Two Memories

 I'm trying to remember occurrences in this year that wasn't. when the coronavirus closed down our lives in March and the USA's non-response to it was akin to allowing the Japanese to invade America in 1942 and now they're poised upon the heights of Arlington ready to overwhelm DC on the morrow. I guess FDR wouldn't be one of the Triumphant Threesome off Presidents if he had followed Trump's incompetent response to everything (which gets lots of people killed) and thrown up his hands and said, The Virginia and Maryland governors need to act and if they need combat boots or web belts for their militias, I could assign my son-in-law to seek contracts worldwide to help procure those.

My last post detailed the one thing during this year-that-wasn't that was normal that I indulged in. Movie-going, I went to see Parasite on Valentine's Day, the Academy Award winning film that, well, sucked. I got incredibly sick that night that made me see God and for the next two weeks I thought I might die as I coughed my lungs out. I wonder what I had, but there were no reliable or helpful tests then, despite the president's subsequent claim that If you want a test you can get a test.

So now it's time to remember my two most memorable moments this year without referring to my daily notes, and I can do that. I went to a wedding party in January in the District that was thrown by a supermarket magnate that was way over the top; I boogied with my love and barely made the last subway to Virginia and expected moreso the rest of the year. But no. the coronavirus intervened and way later, in July when we were all housebound, I come out of my house on July 4th and saw 500 feet up a B-29 bomber fly over my house escorted by four P-51 Mustangs, all restored WW2 warplanes which had flown on Independence Day over the National Mall and were headed to IAD then, and in that instant I thought of my dad who endured 180 days of intense combat in two battles in the Pacific and my mother who got out of her small-town as a teenager by traveling to CA to work in the war industries (where she met my dad at an USO dance).

It's December . . .

 It's December finally in the year that wasn't.  The time for a summing up of the year past, a making of lists.

Except there aren't many or any noteworthy personal events in this year that never should have happened; it's like God stepped away for a moment and got distracted.  What would I list as something I did, because I never went anywhere hardly, or did anything practically, once the virus took hold, and what I think happened this year, my reality, is regarded by the Trumpite side of my family as my fantasy, induced by osmosis apparently by my location not only within the Northeast Bubble but actually inside the Beltway. 

Of course, they live in the real fantasy world, not me, because I operate on real information that I acquire from the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and my further reading in books and magazines as filtered through my education at boarding school, a state university and a top ten law school which taught me critical thinking skills to augment my life experiences acquired from being a ski bum for four years, a policeman for nine years and a lawyer for 25 years.  So what did I accomplish or do in this DOA year?

I went to one movie, on Valentine's Day, Parasite, because it won the Academy Award for being the best picture, where I got really sick by that night with a respiratory ailment that kept me down for two weeks and that I still don't believe I've fully recovered from. The movie was, well, awful and the illness was, well, I'll never know what I actually had because in Trump's America nothing is as it was before him and not for the better by a long shot.

How Many

I called a friend today, a former running buddy who got married and moved out of DC; he asked me how things were going. I said, "Everything sucks." 

I was losing money in my retirement fund, down 45% this year alone despite this month which was the most robust in 30 years, I ate my Thanksgiving dinner alone (oh, doesn't that warm your heart Sharon!) and the holiday season was upon us which keeps me depressed from Veterans Day till March. You see, I have 3 children, all now in their early thirties, who threw me over and ceased all communication with me or any Lamberton due to the divorce two decades ago thanks to her insidious, invidious utilization of PAS back then when they were tender children and my three children all have their birthdays in January or February.

This makes me sad every holiday season. So my friend, a very smart man, embarked upon an enlightening discussion thinly disguised as a quest to find the winter of my discontent and he asked me to list three things that were good in my life now.

I was hard pressed to say what made me feel uplifted currently but I finally settled upon the very important and blessed situations that a) I have enough food to eat (no food insecurity); b) I have enough liquids stored to drink for several months if necessary; and c) all of my five siblings are alive (which is more than I know about my three children). We simultaneously decided that I wished I knew more about the welfare of my real family (my kids) during this lugubrious season; and I decided further that it would be decent or human to know not if I have any grandchildren, but how many I have, and how they are.

Very Unusual Human Beings

 This Thanksgiving I was home since I am not traveling in deference to the over-stressed US health care system, thanks to the criminally negligent pandemic nonresponse on the part of President Baby Huey. At Noon I went to take out a pizza from the Lost Dog Pizzeria in Westover but it was closed for the holiday, although several Uber-Eats drivers were hanging around with putative takeout orders, wondering what was going on. 

I waited awhile in my car to see if anyone I knew showed up. Nobody I recognized came by so I went home to cook a solitary meal for myself.

The meal was fine, a pork roast slathered in BBQ sauce plus fixings. I ate it wondering how many grandchildren I might have, but I also knew two immutable things: my ex-wife who turned our children against me through PAS when they were minors (a form of child abuse) would never tell me if one of them suffered a tragedy; or if I as a parent would ever be informed by her or them of the pleasure and pride of indulging in any grandchildren of any of these three now-adults might have had by now.

I wouldn't want to be my ex-wife, Sharon R. Lightbourne (nee Sharon Rogers), good luck to her at St. Peters gate! And as for JJ&D, I wonder how any of them could have accepted such largess as their Lamberton grandmother provided for them through her own frugal sacrifices as a widow and still diss all Lambertons for these last two decades as being unworthy of having any gratitude towards or communication with, I would have thought that accepting such a sum of money (about 100K each in trust money) from so apparently foul a source would have compelled them to either refuse it or cause them to turn it over to charity; those three now fully mature male adults are unfortunately very unusual human beings, persons I wouldn't recognize now as having had any upbringing influence from me as to what they have become from all appearances.

Veteran's Day 2020

 On Veteran's Day earlier this month I went to see my main street corner man, Trevor, who holds down the intersection of Route 29 and I-66 while wearing a sign declaring himself a combat vet and asking God to bless America. I hadn't seen him in months because I don't hardly ever go by there anymore since since the pandemic began, I only go to Merrifield sometimes in the other direction from my house, which has a Home Depot, and to the grocery store a couple of miles away. He had been sitting on some intel for me for months he said when he saw me. Sharon, the mother of my three estranged children, a heartless covert narcissist (in my opinion) who turned all three boys against me by using the form of child abuse (in some people's opinion including mine) known as PAS, had been in a red car driving by weeks earlier.

