Here's something we all could do to save the Post Office

I have a protest /demonstration /contribution idea to save the Postal Service. Someone suggested on facebook today you put a stamp on your mail-in ballot so it has to be treated as first class mail instead of bulk. My idea is to put two or three on, the excess being as a contribution to the budget. Someone has suggested that if every adult in the country bought a book of stamps it would balance their budget, I see this as a step in that direction. I'm thinking an extra stamp or two on everything we mail will help out without a huge investment of time or money from any of us.

Unconfirmed

Déjà vu

Remember this?

     It started this way. After watching a couple of news shows early this morning, by late afternoon I posted this on facebook: He's doing it again. Like he did in 2016, Trump throws insult after insult at his new opponents and the press follows along and reports it all like puppies snatching up spilled dog food. The main news sources report his opening up the ridiculous birther charge against Kamala Harris and then everybody has to comment on it, his machinations over the Post Office and everybody has to tell how illegal and immoral it is but so far nobody has done anything about it, and promoting outrageous lesser officials like a newly ordained candidate for Congress in Georgia who says all Democrats are satan worshipers. Meanwhile responsible newsmakers end up responding to all the presidential bulldust or face being ignored altogether. I guess it goes to who hollers loudest, but this is dangerous as it was last time the political discourse becomes narrowly focused on all the dishonest actions and rantings of the #fakepresident. He's making it all about himself and the opposition is shouted down in one way or another or ignored while the pundits discuss the next bunch of ignorant blather from Trump. We've been here before. 

     From there it evolved into this comment from a friend: Not looking forward to the debates. Since he has no inclination to anything resembling the truth, he can make dozens of false and outlandish statements and get the press chasing those as well. Unless they put the candidates in separate rooms with a switch on his mike that they shut off as soon as his time is up, and fact checkers on-site to fact check everything he says, it will be the Drumpf show.

To which I responded with this and that's why the picture and the déjà vu. Do I get points  for not repeating the overused Yogi Berra quote?): I would l just like it if they would make him stand behind his own podium. I admit to getting livid and shouting at the TV every time he walked behind Hillary, not sure if he was trying to make her nervous or just remain in the video line of sight, maybe both. To her credit, she held up her own and I never noticed any reaction at all though she must have known he was there.

Somebody is actually trying to do something

Fuck Trump

More politics

For you youngsters in the audience, Yogi Berra was the catcher for the New York Yankees during their heydays in the 1950s famous for his non sequiturs. His exact quote was "It's déjà vu all over again" and it has seemed like over the years no one can use the phrase without saying the Yogi version.

Good days and bad days and going half mad days

Sidelined and holding the single malt hostage.

Over the years my stream of consciousness has eroded the banks so badly it's difficult to find the main channel these days, but let's try. This was going to be one of those good days but, here's how my life goes. I had the trailer all packed up and stocked up to take my first extended trip in it today. But as these things go, the furnace failed so my trip was from here to the dealer's. They had to keep it because they might have to replace the furnace. 
I headed home disappointed but realized I could at least renew a prescription that was about to run out while I was gone and might have cut my trip short. When I called they said half an hour and as I was only that far from them and it was on the way home, the timing was perfect. 
I got there early so I made a Taco Bell stop and the pharmacy which was right across the street called while I was in line for my food. Perfect, luck changing. With my prescription and my burrito in hand I headed home, putzed a little, took a long nap and woke up feeling better. 
I watched Rachel and O'Donnell lavish praise on Kamala Harris and went on line where I came across a great story about her written by a public defender who often opposed her in court when Harris was California's attorney general. I was suitably impressed at the many effective progressive improvements Harris was able to make. In the process I went back into some old political writings on this blog and came across the video version of "For What It's Worth" the kids at Stoneman High School produced after the shooting there. 
Here's that video:

 

My friend Suzy calls
this an adult juice bocx.

That got the juices flowing and then the song following was a cover version of the old Cream song "I can't find my way home." That also was inspiring and I thought of all the alcohol fueled playlists I've put up over the years and considered it, especially as the third song in the future on that channel was by Amy Winehouse and I have never heard her. So, mmmm, time for a little single malt to get things rolling. Get this. I own two expensive bottles of Glenmorangie scotch. You know where they are? They are in the travel trailer 25 miles away at the dealership. I went to the closest liquor store to me here a couple of years ago and I actually had to explain to the kid exactly what single malt scotch is. No sense going there and I am not up for a 20-mile round trip for what would probably be no more than two glasses of expensive scotch. In the process of looking for liquid inspiration, it hit me that in addition to moving those two expensive bottles of scotch into the trailer, I had also cleaned out what was left in the liquor cabinet in the process of leaving this place.
Looking like another night of mediocre TV now. Crap. But wait. I found an old box of Cabernet with some left in it in the back of the refrigerator. Maybe the evening is saved.  
I originally wrote this as an instant message to a friend and it got so long my first move is to turn that into this blog post. Turns out the wine isn't so bad. Watch this space.

