"I Like Beer. Do You Like Beer?"... What I Believe

I am sitting in Chicago O'Hare International airport waiting for a connecting flight to Alaska, and just saw a post claiming that in the Alaska senate race, Sarah Palin is trailing in the polls. This is a good thing. Her deranged, word-salad rants during her vice presidential bid, and from then on, paved the way for a tRump presidency, and we know how that turned out. Our society, our World, doesn't need any more of that bullshit. The MAGA cult leader is now under FBI investigation for stealing top secret government documents and hiding them at his Florida country club, obstruction of justice--AGAIN--and we're waiting for the January 6th committee to resume. Now, this piece of shit appointed THREE supreme court justices, who in a just and sane world would have been impeached by now, since they all committed perjury in their confirmation hearings.

Brett Kavanaugh.  I don't call him Justice because he was a Yalie frat boy at our first and only meeting. 

This is not an accusation.  I have no proof of what happened, only the belief that it did.  I have come to understand that most people believe that in the "Land Of The Free" you have the right to believe anything you want, no matter how ridiculous, illogical, or politically inconvenient it may be. So I reserve the right to believe my story, and in truth, I have no reason to believe it to be untrue. 

When I saw him testify in his confirmation hearings I took an immediate disliking to him.  His arrogant defiance against legitimate lines of questioning, his phoney dismay at being exposed as a pig and an elitist at that, and his laughable emotional sniffing.  As a fan of beer, I had to cringe when he tried to use the line "I like beer. Do you like beer?" to one of the panel of questioners when asked about his behavior during his glory days at Yale.  During the hearings a photograph of him during that time was shown, and that is when I recognized him.  I lived in New Haven at the same time. Though originally from East Pediddleville, I had been in New Haven long enough to consider myself a "townie".  I spent four years there at the State University, then stayed on to be a denizen of the great local music scene of the 80's and 90's.  I saw that picture of him and it all came back to me, the memory of the night when Brett Kavanaugh assaulted me on the corner of College and Chapel!

I was out on the town at night, maybe after dinner or on the way to show. I don't remember exactly who I was with, but at one of those moments when the collective directions were being subconsciously determined I was standing right at the corner, perhaps a few inches off the sidewalk into the street, and a car slowly pulled up, as if to pick up or drop off a passenger, when unexpectedly a body lunged out of the open window and smacked me across the face! Dazed and astounded in the fractions of seconds afterwards I saw his sneering face retreating back into the now speeding car.  He had a light blue headband, possibly a tie, pushing his hair up from his face, with an expression that was triumphantly disrespectful.  He yelled something unintelligible as the car drove off, but at that point I had already moved from astonishment to a bit of amusement since this incident had been so out of the blue and successful. I won't say I was impressed, because no random act of violence is impressive, but you know what I mean.  There was no opportunity to jot down the license plate number.  Was this a fraternity hazing stunt? Some kind of drunken dare egged on by Squee?  Who knows?  I was ok but for the waning sting on my face, and I quickly chalked it up to the random Yalie-Townie interface that sometimes happens.  Seeing the photo of Kavanaugh nearly thirty five years later made me remember the incident.

Why do I believe it was him without really knowing, without really any solid proof?  I will say that believing it was him does call into question my understanding of the way the justice system works-innocent until proven guilty, and all that, but there was no police report, or description of the incident to police with a make and model of the car and a partial license ID.  This was just a random street violence case just like many others that never get reported and go unpunished.  Do I want to accuse him and have him charged? Not at all.  Not because I don't believe it was him, but because his punishment, in a very small way, is my belief turned to knowledge that he is unfit for the court.  He wants to get away with the lie that he deserves to sit on the Supreme Court, but as long as there is at least one person who knows that is not true, it is not true.  Justice.

