My Sunday Feeling

 

No blogging today.  Happy Memorial Day to all those that wore or wear the uniform.

My Sunday Feeling

As you read this, Melissa is in the air.  She should be en route to Cairo.  As in Egypt.  Not the one in Illinois.  She left LR yesterday at 4:20 PM our time.  So I’m guessing that’s right.  

She is going to spend 10 days or so with Sarah who has been working out there.  They have all kinds of stuff planned.  The good folks at Bedford Camera set up the Sony mirrorless camera Uncle Dave wanted me to have.  That will be a great low light box for her to use inside museums and the like.  Sarah is an Arabic speaker.  That’s got to come in handy.  

As you may have surmised, I did not go.  There’s a couple of reasons for this.  A) I was not invited and B) I suspect this is a mother-daughter thing that they need to get out of their systems.  Also C) the notion of being on a plane for that long gave me the DTs.  I’m good.

This will be the longest we have been apart since we started seeing each other 5-6 years ago.  And that’s OK.  I very much enjoyed sitting by myself on the porch looking into the woods.  If last night is any indication, Joe and I will undo all the good work his vegan mother has worked so hard to establish.  Speaking of which, Joe is here.  Well, he’s here to the extent that any 21 year old boy is “here.”  Last night he was up in Conway with his buddies.  

And that’s just fine.  I was that age once.  I didn’t want to hang out with the old folks either.      

Once Melissa was in the air, I went down to the gym where I ran into a buddy of mine who is a criminal lawyer.  We caught up on old news.  I told him I was batching it for awhile.

“So what are you gonna do with yourself?”

“Well, I bought a couple of cigars.”

“ If that’s as wild as you get while she’s gone it doesn’t sound like I will need to come get you out.”

As in out of jail.

No. Not likely.

The PGA is on.  There’s golf to be played and red meat to eat.  There’s a cigar to be smoked and/or chewed on and the new issue of Sports Illustrated came in.  

Joe and I will be just fine.  

And so will Melissa and Sarah.    

I look forward to seeing the pictures M takes with Uncle Dave’s camera.  He would have liked that.

My Sunday Feeling

 I have long thought that at least a third of the electorate in this country is smooth running crazy.  It’s just that with the advent of the Internet and social media they can now talk to each other.

I try, for the most part, to avoid right wing (or left wing for that matter) conspiracy theories and/or theorists.  Those people conduct business in an alternate reality where nuance and coincidence do not exist.  Everything happens for a REASON.  And only certain folks are privy to them. And, like I said, they talk to each other.  

Of course the reality of the matter is that most real world conspiracies are tissue thin and tend to collapse due to the incompetence and/or the big mouths of the participants.  Think of it.  How many surprise birthday parties have you ever seen pulled off?  Exactly.  But Barack Obama could successfully achieve the Oval Office despite having a jimmied up Certificate of Live Birth allegedly issued by the State of Hawaii to hide the “fact” that he was really born in Kenya?  Which was a “secret” kept by scores of people, some of them elected officials, over @ 40 years?  More on this later.

Yeah right.  I refer you again to the inherent difficulty of the surprise birthday party by way of comparison.  But some people want to believe that Obama is Kenyan and that a massive secret conspiracy, unlike the average birthday party plans, held together with iron discipline involving the manufacturers of voting machines and what not propelled Joe Biden to the Presidency over Donald Trump.  

OK.  I try to limit my consumption of bat-shittery to a finite number of sources as I am easily overwhelmed.  But I was turned on to one particular true believer out there by a friend who passed him along with the warning “Do. Not. Engage.”   Sensible advice.

As far as I can tell, this fellow, mercifully unknown to me previously, is way deep off the deep end.  He is a Q adherent-Q being poorly understood in his estimation-and routinely claims to be in possession of inside knowledge of what the future holds.  Despite being, well, nobody as far as I can tell. Just like me and most likely you.  

I have been following this cat since November sometimes with hands over my eyes. He routinely makes predictions based on the inside baseball he plays with the intelligentsia he’s hooked up to. And every prediction they have ever made about anything as far as I can tell has been completely, nay spectacularly, wrong.  They predicted that Biden would lose. He didn’t. Really he didn’t.   They predicted that the Vice President would not confirm the vote of the Electoral College.  The VP did.  They predicted that the SCOTUS would throw out the election results.  It didn’t. They predicted that Biden would never take the Oath of Office.  President Biden did(more on this later as well).  And these are just the predictions I can remember.  

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.  Always wrong but never in doubt.  But here’s the latest from the dark web.  Evidently, there is a line of what passes for thought amongst the faithful that Trump will be restored to the Presidency by August.  (I seem to recall that it was earlier supposed to happen last March.)I have seen this prediction other places out on the Net. So it must be a thing.

I have a question that I would put to the folks that believe this hooey if I were inclined to Engage.  Which I am not.

“How?”