Sharon, who has stonily refused to tell me anything about any of my children (even whether they're all still alive--this is a very abnormal woman), is the only link I have with any of my children, since in the consuming hatred she harbors in her flinty soul towards me she influenced our children not to communicate with a single relative on my side of the family for over 15 years. Now that's abnormal! She used to live two miles from me, a block away from Trevor's intersection, and she used to use her phony concerned Christian blather on him whenever she walked by him with her most recent husband Jim.  A couple of years ago she moved away for parts unknown, thus severing my only link to my children.  

Trevor knows cars as well as people.  Whenever I drive by, even if I'm three lanes over, he'll shout out to me, "Hey, lawyer man!"  He knows Jim drives a Jeep.  He knows Sharon drives a red convertible Mustang. The car he saw her in was red but not a Mustang nor a convertible nor a Jeep.  But he said it had North Carolina tags.  Thanks Trevor!

Then since it was almost noon and a federal holiday, I went over to Westover and went into the Lost Dog pizzeria and looked around but didn't see anyone I recognized so I left and hung out outside for awhile watching the comings and goings at the restaurant, which has limited seating inside as well as takeout.  It felt like I used to feel every holiday when I went to Sharon's residence until the youngest one turned 18 to execute upon my plain vanilla visitation, but she never cooperated with the court order; the house was always dark, the phone was never answered and no children ever came out.  For a few months initially when the children were learning under her tutelage how to become scofflaws and that court orders meant nothing (there wasn't enough money in my world to go running to court to get a hearing 6 weeks later every time this happened), the kids would come out in their stockinged feet, even in cold weather, to brightly recite, "Mom sent us out ready to go but we don't want to go with you so we're not."  And then they would skip back into her house, close the door and that was my visitation for those two weeks.  After a period of time they even abandoned that charade.  You see, research shows that children would rather keep the parent happy with whom they spend the most amount of time (she had them 83% of the time to my 17% of the time under the visitation order) and who puts the most amount of stress upon them through manipulation, oftentimes unrelenting in the case of an alienating parent, to the point where they abandon or start to hate the other parent to keep the grotesque manipulator happy.  

Anyway, I went home from the Lost Dog this Veteran's Day and cooked myself a frozen Stouffers Pizza on French Bread for lunch.  The holiday season is coming up fast so I'm starting to get sad again.  Then the three children, now all adults in their 30s, all have birthdays in January or February.  The middle child, whose birthday is next, registered to vote in Seattle a few years back, as I discovered poking around on the internet, the only child who ever moved any distance away from her.  I thought he might be trying to break her unnatural influence upon him as he started to fully mature in adulthood.  Since she's now in North Carolina, I wonder if he'll move back east and maybe follow her there.

And the winner is . . .not Chump Trump.

Biden won going away. By more than 5.5 million votes. He blew Don the Con out in the electoral college by an historic landslide. Really. He won 306 electoral college votes, the same amount Trump won by in 2016, when the orange bloviator used to hand out maps of his electoral college victory to visitors and claim it was the greatest wipeout in history. Not the Trump is insecure and craves adulation. Never mind that Tricky Dick won 49 states in 1972. Ignore that Trump won his victory by about 77,000 votes in three states combined, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, the so-called Blue Wall. Biden reclaimed those three states by a quarter million votes combined and flipped three more states Trump won in2016, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. Yeah, that's right, Georgia. 

I think that when Biden calls at the White House on the morning of January 20th, he ought to bring the Baby Huey president a gift--a framed picture of the electoral college victory that Biden won, entitled An Historic Wipeout of an Incumbent President. Yeah, that's what I think. It'd be perfect, a perfect gift for the departing president perfectly outlining the 306 votes that Biden won over the biggest election loser in presidential history.

Trump should look forward to departing the presidency. Even more time for golf. No more boring briefings which cut into his TV time. He won't have to salute North Korean generals anymore. Angela Merkel won't be around to throw candy bars at. No more annoying powerful women around to feel inferior to like Nancy Pelosi or Angela Merkel. He can surround himself with even more foolish and feckless women than the gibberish-spouting Kellyanne Conway, the stupid, lying bimbo Kayleigh McEnany, the pathetically untruthful Sarah Huckaby Sanders and the hopelessly corrupt Hope Hicks.

It's a shame Trump's going to spend his last two months in office doing nothing about the raging pandemic but everything about subverting our democracy by denying the incoming president classified briefings so he can be fully informed when he takes the reins of power, that is whenever L'il Richie Rich isn't stamping his foot wherever he's sulking and railing that the election was rigged, somehow, thus turning his 71 million cult followers into vacuous conspiracy believers for the rest of their lives. None Dare Call It Treason.

We can now announce . . . .

 I dragged myself off to my motel room in 2016 at 11 pm in Newport News on election night after a 16 hour stint being an inside poll observer in that town (apparently SE Virginia doesn't have any democratic lawyers, so they have to reach 300 miles up to Arlington and Falls Church to find lawyers willing to drive down there for three days). I switched on the TV set and settled into bed ready for an exciting night watching the returns come in leading to a Hillary Clinton victory. Remember how she was 99% certain to win?

I had been inside a bubble all day since 5 am locked into a polling precinct place in the poorest part of town where the tally at the end of the night was akin to 80% Clinton, 11% Trump and 9% those faux candidates the pothead Johnson and the useful idiot Stein so nothing had prepared me for what I saw within a minute of turning the TV on. I have watched enough presidential returns to know that something unimaginable and momentous was afoot. Florida was gone, North Carolina (where I had canvassed) was gone, Clinton was losing in Virginia (where I had canvassed) with 95% of the vote in, but some returns from Democrat-rich Fairfax County were not yet in (where indeed Hillary eked out a thin state victory). I switched off the light and went to sleep with the TV set still on.