So since I believe he hit me in the face that night, do I also believe the accusations leveled by the very courageous and principled Christine Blasey Ford?  You bet I do!  She couldn't let him cruise through his confirmation hearings without facing his shitty past (the one he seems to be proud of), knowing that such a shitty person who would bully and attempt rape and commit random street violence upon Townies could sit on the United States Supreme Court, put there by the shittiest of shit people--President Donald JOHN tRump.  I think that all three of his SCOTUS appointments, since they were appointed by a twice-impeached, big liar president who is now under investigation for insurrection, espionage, election tampering, witness tampering, et cetera, and since they all committed perjury over their potential rulings in the abortion issue, should be impeached themselves. I knew he'd be confirmed because of just how shitty the whole scenario was, and that's just what Justice in this country is nowadays.

Halfway through our trip in Alaska it was announced that Sarah Palin had lost her Senate bid, and it was reason for rejoicing.  We did drive through her hometown of Wasilla, seeing really only strip malls and other commercial establishments, on the way to  Talkeetna, a fascinating wild little town where they refer to Denali, the former Mount McKinley renamed as the original native name by President Obama, as "She".  Talkeetna was an unincorporated town that earlier in its history was threatened by the state to be made its capital.   They wanted no part of it. In 1997 they were mandated to elect a mayor, and not wanting to defile their quirky little place on the Earth (rumored to be the inspiration for the town of Cicely in the TV series Northern Exposure) with politics, elected the least partisan person they could find--a cat named Mr. Stubbs.  When Mr. Stubbs died, he was replaced by the current mayor, another cat named Denali, who we saw crossing the Main Street in town on our way out.  

Wasilla should have taken a lesson from Talkeetna, as the United States should have taken a lesson from New Haven in not electing to the Supreme Court an entitled, partisan liar guilty of sexual abuse and random drunken street violence.  Again, this is not an accusation, just a belief I have, and surely any and all MAGA types, no matter how closet authoritarian they may be, should agree with me that I have a right to believe it.  This country is in a deep shitload of trouble because of people like this. Liars. Cheaters. Bullies. Abusers. Fascists.

A Tale Of Two Trumpers (X2) And A Message From The Grave...I Love/Hate New York...The Virus That Went Viral...Tank Update #8

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.

Three Days At Salmon River

This has been an atypical summer for me.  I have gone on work trips (as recounted before in this blog) to other areas to work on per diem for several weeks at a time.  In May I went to the Adirondacks for six weeks of hotel dwelling and pulling massive OT hours--and now I am living in a depressing inn in the Southern Tier of New York State Northwest of the Catskills.  The only Culture I can ascertain in this region is Amish, and, sadly, the Cult Of Trump.  It must be noted that because of the political Shitstorm our country is embroiled in thanks to President FUCKFACE, I found myself equally devastated by the deaths of Aretha Franklin, The Queen Of Soul, and of Senator John McCain, American Hero, albeit Republican, neither of whom seems to have had any influence on this region whatsoever.  I always thought of upstate New York as a progressive, cool, cultured place, but apparently my ship touched down in the Armpit.

So, my time this Summer communing with my Salmon River has been horribly foreshortened...

In the month and a half I was home this Summer, the weather was oppressively hot and humid, and often there would be heavy thunderstorms with torrential rain in the late afternoons.  Your standard Climate Change scenario...Salmon River was running very high with storm run-off, and the only way for me to cope with that steam bath kind of weather was to get my body in that river...

Emmet and I went most days after work.  We'd go cool off before I would be able to deal with the kitchen chores.  One time snorkeling we found a large breeder trout, I'd say twenty inches or so, probably a male because his face was twisted upward like how spawning salmon get, and he had a puncture wound on his back--I'm guessing from the bill of a heron.  He let us move close to him and even touch him.  I think he was near death.