This question first-or one close to it-popped up back in the day when numerous lawsuits were filed seeking to remove Barack Obama from office due to the fact that he allegedly was not native born.  A Federal Judge in California ruled that even assuming that the Plaintiff in this case was correct-and trust me, it is never good when the Judge prefaces his or her ruling with the phrase “even assuming you’re correct”-that once Obama took the Oath of Office he was the President.  And as President, could only be removed from Office through Impeachment according to the Constitution of the United States of America.  

Joe Biden took the Oath of Office.  Do I have to draw you a map?

Speaking of the Constitution, let’s assume that Biden is no longer able to serve, resigns or is impeached even.  The Founding Fathers took care of this for us.  Article II, Section I of the Constitution sets out the line of succession to the Presidency if the President dies or resigns.  If Joe Biden were to step down today Kamala Harris would be next in line.  If she were not able to serve then the Speaker of the House would be eligible followed by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate.  After those elected officials members of the Cabinet are next in line.

All in all, the line of succession extends to 18 people, none of whom are former Presidents.  It’s in the Constitution (as modified by the Presidential Succession Act).  “You could look it up” as reknowned constitutional scholar Casey Stengel might say.  

Long story short, under the Constitution Joe Biden can only be removed by Impeachment as he has taken the Oath of Office.  Even at that under the Constitution his replacement can only come from the line of succession prescribed therein.   Not to put too fine a point on it, the only way under the rule of law that Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office is if he wins the next Presidential election.  Period.

I don’t think these folks are much interested in that. They were pretty disaffected going into last November.  They live in a fantasy world of magical thinking in which authoritarianism transcends such niceties as the rule of law.  

They are the part of the electorate that is barking mad.  And they talk to each other.

Here’s hoping they don’t leave the talking stage.   

   

  

    

My Mother’s Day Feeling

 No blogging today.  

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Moms out there!  God bless you.....

My Sunday Feeling

 My old house is on the market.  

I first found out Thursday night from my buddy Phil.  Then the messages started coming in from all over.  This is no surprise given the red hot real estate market we are experiencing and the ubiquitous nature of information about houses for sale.  Folks all over are keeping an eye out.  Hell, one of the more popular real estate websites sent me a message Friday.  Apparently, it thinks I still own it.

That’s why I don’t really trust a lot of the information on these real estate websites.  There’s a lot of stuff they get wrong.  Particularly real estate values. 

And who actually owns a particular property evidently.  

I was kind of surprised to see my old place for sale.  Neither myself or the folks I sold the house to have been in our respective dwellings quite 3 years yet.  Maybe they’re flippers.  If they are, this is the market in which to do it, boy.  God knows I’m not looking to sell. But there’s a certain number in my head that would cause me to at least take a listen.  It’s not a crazy number and I bet I could get it. But I hope I don’t get that offer.  The notion of moving again gives me the DTs.  

I’m not widely known to be a sentimental man.  But I confess to feeling kind of strange taking a tour of my old house with somebody else’s stuff in it.  It’s akin to what a buddy of mine once said about going through a divorce. “You know it’s over when you see somebody else in your old front yard playing with your dog,” he said.  Now I knew it was over with the old place when I signed off on the new buyer’s offer.  Or made the offer on the house from which I am typing this deathless prose. Over is over.  I tend not to access the memory banks very often.

Still, I could relate to my buddy’s experience.  There was a kind of a cognitive dissonance “walking through” a place where I lived for years without any of my things in sight.  None of my furniture. No golf clubs.  No ballgame on in the background.  No guitars.  No whiskey bottles.  It felt like I was intruding. Almost voyeuristic.  

However, I was able to confirm something from the virtual tour that I had suspected while driving by from time to time.  The azaleas and dogwoods are gone. Now the folks that bought my old place had the absolute right to do whatever the hell they wanted to do with the front yard.  It’s none of my business.  And perhaps they were transplanted to someplace in the backyard.  Could very well be.  None of my business in any event.

But according to a buddy of mine who is a landscaper those azalea bushes had been there for at least 50 years.  And the dogwoods at least 10 years before me.  I thought that I had lost them for good after the great ice storm of 2000.  But the next spring the azaleas gave me again my miniature version of Augusta National.  And about half of the dogwoods came back.  

Those scraggly dogwoods were to me a metaphor for rebirth and courage that I always found entirely consistent with the Easter message.  Further, I enjoyed immensely sitting on my porch with a beverage and simply taking in the annual festival of beauty before me. 

I think we will have dogwoods in our future over here.  This spring with the pandemic and the aftermath of the blizzard was just too crazy.  I think we were doing good to just get through it all.  And I sometimes wonder how we did.  

Maybe next spring.  Barring the outbreak of World War III, or the Cubs with their insufferable fans winning the World Series, this year can’t possibly be any worse than last year.  And odds are we’ll still be here at what is no longer referred to as “the new place.”  Seller’s market or no seller’s market.  

And I hope whoever buys my old house again enjoys it as much as my friends and I did.  

Perhaps by then Zillow will take me off the title.