At about 4 am the change in the tone of the announcers woke me up in time to hear, "We can now announce that Donald Trump has just been elected as the 45th president president of the United States. I instantly knew, lying there in darkness in a strange bed all by myself in a seedy motel room far from home, that a bottleneck had arrived that my life was flowing through at that very moment. Into the one end my past life entered, a proud, confident American who knew America for all its faults was exceptional, and out the other end was emerging a citizen who knew he no longer knew his country and was fearful of the future, both for himself and his country. I felt like this moment actually might be a death knell of either myself or my country.

Sound overblown? America and its democratic institutions have become empty husks of themselves in four short years, no longer a world leader and having become the laughing stock of the world in its response to the worldwide pandemic with the most deaths and infections from it by far. Me die as a result of the occurrence of that moment? How about the threats or perhaps eventualities of dying by COVID-19, nuclear war with North Korea, a one-off nuclear exchange with a state like Iran (I do live in the DC blast range), shot by a heavily armed militiaman or soldier at a protest or denied necessary medical care by administration-ordered retrenchments in the health-care networks so the super rich could get get another hefty tax cut.

The last four years have been horrible for America and Americans who care to keep informed.

Last night felt pretty much the same as that 2016 moment for me, mingled with incredulity because Americans have seen what's happened in the past four years (caged and orphaned children, separated families, a quarter million Americans dead unnecessarily, unemployment at record-level, a looming depression, racism exposed and coddled, assassination plots against political or governing leaders tacitly encouraged, rampant corruption, allies cast aside, adversaries embraced etc. etc. etc.) , but I when I went to bed last night I still thought Biden would win, barely, the electoral college, perhaps by 270-268.

The political landscape was even more bleak when I woke up this morning, with no chance of the Dems taking the senate, the Dems losing seats in the house and Biden temporarily behind in his Blue Wall reclaiming bid, but I still think Biden will win, barely. We know that Biden will win millions more votes than Trump nationwide--so much for one person one vote--yet he has only one one tenuous path to a nail biter victory. But Dems are used to this; the last two Republican presidents, both tenures being utterly ruinous for the nation, were both outvoted yet entered the people's house (Dubya Bush thanks to a single vote--GOP appointed Scalia's).

Next perhaps I'll recount last night's fevered dream while I fitfully slept, no TV blaring this time to wake me up into an ongoing nightmare.

When I was on the radio . . . .

This post was inspired by a FB post that went like this: Child--Alexa, play Let It Go. Parent--When I was your age, I would call a radio station, wait on hold for 30 minutes till I got through, request a song then sit by my boombox for an hour with a blank cassette in it so I could record the song when it came on. Child--I don't know what that means.

I recorded myself on the radio once as a boy of about 11. It was on a general call-in talk show in New York City and I lay on my parents bed upstairs next to the radio tuned in to the station, dialed it up about 50 times on the rotary dial phone, which required seven twirls of the round number wheel for each call, always got a busy signal, had to hang up and repeat the process, but after an hour of constant dialing I got through to the station, waited 5 or 10 minutes more and got through to the radio host.

I talked for three or four minutes with the host about potholes in the roads which jarred my bike as I delivered the Herald Tribune each morning at 5 am and these vibrations sometimes caused the folded papers to fall out of the bike's basket. As soon as I got on I switched on my little reel to reel tape recorder and recorded the interview as it came out of the radio by my parents bed. 

The host explained that potholes were caused by the expanding property of water as it turns to ice after it gets into the crevices of roadway asphalt during cold weather. (I actually knew this but pretended that I didn't.) 

When I got off the host wondered to the audience why I was still up, it being about 9:30 pm by the time I got through to the station, and when I announced to my parents downstairs that I had just been on the radio, they merely said, "We wondered what all that dialing was for." 

So I check marked Being On The Radio on my life's list, but I doubt any kid today would have the patience, or the idiocy, to make a dialing motion 350 times, which also involved removing the finger each time so the wheel could slowly spin back. I also wonder if they would know what a cigar-box sized two-reel tape recorder was, or how to operate a rotary dial phone, or how to record a program by setting a running tape recorder next to a radio which was tuned in to a station. Memories of the early 60s.

Happy birthday, Mom! Vote tomorrow!

The Recent Ruination of American Exceptionalism

There is less than a week to go before we can start restoring America to its former greatness. Unfortunately the first priority will be to get some control over the coronavirus and by January 20th, and we will have wasted a full year in that endeavor thanks to the recklessness a minority of American voters four years ago who voted for a crass failed businessman to "Make America Great Again." Any critical thinker then could have seen that was a dangerous put-the-tooth-under-the-pillow wish with ten minutes of Google research.

I voted early over a month ago, and although I have done nothing for any campaign this time, unlike in 2016, 2017 and 2018 when I worked hard for democrats, to good success in 2017 and 2018, and clearly the nation's immediate, rapid decline starting in 2017 wasn't because of anything that I left undone in 2016. Because I am in a vulnerable category for the coronavirus, I have chosen not to put myself at risk by working within the confines of a campaign and potentially become a further burden upon our straining health care system by getting sick.  

Also, I have been hearing hospital administrators lately talking about rationing health care and making choices about who to treat because their hospitals have no further capacity. I understand triage and I have no doubt my care would be placed behind that of reckless, maskless young people who got themselves sick by attending packed GOP functions if health care started to be rationed in Trump's America in the face of all the hot spots everywhere. In other words, people over 65 like me would be sent home to die there with no treatment.

I talked my gardener into voting early and he voted for Biden. I talked my neighbor's live-in adult son into voting early and he voted for Biden. This week I talked the young man living at his parents house across the street into promising that he would vote. So I consider that I multiplied my vote by two and a half times.  

I am retired, my 401K has gone down over 60% this year and my social security check was late this month but I have sent a $25 check to 23 democratic incumbents or challengers, mostly senatorial candidates because the soulless grim reaper, aka Moscow Mitch McConnell, has shown us all that true Machiavellian power in the US resides in the senate where a paltry minority of the population can control negatively the lives of the large majority in this country. But I mailed contributions to a few representatives as well like Wendy Davis in TX and Max Rose in NY. I admire Davis because of her heroic efforts in an 18-hour filibuster while trying to block draconian restrictions being put upon a woman's right to control her own body in \Texas a few years back. I am from conservative Staten Island and I wish good luck to the unflappable, feisty Rose!.  