When Emmet went away for a week to summer camp I continued going there every day after work.  I was trying to catch up on lost time from my first New York trip and anticipating the next.  One day I went and there were a bunch of people up in the cascade section, so I went to the lower, more open part. The water was so high that that the three big rocks usually visible were showing only three to four inches above water.  When the river is this high, it's great for hanging; you dive to the bottom, grab onto a rock and just hang in the strong current feeling the energy of the moving water.  My Happy Place.  I did that for a while, letting the river pull away the sick heat of the day, then I made three piled rock sculptures, one on each of the big boulders.  I often do this, and they are usually gone the next time I go back, but the next day I went back and they were all three resolute and lined up with the Belt of Orion.  I had the place to myself this time so I went to the cascades where you can sit back and let the water stream over your head, creating a cavity of air that you can breathe in under water. After a while three guys, probably in their third decades approached coming down the river on inner tubes.  The cascades are formed by a solid rock ledge that used to be the base for the mill dam that used to be there.  In the spot where the mill wheel once was there is an opening for a swift patch of rapids.  A certain rock takes the brunt of the flow and splashes it over, making an impossible navigational zone.  You can't not flip over here.  They came down one at a time, and one at a time they flipped over.  Competition was apparently a motivator for them and they came back several more times to see who could do it without flipping, and each time they all flipped.  When they gave up they pulled over on the small beach down below me and smoked cigarettes, then I noticed one of them throwing rocks.  Then they were all throwing rocks and I realized they were trying to knock down my stone piles from the day before!

At first I was offended, but realized it was silly and then I started rooting for them.  I liked the irony of them not knowing, and I knowing who had placed those cairns there and that I was there to see my temporary creations purposefully destroyed.  One guy was throwing lefty and I secretly rooted for him.  They were not successful for some ten minutes I'd say, but finally one of the right-handed guys hit the cairn and it all tumbled into the eddy behind the boulder.  After that, they got back into the water and continued downstream.

The next day was another miserable steam bath.  The old mill cascade area was mobbed, so I went further upstream to find a spot. Up the dirt road in the State Forest I found a nice widened area where a small rock dam had deepened it for swimming.  I snorkeled around a bit, then I  found a nice flat boulder about four inches under the surface of the water.  On it, I built a nice, almost cylindrical cairn about a foot and a half tall, looking like it was floating on the water surface.  I often wonder about some of the rocks I find in the river.  Some I have found are green or purple and have a hardness and smothness unlike local rocks.  I almost want to think they are slate, but they don't seem to be layered.  In this spot I found a boulder about the size of an air conditioner, deep black with white veins running through it.  Obviously dropped by a glacier and over time made it downstream from somewhere North of here where a stone like this would exist.  I left the cairn to the elements.  Another giant rainstorm raised the river by a foot a few days later, and that was that.

Happy Birthday, America?

This was written early in the morning on the Fourth of July in this foul year of Our Lord, 2017, without, I might add, the prodding and cajoling from my Editor who seems to have given up on me.  Maybe he's now with some bandwagon pundit on Fox News like I saw last night, a young pretty white girl-maybe all of twenty-five years old, spewing hatred of Liberals like a seasoned Media Whore.  Or maybe the other guy on the panel, a caricature of a human being, animated like some Disneyland puppet machine in hot Orlando, and goes by only a first name.  Has the sick spectacle of our political nightmare come to this, that pundits now have one-name monikers, are represented by high power agencies, have their own propaganda websites with corporate sponsorships?  Meanwhile on the other side of the schizoid coin the other news network was once again whipping up a frenzy about how close we actually are to bringing down Trump.

Trump.  Let it sink in.  The grifter President.  The star of the most massive, all-consuming Reality TV series ever.  Period.  (Right Spicer?)  He's right, in all his boasting, he is actually right that he is the star of the show.  It's a Reality series that spans all the major networks, the internet, social media, and every minute of every day of all of real Life as well.  This is an Orwellian nightmare only hinted at by earlier Republican administrations.

Trump.  How, in the era of Google, did it slip past everybody that maybe symbolically we shouldn't elect a man whose very name means to win through deceit or by using a secret weapon?  Oh right, the earlier administrations who only hinted at this scenario have been for decades at work brainwashing and devolving the population to the point that a Trump voter base could exist.  That, and the KochBroCo propaganda machine creating the cognitive dissonance to sucker in the smart ones, and of course, the Racists.

