and the steel support strand had been spliced, leaving a loop of exposed cable pairs covered by a disintegrating plastic bag. I went up in the bucket and looked at it. The pairs were not in bad shape. No corrosion or flaking insulation. I checked the pair that his service was supposed to be on, and found it not to be there. Now I would have to go to the house to try to identify which pair he was on so I could test it, then I'd go back to place a splice case over the breach to protect the pairs. As I drove up to the terminal pole at the end of the cable run in front of the house I noticed the familiar Trump/Pence campaign sign thirty feet away. It was a big lawn version of the sign, but it was set up in the woods and I noticed objects on the ground surrounding it. I got out of the truck and gathered my tool belt and test equipment and walked closer to the sign to get a better look. It was surrounded by those solar rechargeable footlights and what turned out to be discarded Roundup poison ivy killer bottles. A peculiar scene for the middle of the woods, but then further off in an open field I saw another sign. What the fuck was going on here in the middle of the woods? Was this display meant to be seen, or not? It struck me as very odd, and as I turned around to face my truck I was startled by the man standing there, having snuck up on me. "What are you doing?" he said, "I told you the problem was back by the road!" I started to try to explain that I have a troubleshooting procedure, but he cut me off-"Do you want me to show you?" "I already saw that!" I snapped back. "What were you looking at over there?" he demanded. "Why were you looking at the signs?" I was not in the mood for this. "I have to find your line first so I can test it!" I said. "Did you see the cable?" he berated again. I didn't want to try to explain anymore. I've been doing this type of work for twenty three years and people who adamantly diagnose their problem and tell me how to fix it are almost always wrong, and this guy had taken it to the extreme. "I'm going to test the line at the side of your house. That's the way I do it. I'll go fix the cable after that." Then he started asking me what kind of repair I was going to do, if it would be permanent, and I just walked to the house and did my thing. No data errors found at the box, of course. At this point I considered telling him I had to look at his modem, but I did not want to push it with this guy. He was the kind of person who disbelieves and argues with everything people say, and I was almost ready to tell him to go fuck himself, but I closed up the box and went back to my truck. My guess is he needed a new modem, but I didn't want to go inside his house, so I resolved to do what he wanted, come what may. It occurred to me that I had been at this house before, but this was a different guy than was there the last time. Something fishy was going on here. The name on the account was that of a woman, and I figured this house was owned by an elderly woman whose sons were caretaking there, or they had inherited it. The guy I remembered from before was much more mild-mannered than this jerk. This guy seemed to be well educated and/or well connected. Still dazed by the exchange I had just had I drove back out to the breach in the cable, went up and started to work on installing a splice case. After a short while I saw him walking up the driveway toward me. He had put on a fluorescent yellow safety vest and was coming to check on what I was doing. He seemed a little more calm now, and asked me about the repair I was doing. "This needs to be done," I said from up in the bucket, "but I don't think this was causing your disconnect issue." "What do you mean?" he said, irritatingly. "I mean the pairs are in good shape up here and I haven't found any cause of your problem." I explained. "Well, that's got to be it. Is this going to be a permanent repair?" he nagged. "Yes it is." I said sarcastically. Eventually he thanked me and walked back to his house and I was glad to be rid of him. I finished up and drove away, unconcerned whether I fixed his issue or not. I would rather have known what the deal was with those signs.
The thing is, all of these Trumpers, these cult followers, are weird people in some way. There is a disconnect between their political convictions and their interpersonal behavior. These people have no inkling that they could possibly be wrong despite their quirks, which should be a clue that there's something "off" about them. They may not all be racists, or authoritarians, or psychotic gun collectors, or even narcissists like their Dear Leader, but these weird people seem unable to perceive the deeply wrong presence he has in the political realm. Just what we need, an entire political ideology based upon personality disorders! As I write this, it is only a few weeks away from the inauguration of president-elect Joe Biden, and the first ever woman of color as vice-president. Things seem to be looking up for the country, but many of these Trump cultists think we're heading into a communist hell-scape! Let them agonize over it, as I and many others have for the last four years. Let them suffer fear and anxiety for no reason as I have for very good reasons for four years. A Covid vaccine has emerged, and I hope it will also cure the Trump virus...
Lastly, there's the tank update that I'm supposed to include in this post, according to Karen, my new editor. Well, it's getting late in the year and I want to publish this before 2021 rolls around, so Karen is going to have to wait for the tank update. I didn't post anything at all in 2019, so she'll have to get used to dealing with my fecklessness.