And I put a Biden sign in my yard and on my car. If I ever meet any of my grandchildren, I won't feel totally embarrassed if they complain to me about the total and hopefully not irretrievable ruination of American excellence under Trump.

Less than two weeks out, and closing in on 225,000 deaths

 There's not much to do for the election since I voted last month.  I get text messages asking me to sign up for inside poll watcher training, like I did in 2016, but I resist it since I have more than one comorbidities concerning COVID-19.  I decided I am not going to spend16 hours in a closed space packed with people working and constantly shuffling in and out, it's a younger person's job now to save our tottering republic--I did my best the last presidential election.

I had chatted up one of the two live-at-home sons of my neighbors who had indicated an interest in the election and offered to take him to City Hall to vote in-person early, but he never answered the door when I knocked at the prearranged time.  (The other son, the one who went to college, brusquely said he didn't vote, go figure.)  I saw him last week on the sidewalk and he told me that he had indeed voted the day I knocked, only later, and he had voted for Biden.  Score!

I watched the second debate in its entirety, and clips of the first one, both gave me a headache to see a snarling, mugging bully hector an aging septuagenarian with utter, lying and nonsensical BS.  And I watch the count of American dead mount steadily each day, about to pass 225,000 in a mere eight months, most of them unnecessary if only there had been leadership from the president and a national plan.  As it is, the coronavirus is raging uncontrollably across the land while Nero fiddles, the U.S. is the laughing stock of the world in its ineptitude.

I sit at home, watch the news, go out threesor four  times a week to the store and wait for the virus to be over or quelled.  It's obviously going to be a long wait because absolutely nothing is going to be done to ameliorate the current situation before January 20th, which is still three months away at which time the U.S. under Biden will start at Go, with a full year utterly wasted thanks to the shocking  recklessness of the U.S electorate in 2016 who took a flier on such an obviously utterly unfit candidate and voted him in thanks to the obsolescent electoral college which strips the populous coasts of the power of a democracy's supposed mainstay of one person one vote.  All power flows through the Senate, Mitch McConnell has shown us that with his grim reaping, and every day I send out another $25 check to Democratic senatorial candidates, twenty checks so far.

I can't wait for November 3rd at 7 pm.

Dreams of My Children, or Why I Hate Holidays.

Besides Christmas or Thanksgiving, which cause the heart to bring forth images of family and longing memories of missing loved ones, Columbus Day is the holiday I most dislike.  Nineteen years ago during The Divorce  I brought my children back from a lovely trip to Ohio to visit their cousins and aunt and uncle and that night their mother called Dr. Victor Elion, a charlatan court-house-lounging psychologist who acquired visitation overseeing powers over my visitation thanks to the careless writing of an order by my dreadful then-divorce attorney, to complain that I had brought the children home "tired."  He completely suspended my visitation privileges that night, ex parte, and I wasn't able to restore my rights until after a hearing scheduled two months later and by then, the children had turned against me by application of PAS, a form of brainwashing which immature tender children are especially sensitive to, by their mother and her coterie of agenda-driven hired gun social services "professionals" no better than Dr. Elion.  I remember thinking at the time that 60 days of no communication with my children was heartbreakingly cruel and painful.  What did I know then in my ignorance, I haven't seen nor heard from any of my children in 15 years.

But you don't have to take my word for it.  You could google my name and the name of my oldest son, James Bradley Lamberton, before he changed his name to her name on his eighteenth birthday, and find an opinion by the Virginia appellate court on how that divorce went, which contains phrases like "reprehensible." a "harassment petition" and "unjustified" in describing the actions of the mother during the litigation.  She was assessed sanctions and my costs of just under $50,000 finally which ended the litigation finally after several dreadful soul and money sucking years.

So I hate Columbus Day, it immediately conjures up memories of my lost children and the unfairness men mostly face these days in heartless domestic law courts.  For years I have maintained a public outreach to my children on this very venue, letting them know that on any holiday during which I am home that I would be at a nearby pizzeria to where they grew up during the noon hour and inviting any or all of them to join me so we could, as adults in a loving family, could pick up the threads from this day going forward.  After all, until each one turned 18, I was always at their curbside every other holiday or Friday at 5 pm to undertake my court-ordered visitation and partake in the custody order (full joint legal custody), although they (nor their mother) never answered my cellphone calls to the house and after ten minutes I would drive away to return on the next holiday or twice-monthly Friday.

No one besides a forlorn fellow sufferer in the Arlington Court who I didn't know (I thought she was serving me a subpoena when she approached me in the restaurant as I ate) who was undergoing the very same PAS applications that I suffered from.  She described the same unfair and dreadful undertakings  by the same cast of characters in the case she was associated with, like, in my opinion, the odious and unprofessional Meg Sullivan, LPSW, that in my opinion in conjunction with other hired whore "professionals" extrajudicially cost me my fatherhood.  But I persevere.  Today, even during the pandemic, I parked at noon within sight of the front door of the Lost Dog Restaurant in Westover, donned my mask and checked out the inside quickly and ordered a Polynesian Pie, spent the time it was cooking in my car watching people entering or leaving the front door of the premises, received a text at 12:33 that my pie was ready, watched for a few minutes more then picked up my pie and a few minutes later drove home to enjoy it.  I am sorry for those three, as the fatuous Dr. Elion used to refer to them as, lads, now all adults in their thirties.  What men they should be, that they so easily cast family members out on temptations offered to them by others, even though as young children but now mature adults! 

A Two-fer . . .

Ernesto, who mows my lawn, called me yesterday, which he almost never does.  He's a friend of mine, a Bolivian who has been here for thirty years and a citizen since 2000.  He speaks passable English (I am envious when I sit outside with my next door neighbor occasionally--she is his brother--and those two start speaking together in an indigent dialect from South America which means that they speak three languages, including of of course Spanish, whereas I can only speak one) but he is not fully up on politics in America so I do my best to inform him.