Trump's main fuction is to distract us via Twitter while his co-stars do the damge of wiping out everything good Obama, and maybe even Bill Clinton have done.  A pathological liar and master of projection, he creates near perfect confusion if you are trying to make sense of things.  It's best if you don't, apparently.  Ever notice that everything he ever accused Obama and/or Hillary Clinton of, he is actually guilty or under suspicion of.  Every inflammatory gas expulsion he said on the campaign trail comes to pass, and every good thing he promised gets flippantly forgotten.

There's been much said lately about his war with the Press.  He's now battling Morning Joe-who practically fellated him every day during the campaign, and Mikka who dares to be a bleeding woman, and he's posting juvenile videos about superhero Trump pummeling CNN in the wrestling ring. What the fuck is up with his twisted fixation on women and blood? Very Presidential.  Bigly. 

I mentioned my editor earlier, and fuck him too.  I had to just get to the point on my own where I had a quiet Holiday morning to sit down and write, say enough is enough of allowing this pig-fucker to damage my Spirit, and do it.  I am a creative person at my core.  I feel best when I am making things, sounds, ideas.  The long, absurd spectacle of the campaign trail sucked me in like the many multitudes and put my creative output on Life-support.  Then the fucker WON!  Tailspin.  The new plot twists dominate.  Collusion with Russia?  Emoluments?  Multi-million dollar tax dollar funded Golf weekends while pissing off Kim Jong Un--a man Trump ADMIRES!  Twitter storms suggesting dementia and a complete disinterest in how our government actually works--or doesn't.  This all kills my creative motivation, the daily panic of what each new day might bring, anxiety over the planned complete destruction of everything Liberal or Progressive and perhaps inadvertently (or not) of everything wholesome as well.  War? Apocalypse?  Holy Hell!

I realized finally that my creativity is the one thing they had better not fuck with, so I think I'm back.  I have to get moving or I'm dead.  I think I have reached my Lifetime limit for Bullshit.

I wish Hunter Thompson was still here to write about this Shitstorm we're in, but Res Ipsa Loquitur...

Pokemon Apocalypse...Zombie Go...

In a World where the most terrifying Societal Trend is the Willingness of anybody, let alone any significant percentage of the population, to support "the Republican Presidential Nominee" (I was tempted to add here, in parentheses, [He Who Must Not Be Named], but I remembered that's what I call Governor Voldemort of Florida, Rick Scott) in the greatest, most elaborate and internationally critical Reality TV series we have been calling the United States Presidential Election Race, where almost a majority of TV shows, books, and movies are about vampires, werewolves, and wizards, and where after Terrorism, most American's biggest concern is the threat of a "Zombie Apocalypse", who would have thought it would actually come to pass?

They're out there walking the Earth, with outstretched arms grasping their Devices, desecrating sacred places, leaving detritus, annoying people by getting in their way, seemingly oblivious to the World around them except for their singular goal--Pokemon Ones and Zeroes...

Learner's Permit...Threading The Needle...Driving In Space

My son Owen turned sixteen and soon after got his learner's permit.  He's a smart kid, with good reflexes, probably due to playing lacrosse goalie, so he's doing well learning with no apparent trepidation, which is why I feel I need to clue him in on some of the unexpected wackiness some drivers may present to him at any moment on the roads.  In fact, this started some years earlier on a road trip in Maine.  We had been in Vermont and were making our way far into Maine to go to our backwoods Paradise, when outside of Skowhegan we got stuck in a line of cars behind a slow driver.  We were on a long, low upward grade with fields on each side; a two-lane, fairly narrow country route, and I noticed in my rear-view mirror two or three cars approaching from behind, moving fast.  I got the impression they were traveling together.  They reached the line and started weaving in and out of the line, passing cars via the oncoming left lane, making their way through the line up the low hill.  A green minivan with New Jersey plates made a move to pass the slow lead car as it neared the summit of the grade.  I said to Owen, who was in the back seat, "See that guy, what he's doing?  That guy is nuts!  He can't see if there's anything coming up over the other side."  And then sure as shit came the perfect poetic justice for this dick move...a car popped up just over the hill in the left lane, and quickly darted off to the shoulder in a cloud of dust.  It was a State Police cruiser!  The cop spun around to pursue, pulled over the wrong car--we could see the stunned look on the woman's face as we passed her and the cop--then was off again as we reached the summit.  Just after that there was a major fork and it looked like fifty-fifty if he would catch the guy or go the wrong way, but he got him!  We saw that minivan pulled over a half mile down the way on our route.  I would bet that guy spent the night in jail.  You figure, speeding, unlawful passing, reckless driving, endangering the life of a police officer, being from New Jersey...yeah, maybe more than one night.