And, oh yeah, here's that Cream cover:


And then there's my first Amy Winehouse. (The most recent member to join the "27 club") RIP


Interesting for sure. And this old wine is still pretty good, too. Now, about that furnace.
       Somehow the term "old wine" keeps drawing me into the necessity to write a poem but for the life of me I can't find my way to the next word or home either for that matter. So that goes. It brings to mind Isaac Bashevis Singer whose "Old Loves" was recommended to me by a friend years ago and still stands in a place of prominence on an overloaded bookshelf at the East Pole. So old loves and old wine must connect by some thread, but old loves have become painful memories in my current circumstance and right now I am past the bad part of the day and looking for food so I'm not going there and besides I have just poured the second glass of wine and really would rather eat something. (now that's how stream of consciousness works) but there's a problem you see, most of the recent food purchases and all the condiments and sauces and such are in that trailer a 50-mile round trip away and probably locked indoors anyway (I don't even have Jimmy Buffett's mythical lost shaker of salt), however I did spot a Marie Callendar chicken pot pie in the freezer when I pulled an ice cube out for the wine (I have this tray that makes huge cubes you only need one per drink and it lasts a long time)… oh, crap just gave away my pedestrian tastes … no matter, this isn't luxury wine dining it's what I call writer's wine, the cheap wine beat writers like Ferlinghetti and Kerouac and Ginsburg drank in sleazy apartments and taverns in San Francisco or Greenwich Village ... during the 1950s. I'm done.
Here's that story about Kamala Harris
Past playlists
More past playlists
And a few looks at politics
When good people do nothing

Fuck you Trump, just fuck you

Mr. Mike Cartoons.com

Within the orbit of six degrees of separation (probably only one or two) everyone in this country, if not receiving benefits themselves, is connected to someone who is dependent on Social Security for some measure of support. Parents, grandparents, children, somewhere in the current milieu is a person you are related to or at least know who is collecting benefits. And, everyone who has ever held a job and had that "payroll tax" deducted has an investment in their own retirement future, not to mention a stake in it that could cover a myriad of personal disasters that for some reason or other threaten the individual's basic existence.

In my own case, while my income has always been limited by personal choices, I now survive mostly on monthly payments from Social Security. I have enough put away to meet a major problem, but for day-to-day expenses that check every month supports me. And, if not for Medicare to cover increasing expenses since I have emerged from the bulletproof years of my youth, grow older and develop increasingly serious infirmities, I would have used up that emergency fund several years ago. 

Now, as mentioned above, almost every wage earner in the country has paid into the system. I have paid into it since 1959 when I received my first check from a job as a teen-aged chef's helper in a New Hampshire seaside restaurant. That's almost 60 years of paying that "tax." That is not an entitlement in the current use of the word by some elected officials but as a true entitlement in that as I have paid into the program I am entitled to the benefits of those contributions. And, something a younger person might not realize, a premium for Medicare coverage is deducted from every Social Security payment I receive. That's right, Medicare is not free to any of us.

So, now comes a spoiled brat of a #fakepresident, attempting by exeuctive order to stop that "payroll tax," that payment wage-earners make to support current benefits on the promise that when their time comes, the money will come back to them. It's questionable whether that order is legal or not or can be enforced. Probably a judicial ruling somewhere along the line will decide that before the first time it's applied. Worse is the underlying reason most who undestand these things believe is the motive for removing the "tax." More important from this #fakepresident who was elected by people who are most likely to need Social Security, is his threat to end Social Security and Medicare if we elect him to a second term.

I would say this is about the dumbest thing a candidate could advocate going into a hotly contested election alienating 63 million Social Security recipients who pretty much all vote, but as I drive around my neighborhood and see the Trump signs and flags in some yards, it seems no matter what this guy says, he is still supported by a large stupid percentage of the American voting public. This is not a wealthy neighborhood, there are young people with kids they are sending to school on the insistence of the same man despite the Coronavirus slowly creeping north from its largest Alaska concentration in Anchorage into the next largest Alaska population area, filled with people proud to claim their rights as Americans to not wear protective masks. And those people support the man who would take away the only safety net many of them have.

What generated this diatribe? I mean so many people discuss this crap on news shows that there's little I can add except my own outrage so I haven't written much about it. But this morning shortly after I woke up and began my usual Internet tour starting with facebook, I came across a post showing a grinning president over the headline that he plans to eliminate Social Security and

Medicare in his second term. For a moment my body literally went cold with the realization that at the age of 78 I would be without secure income to support me. A quick mental tour through my finances assured me I might be able to last as long as three years and that's if nothing unexpected happens.           Considering that I am facing two serious medical procedures in the near future, that time is shortened considerably. It has gone beyond a bunch of talking heads on TV into the very gut of existence. It's a helpless feeling. The one bit of optimism I hold is that this is another of the #fakepresident's bait and switch maneuvers. He starts a new outrage  and the press focuses on the new one so we forget about his failure with coronavirus and his failure to act on Russia paying a bounty on American soldiers in Afghanistan, his failure to act on Black Lives Matter, maybe his failures altogether. It certainly shows he doesn't give a good damn about the regular folks in this country. Unfortunately none of those failures matter to those people putting up signs in the neighborhood. But you can bet if he carries through with his threat many of them will feel the effects at some time in their future.
Oh, and by the way: There is no logic in politics. C–

When good people do nothing
There's no logic, no logic at all
More political comment

I have a question for the DMV

Arrow 16 inches, numbers 8 inches

Last fall I failed the vision test to renew my driver's license. I hadn't had my vision checked in a couple of years so I went to the doctor, got a new prescription and then passed the test easily. However, something about it all has been nagging at me so today with the sun out and not much to do I went about asking this question of the Department of Motor Vehicles: Why if the lettering on road signs is THIS BIG …

Letters 4 1/2 inches

Letters 10 1/2 inches

Letters 8 inches

Letters 8 inches, numbers 13 inches

Letters 7 inches

Big enough

This one could be bigger.

Letters 8 inches

… do I have to be able to read the fine print at the bottom of an insurance policy?   Please put your response in the comments section.