He told me that he had just voted early at City Hall and it only took him five minutes--in and out with no one else there except for the registrar.  He thanked me for informing him of the existence of early voting and where to go and when it was open (M-F 9-5 untill election week) because he wasn't sure otherwise if he would have gone to his local precinct at the elementary school on election day and waited on line during a pandemic to vote otherwise and getting an absentee mail-in ballot was otherwise too cumbersome for him in Virginia (you have to obtain the proper application form, fill it out correctly, send it to the proper place, receive the ballot back, fill that out correctly, including fulfilling properly all the requirements for the return envelope including a proper signature in the right place. and sending it back so it'll arrive in time in an era when the U.S, mail is being deliberately being slowed down by Postmaster Louis DeJoy, a Trump sycophant).

I was gratified to hear from Ernesto because I had offered to take my neighbor, her husband and her two adult children to City Hall to vote when I went  to vote early but they were no shows when I knocked on their door at the prearranged time.  I then issued a standing offer to drive any of them to City Hall during early voting hours but a complicated series of reasons why they had no time to do this whenever I suggested a time made it dawn upon me that although they revile Donald Trump, they were going to vote, if at all, on their own time.

I felt bad that I really had no other plans to work in this election--I am too much in a suspect group health-wise to physically electioneer during a pandemic--besides voting early myself, sending modest checks to democratic senatorial candidates and putting up a Biden sign in my yard.  Receiving Ernesto's call out of the clear blue yesterday was a delight.

I voted . . .

 In these cataclysmic times, I executed my plan to vote on the first day early voting started in Virginia last month, on September 18th.  I drove down to City Hall at 10 am armed with a notice dated in August from my bank which came addressed to me at my residential address indicating that a check I had deposited had in fact been deposited.

I walked in with a face mask on and was met by a sheriff's deputy to whom I announced that I was present to vote.  He directed me towards the city's registrar office without requiring me to go through any security, where there was no there aside from a receptionist behind a plexiglass shield and the registrar and two polling volunteers.  The receptionist asked to see my driver's license whereupon I presented her with my bank account note (Virginia dropped its photo ID law this year after the democrats reclaimed both chambers of the statehouse although it still requires suitable documents) which she examined with a sour face and then handed me a voting slip which I gave to the registrar who gave me a ballot in a folder and a free (the pandemic you know) pen to fill it out with.

The choice for president/VP was easy as were the choices for senator and representative and it took but a second to mark those blank ovals.  I didn't know a single thing about any of the four persons running for three spots on city council so I left those blank and read carefully the two proposed constitutional amendments and marked "yes' on both of those (I'm a democrat you see, and since I discerned through the incomprehensible legalese that they were both measures intent on lessening burdens on poor people and "totally" disabled veterans, in other words giving money away, of course I voted for those), slipped my ballot into the scanning and counting machine and handed my folder back to a volunteer (did she wipe it down for the next voter who showed up?).

I asked if I was the first person there so far and was surprised to hear that 32 other voters had already preceded me that morning and that a third of the registered voters in the city had already made applications for mail-in ballots.  With such a crushing response already in the very first hour of voting seven weeks out from election day it was and remains clear to me that Trump is going to go down in a landslide and the country, and the world, will awaken from this four-year, horrific nightmare.

It finally came . . .

 On the first of the month, I prodded myself out of my numbing COVID-19 self-quarantine and made a plan to address the upcoming election, now a mere five weeks away.  There are 206,000 Americans who tragically won't be voting because they're dead unnecessarily thanks largely to our tax-cheat president's massively inept coronavirus response leading directly to the still continuing lack of reliable testing, contact tracing, provision of PPE, disclosure of truthful, non-divisive information etc.

I went to the city registrar's office and found out that I was indeed registered to vote and when and where early voting started, and I voted thereby on the first available date.  I went to Joe Biden's campaign website and for a $50 contribution, ordered two buttons, a bumper sticker and a Biden/Harris yard sign.

It finally arrived yesterday and I immediately planted it in my front yard.  I took a picture, which I ordinarily would have posted here but a few months go I lost the ability to transfer photos from my computer to my blog, and I no longer have the ability to put photos into this blog except for pictures from previous blog posts.

So now I parse out twenty-five dollar checks to democratic senatorial candidates and wait for January 21st, Joe Biden's first full day in office when patriotic Americans who aren't beholden to foreign money or influence can start making America Great Again.  Meanwhile my Biden yard sign stands out like an evergreen tree in a pine forest as I have yet to see a single Trump sign anywhere in town.

The problem with Act Blue

 I'm trying to do my best to help restore American greatness--I've already voted, in person so my vote won't get caught in any election day invalidation by being mailed in and never arriving or being counted too late after the current president has created the deepest constitutional crisis since the Civil War by declaring the election invalid on election night. I'm not going canvassing door-to-door like I did in 2016 ned 2018 nor doing poll-watching like I did in 2016, 2017 and 2018, I'm in the high-risk group for COVID-19. What I think is most crucial, beyond ousting our corrupt, faux president is to throw the senate out from the corrupt, soulless grip of Moscow Mitch, so that the tail no longer wags the dog, wherein 53 venal anti-patriotic senators representing about 29% of the population jam their values (none that I can discern besides getting themselves rich and maintaining power) and judges (young, pro-big business and rabidly antichoice) down on the majority of Americans, who think otherwise, are patriots and value principles and concern for all our citizens.

So I contribute $25 to contested senate races, so far sending a check to Dr. Barbara Bollier (KS), Mark Kelly (AZ), Amy McGrath (KY), Maggie Hassan (NH), Jaime Harrison (SC) and MJ Hegar (TX). The trouble is, except for one example, those are in response to solicitations that come in the mail that I can return a check to. For Harrison, I googled his name and found a site where it listed an address I could send a check to for his campaign. For the rest, like the Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, Montana, Iowa and Virginia races, I get mired in an inescapable maze of the Act Blue payment system for those democratic candidates, with no way to get to a page which tells me where I can send a check to. First off, these pages want too much information from me and I don't trust their security in terms of safeguarding my on-line payments. I can't understand exactly what I'm supposedly paying for or how many times. I learned in 2018 about "recurrent payments" that appear a fortnight later on my credit card no matter how closely I read the fine print and that are a pain to get rid of. 