It was a thrill to see this all play out, and lucky nobody got hurt, but it could all have been avoided.  I know, I know, slow drivers dig in and say "I'm going the speed limit!", but I believe that if you see a line of cars behind you, even though your Hall Monitor mentality tells you it's for their own good, just pull over for half a minute and let them all go by!  Let them get a ticket (they probably won't), or get to their destination on time, or whatever, or this kind of roadway clusterfuck can happen.  I bet a lot of slow drivers get rear-ended, and yes, I know it's the rear-ender that is at fault.  I just also know instinctually that speed limits should really be more of a reference guideline than a set-in-stone rule, and that if you feel safe and in control, any speed within reason should be OK.  I find it extremely difficult to drive 25 MPH even in a school zone because I feel less in control just with the distraction of making the effort to keep the speed down.  But this matters little to Officer Friendly,  revenue generator, who gave me a speeding ticket an hour later in Greenville for going 39 MPH.

Two examples of dipshit driving  happened near me on the same day, probably noticed because I was not driving my own car and was being more vigilant.  First case; I was driving through Portland on Route 66 in the left lane, when I noticed that there was a car behind me in the right lane just hanging in my blind spot.  This went on for a good distance despite my subtle speed changes, and so I decided to take action.  Keeping the car in my sight a best as I could, I switched on my right turn signal, then very quickly moved into the right lane so that I was just ahead of the dipshit, hoping that this maneuver would educate him as to what he was doing.  I guess it didn't work, because he then switched to the left lane--and hung in my blind spot!  A few hours later I was again on Route 66 but this time I was at the twin hills between East Pediddleville and Marlborough.  As you begin climbing the long steep hill leading into Marlborough, there is a rather large sign that reads: "Slower Traffic Keep Right", and there is in fact a slow lane on the right side of the road.  You guessed it, I was behind a slow driver in the LEFT lane.  The guy wasn't getting the hint with me close behind him, wishing he would move over, so I began to consider passing him on the right.  Just as I was about to go, I checked my side mirror to find a car whizzing up the right lane to pass me!  Jesus, just fucking pull over, Grandpa!

Do you leave open spaces like I do so cars can merge, coming up to highway bottlenecks?  You should.  If everyone did, the bottlenecks would not occur.  You won't do it.

As for highway driving, I tend to NOT drive much over the speed limit.  One of my secret deepest fears is high-speed highway accidents.  Once I was called for jury duty in New Haven and one of the other people waiting there for Voir Dir was a state trooper, and I overheard him say that he and his cohorts at the barracks referred to the section of I-95 between New Haven and Stamford as "The Metal Muncher" because of all the accidents.  I avoid that road if at all possible.  I frequently drive from Pediddleville to Bridgeport for my radio show, and I'll use the Merritt Parkway since it's more civilized and is also a more direct route for me.  I don't remember if this happened on the Merritt or I-95, but when it happened for the first time right in front of me on the road, I was certain I was going to die...I'm talking about DickMove #1, shown in illustration #1.