Never again, democrats, sorry! I'm retired and watch my nest egg go down dramatically each month in Trump's Amerika and fear for the future of Social Security under the administration of the kleptocrats in charge. So I sit and wait each day for the mail to arrive (or not as has been happening lately) in the hope that another solicitation will arrive for a democratic challenger for senate so I can contribute. I voted in person already--have you?

Past time for change of administration

Careful now!

Moving forward.

DeJoy's Contribution to Amerika

 In Trump's Amerika: 

He is busy destroying the United States Post Office, an institution enshrined within our constitution. The vehicle for this demolition is his lackey mega-donor Postmaster DeJoy, who is busy removing sidewalk postal boxes, high-speed mail sorting machines (selling these million-dollar machines for scrap-metal) and prohibiting overtime or trips back to the PO by carriers for more mail.

Is it working?  Within this past month, I mailed out a credit card payment on August 17 that was due on September 8.  It is still not there, the bank is calling daily for its money and I have been assessed a late charge.

I have a rental unit that is one of the pillars of my retirement stream of money.  The tenant who has lived there for ten years has never missed nor been late with a payment.

The rent that was due for September still hadn't showed up by Monday, September 14.  I called my tenant and he said he had mailed it out on the first or second as always, which I fully believe.  He sent out a second check by expedited mail at an excessive cost, which I told him to take off the rent, which showed up today.  The original check is still in a place unknown. Do you think the mail has been slowed to a point approaching disablement?

Voter supression of vote-by-mail during this pandemic?  Absolutely.

My Plan To Vote

What's your plan to vote? I have mine. 

Last month I went to the City registrar's office to research it and I discovered: 

i.) I am registered; 

ii.) Early voting opens at City Hall on Friday September 18; 

iii.) The ID requirement now is that I have to bring proof that I live at my registered address. A current utility bill addressed to me at that address will suffice--so I have put my last electric, and gas, bill next to my passport to bring;

iv.) There is no dumb requirement anymore of attesting to a reason why you're voting early. Formerly I always swore that I would be outside of the city limits on that day (it didn't matter when during the day or how far or for how long) and so on election day I would always walk up to the McDonalds a few blocks away and buy a cup of coffee there--it is across the street from Falls Church in Fairfax County; and 

v.) I did NOT make application for a mail-in absentee ballot. If I had, and I did it correctly, I would have to present the actual ballot sent to me by the state or, if I didn't receive it yet (or ever, given the current state of the Post Office under the direction of Trump's yes-man Postmaster DeJoy) or the dog ate it or I lost it or forgot it--no vote for me till I came back with that actual ballot. Or I could mail in the ballot, if it ever came, or I found it, or I taped it together after I got it away from the dog, hoping it would be received by the Friday following the Tuesday election, postmarked before or on November 3, and it fulfilled the proper requirements such as the signature was placed in the proper spot and it matched, by some stranger's scrutiny, the signature on file at DMV or on my original registration. Your signature doesn't change over time, does it? Did you impatiently scrawl that signature because you were in a hurry?

vi.) Voting early in person, and not by mail-in, assures that my vote will be counted immediately at 7 pm on November 3, because the ballot will already be in the polling machine and can be run off instantly electronically along with all the other votes cast in person on November 3. Thus I will not potentially contribute to Trump's possible "red mirage," where he could declare victory on November 3 if he is ahead before the absentee (mail-in) votes can be added to the total and give the true result. Absentee (mail-in) ballots are opened only after 7 pm on November 3 and need to have the envelopes examined for a proper signature, the envelopes slit open and the ballot extracted, smoothed out, and fed into the machine to be counted, a laborious process that could take up to a minute each. Trump could use the time delay inherent in counting these votes to sow confusion and declare further (true) results invalid and give his uneducated, unstable and infatuated supporters all the time and excuse they need to go home and get their long guns to take to the streets in an effort to enforce an illegal vigilante result.

So in summation, here in Falls Church, Virginia, three days from now on Friday September 18th, I will be knocking on my neighbor's door at 10 am and three of us will drive down to City Hall. I will have my utility bill in my pocket, with my driver's license as a backup, and we will vote in this existential election for the democracy we formerly knew.

Oh, and bring a mask. And leave your guns at home, you'll have to pass through a metal detector, and the last time I was there they put my name and phone number down on a contact tracing list.

A Negative Experience

I was dreadfully sick for two weeks with a respiratory ailment in February that, in retrospect, I was sure was COVID-19.  Not that recovering from it makes you immune to getting it again, perhaps even worse the next time; no one knows. I  haven't felt 100% since then in any case.

I tried to get an antibody test in June from my health-care provider Kaiser to determine whether I was a survivor but a doctor called me when I requested such a test and told me after listening to my symptoms back in the winter that what I had had was "the flu" and not coronavirus because I hadn't been to China around that time and she said Kaiser didn't do antibody tests anyway, because what was the point?  My respect for Kaiser fell a long way then and I wondered what they do for the $12,000 in premiums I and my former employer pay to them each year for health care which costs me a co-pay each time I use it anyway.

But now Kaiser does do antibody testing, as I discovered earlier this month when I called to schedule an appointment for a flu shot.  So six months after I was so sick I went in for a blood draw to test for the presence of sufficient antibodies left over in my bloodstream that would mark a response to the coronavirus by my immune system.  It came back a few days later negative.

After four years of living in the dystopian chaos of Trump's corrupted America, where everybody has their own alternative facts in this formerly great country, where an American used to be able to trust a test result but now nothing is what it seems to be and we've fallen down the rabbit hole of anti-science and the politicization of everything, here's what I am left with.  I am happy to have had the test finally given to me but half a year passed by before I could wheedle the test, and the antibodies likely have diminished to an unmeasurable degree by now but at least now I know that I will never know if I had COVID-19 when I was so sick in February.  The test result also might be a false negative, because nobody in America trusts test administrations or results (or vaccines) anymore after four years under Trump, he of the falsity of "If you want a test you get a test, they're beautiful" and the idiocy of "Just inject bleach, it'll clean the lungs in a minute."

An hour of conversation

 The convenience store in the rural coastal village in the Carolinas where I visited my college roommate last month is a central meeting point for the good ol' locals who gather there at around 5 p.m. when the chartered fishing boats have come in and the carpenter hammers have fallen silent. Although my long-time friend is a New Yorker, as am I, he almost achieves a local status among the locals there because he is so personable. They like him. Maybe in another 20 years. 

We both spent an hour in the store sitting around when I was there, and I graduated from a feigned elbow bump upon introductions to a fervent hand clasp when we left because we both were very voluble and cogent among these equally intelligent Americans in the ensuing hour-long free-ranging conversation. The only time we both fell silent was when the discussion turned to whether the descendants of slaves in the vicinity were better off than if their forebears had never been abducted from Africa by slavers.

The consensus from these higher-degreed, educated boat and business owners was that yes, the likely-not-college-educated local blacks who mostly lived at or below the poverty level in America, given their opportunities here, were definitely better off here than if they had been born centuries later in their forebears' native continent, with their relative prospective opportunities there. 

It was a fascinating hour I spent listening that I'll never forget.

40 years of work

It's the Labor Day holiday, celebrating the working men and women who made America great. Until I retired in 2016, I've always worked. From 1972-1976, following dropping out of college to work full time on the McGovern campaign after my sophomore year, I worked in the restaurant industry in New York City for a year then spent winters in Aspen and summers on Nantucket, enjoying skiing or beach time during the days and working at night.

Then after I returned to college to finish up my BA in history, I became a lawman from 1977 to 1987, two years as a deputy in Boulder County and seven years as a Colorado State Trooper. The latter was a job I enjoyed very much, being a first responder in the foothills and mountains in Jefferson County and Boulder County and spending a year on duty in Denver as part of the Executive Security Detail protecting Governor Lamm.

The first of my three children arrived in 1986 and I decided to get a more "regular" job rather than alternating the day shift with the night shift every two weeks with a week of graves thrown in every six weeks. So I went off to law school and worked as a consumer protection attorney for the government from 1990 to 2016 when I retired on principle due to discriminatory ageism by the new, current breed of self-serving mid-level managers that have no regard for institutionalism or their workers.

Since then I have tried to be a good, patriotic citizen working to return America to greatness and its traditions after four years of enervation and existential chaos. From being cemented in place for hours on the Mall by the overwhelming crowd at the Women's March in 2017 to now when I've carefully researched my voting plant, I've tried to continue making a difference after 40 years of actual productive labor broken only by two stints in school. In 2016 I worked in the presidential campaign for a candidate I didn't particularly like but who was obviously vastly superior  to the totally unqualified candidate opposing her.  In 2017, in addition to working in the Virginia gubernatorial campaign, I effected a pro se a settlement with my agency that granted me i) my proper last review of a grade of all Outstanding; ii) a lifetime achievement award; iii) a monetary settlement; iv) a requirement that the division provide training for management specifically relating to the scourge of ageism discrimination; v) including for any former managers who returned within five years (the manager most responsible, with help from the other managers he was in cahoots with, left the agency abruptly two weeks after I retired suddenly); and vi) most importantly to me, it did not contain NDA, because I don't believe in hiding away evidence or suggestions of wrongdoing behind ubiquitous NDAs.  In 2018 I worked all fall to help flip the nearby Tenth Virginia Congressional District from the party that held the seat for forty years.  Last year I registered voters and attended rallies in support of the impeachment of our incompetent, rogue president who is tearing down our country, perhaps irrevocably.  This year I've lined up neighbors to come vote with me at City Hall on the first day early voting opens, Friday, September 18th in Virginia.  I'm proud of my more than 40 years of lifetime work, and all the volunteering and other activism I've done done contributing to the community as well.  

Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV.

A few weeks back, our very stable genius was reveling during a jaw-dropping interview on TV how smart or normal he was, how a year or so ago he had heard and repeated back during a simpleton's cognitive test the simple phrase "person, woman, man, tv, camera;" and how amazed the doctors were that he could repeat back this trite five-word word salad, that basically constitutes two descriptive adjectival groups, humans and photographic devices a few minutes later.  I received a simple "psychological" test yesterday after responding to an appointment to have my annual flu shot at the local Kaiser facility.

The nurse explained that in these times of isolation imposed by the COVID-19 crisis, there was concern afoot that there were many in the general population that were "depressed" because of or during it, and would I mind responding to two questions handwritten on a sheet of paper she left with me while she went off to prepare my extra-special dose of flu vaccine, because I was over 65.  The questions were: I wake up and don't feel like doing anything at all---; and I feel out or sorts or despondent or depressed or hopeless---; and the answer to each query came from these four possibilities: 0) never or not at all; 1) occasionally; 2) several days each week; or 3) all the time.

When she returned, and before she jabbed my arm with the special cocktail she prepared (my arm aches today!), I said the supposed general feeling of ennui or perhaps hopelessness in our society only half related to the devastating, deadly pandemic, the other half of the current chaotic conditions afflicting our lives would addressed on November 3d, and she smiled, either knowingly or sympathetically.  For question one, the answer was three, and for question two the answer was one.

She said in a sympathetic voice, "I think you should speak with your doctor about these feelings."  So there you have it, I'm apparently either depressed or suicidal, as shown by this simplistic simpleton's test, during these depressing times that started on November 8, 2016 and have steadily and then increasingly only gotten much worse. 

Summer's almost gone . . .

 . . . but I did get away in this year that wasn't, once.

Summer's almost gone; Summer's almost gone; Almost gone. Yeah, it's almost gone; Where will we be; When the summer's gone?

The call came in on a Saturday at the end of August from a friend out west who I met in my college freshman dorm from whom I hadn't heard in years.  It was the first call from him that I can recall.

It concerned a college roommate, about whom he (and other dorm mates) was concerned who had recently suffered a compound leg fracture and waited for several hours (until the next morning) before dragging himself to his car and driving himself to the nearest hospital 30 minutes away.  (Roomie had dialed 9-11 when it occurred but, despite having insurance, engaged in the Republican health care plan of shopping for the best price option before committing by asking how much an ambulance ride would cost.  When the exasperated operator said she didn't know, he said he'd "call back" and dragged himself off to bed, leaving behind a bloody smear across the floor.)