You have to be a special kind of asshole daredevil to pull this move.  You are cutting somebody off despite what could happen, just to exit the highway from the Left Lane! That it is so important for you to not miss the exit that you would endanger others is indicative of a Civilization in decline.  Unfortunately since that time, it has happened so many times that I have become blase´about it when it happens, which is troubling to say the least.  Who are these people that would do this?  Are they afraid of being late for something and don't want to use the next exit and backtrack, (which would indicate to me that less deserving things than Life are valued)?  Or are these people just adrenalin junkies or sociopaths, and get some kind of thrill out of terrifying strangers on the road?  Special distiction goes to the unknown perpetrator of DickMove #2, which occurred right in front of me on The Metal Muncher, which is a three lane divided highway, where Mr. Nadsofsteel from the third (left) lane, cut me off in the center lane, then exited the highway a split second after a car in the right lane had been there.  Threading the needle...

...and despite the impossibility of imagining myself attempting anything like this, I suppose some admiration for the Nerve might be appropriate, which doesn't disturb me as much as my taking the event that was my first witnessing of DickMove #2 as matter-of-factly as I did.

Obviously you are most safe on the highway when you have the road to yourself.  It stands to reason that the more cars you have near you, the more likely you are to have a high-speed highway accident.  In driving safety courses I have taken at work, they advocate "the Space Cushion", where you leave a four second gap using a fixed object and counting to set the distance of your space cushion. I noticed that cars on the highway,  if manipulated correctly, will tend to group together.  I tried using the space cushion technique not only in front of me, but behind.  I fix the front space cushion behind the last car in a group, and keep this up until the cars that don"t pass me form the rear group, and there I am, all by myself in the middle.  I try to keep both space cushions equidistant, and they can be maintained for surprisingly long distances through subtle speed changes and frequent use of the rear-view mirror.  The last car in the front group likes it, the lead car in the rear group likes it, and I am Golden!  The absolute best position to be in is behind a big truck--nobody wants to get in that space for very long, but at the distance of the space cushion the truck is not obstructing the view ahead.  This is easy to maintain for as long as the truck is there.  If I really actively use this technique I get to the point where I am manipulating the traffic flow to my own benefit.  In fact I obsess about it.  I also consider that in making myself safer, I am making others less safe, so there's that... King of the road, safe as can be.

Make The Americas Great Again

Pre-addendum:  Today I saw CNN broadcasting an interview with Cory Lewandowski, Trump's attack dog former campaign manager.  I didn't hear anything he said because the sound was low on the TV in the diner, but fuck him.  What really got me was the headline CNN was showing in the crawl:  "Trump praises Supreme Court for blocking Obama immigration plan"  Really, CNN?  Are you that shitty of a news organization that you would characterize it that way?  The Supreme Court voted, and came to an impasse, a tie, because the asshole party won't confirm or even allow for a vote on Obama's nomination.  That's not in any way the Supreme Court blocking anything.  Because of the tie, the lower court's ruling stands.  This is just protocol since there is an even number of justices who came to a tie vote.  And so CNN gives The fucking Donald a headline for this?

Now another attempt at clarification:  Lately Donald Trump's comments about Mexicans have been called "racist".  Though it pains me to defend him on this topic, he is not technically being racist.  A dickhead, yes, but not racist.  It is true that he has said racist things about African Americans, which is abhorrent, disgustingly misogynist things about women, downright cruel things about disabled people, very insensitive things about people he would characterize as "losers", and the things he's said about Mexicans are insulting and bigoted, but not technically racist.

Mexicans are not a Race.  They are citizens or residents of the country of Mexico.  Let's school Trump and his willfully ignorant followers on a little Geography.  The Western Hemisphere is known collectively as "The Americas".  There is NO SUCH COUNTRY AS AMERICA.  The Americas are made up of a group of countries on the continent of South America; places like Argentina, Peru, and Brazil, the thinnish strip of land comprising Central America; places like Panama and Nicaragua, and the three countries that comprise the continent of North America, which are Canada, The United States of America, and Mexico.  Yes that's right, Mexico is considered part of North America, no matter how icky it makes Skeeter and Bubba feel.  Therefore, everyone who lives in the Western Hemisphere is American.

Yes, Donald Trump, you asshole, Mexicans are every bit as "American" as you are.

Yes, Donald Trump, you fucking douchebag, it is time to make The Americas great again.

Yes, Donald Trump, it is time to build a fucking wall--around YOU.