My friend pointedly asked how long it would take me to drive down to roomie's house.  He obviously already had looked it up on Google because when I fudged by an hour or two and said about eight hours, he expressed disappointment and said he thought it might be a mere five and a half or six. The truth lies somewhere in between.

I drove down the next day.   I stayed at his house (and slept on his screened-in porch for five nights, it was so hot) and did what I could to make his situation more comfortable.

So I took a summer trip!  I was afraid up to that point that I would not a) go anywhere this summer or b) take a dip off a beach somewhere.

Mission accomplished.  I even threw in several attempts at capturing a picturesque sunup and a visit to the Civil War battlefield (several "battles," largely troop maneuvering that either succeeded or failed in dislodging the enemy from the river port city) of New Bern.  I will add here that Google seems to have commandeered Blog, "updated" it (which makes it more difficult to use) and rejects every attempt of mine to import pictures from my computer into a post like I used to do and hence has destroyed my ability to post pictures here and dramatically diminished my enjoyment in blogging here.

So this summer wasn't a total waste in this year-that-wasn't, I spent all or part of five days in rural North Carolina.  I swam off a "beach" (actually a river bank upon which the city had dumped a load of sand), sat around for an hour palavering with some southern good ole boys in a local convenience store, spent a half-hour speaking with the mayor at my roomie's house (she "dropped" by--I'm sure she was interviewing me to discern whether I was likely bringing the coronavirus to her region and hence should be quarantined) and enjoyed a subsequent fish dinner (cooked by roomie as he gimped around his kitchen in his rigid "boot") in this coastal village.

What's this?! A test? In America?

 I was terribly sick for two weeks in the last half of February with a severe respiratory ailment, coughing my lungs out the first four or five days.  I started coughing with a scratchy throat on Valentine's Day while I was watching the movie Parasite in a theatre and by bedtime I was coughing continuously and could barely sleep.  

I woke up, more or less, on Saturday and got on the phone to Kaiser, my health-care provider, about what I was going to do about this sudden, dreadful cough I had developed in a matter of hours.  My GP wouldn't be back until Tuesday (Monday was a holiday) and the advise nurse suggested two courses of action: to go to the Kaiser Urgent Care Center ten miles away for double my normal co-pay or go to a pharmacy and buy an over-the-counter decongestant Mucinex expectorant, which I did and started to tough it out.

A day or two later I was coughing so long and hard during the day that I feared the oncoming night and thought that I was dying.  A few nights I woke up coughing so hard that I had to sit up in bed to catch my breath, several times.

But after two weeks I got over it, sort of.  I coughed occasionally, not too hard, I was occasionally short of breath, especially at night, my lungs ached, I was generally fatigued and I won't tell you the details about my all-day every day GI issues.  Now six months later I am still sometimes short of breath, I "go" several times a day and my lungs still feel inflamed so I haven't run a single mile since February because I don't want to further aggravate them and invite further inflammation.

I wonder what I had.  Everyone tells me I certainly didn't have Covid19 because it was too early (apparently the coronavirus first started roaming the land in March) and I didn't come from China.  Besides, there are no reliable tests in America even half a year later because, well, this is Trump's America and we have become a piteous country with no exceptionalism anymore, mocked or walked all over by the rest of the world.

I tried to get an antigen test in July so I could participate in blood plasma therapy if I had had Covid19 in February, but a Kaiser doctor called me and said: Naw, we don't do antigen tests, why should we; and if you think you are sick with the virus, call Kaiser and follow its long dance correctly and we'll get you a Covid test.  She assured me that what I described had in February was merely the flu.  I wondered aloud to her why the hell I got a flu shot in the fall if I still got so sick from the flu.  She assured me my ordinary flu sickness would have been even more severe if I hadn't gotten that shot.  Whatever.

Kaiser, which won't even let me in the door without going through the nth degree at the door ("Do you have shortness of breath? Nope, not me. Diarrhea? Nope.") and then taking my temperature, sent me a postcard to get a "driveby" flu shot this year.  I called for an appointment and got to complaining about Kaiser not doing any antigen tests and my, how things have changed.  I was referred to a nurse who got me an appointment this very day for a blood draw to be used for an antigen test.  I like operating on real information.  I'll keep you informed.

 

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

 Here is an interesting article in the Washington Post by a student who attended the Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Fairfax County, the best technical public high school in the land. The author made the most of the education opportunity presented but laments that the school hasn't kept up with the changing demographics of our nation as represented by the population current makeup of the county and suggests that it would have been better to attend a local public high school for a better life experience which would or could have led to a more productive and rewarding life.

This is interesting to me since my oldest child attended TJ for four years and certainly would have had a more productive or at least a more rewarding life if he had attended a local high school in the city of Falls Church or the county of Arlington instead. He squandered his magnificent opportunity by attending this school (which was his choice because he could have otherwise attended an elite top-ten boarding prep school, Lawrenceville, perhaps the Stanford of high school education instead), staggered out of TJ with the bottom high school diploma of three grades in Virginia (about equal to a GED diploma after four years at the premiere public technical school in the nation), a general diploma rather than a regular  high school diploma or a magnet school diploma. This was during the multi-year, quarter-million-dollar divorce engineered by his mother during which, in my opinion, her covert narcissistic predilections overcame the immature wills of our three minor children through the perpetuation of PAS (which many persons knowledgeable of its pernicious scourge label a form of child abuse) for her own petty personal aggrandizement of her sense of her self.

Our oldest child, a talented, bold, smart, athletic pre-teen, a mega-achiever when pushed or nurtured, never went to college after being let out of TJ with his shop-class diploma, and lapsed into internet gambling, being a boy-Friday for the scumbag divorce lawyer who took his "case" to sue his father for fiduciary breach during the divorce (the case was thrown out of court, with sanctions assessed) and perpetrating ever-incomplete schemes on go-fund-me pages.  In his foisted-upon bitterness as a child (by her coterie of mercenary adult "professionals"), the lad, now a fully mature adult, changed his name, lived I think at his mother's next husband's residence and hasn't communicated with any Lamberton (the name he eschewed on his 18th birthday) for over fifteen years.

So I think the article's author might be right.  The experience my oldest child received at TJ wasn't representative of any child's that I know of, when I was effectively shut out of any involvement by TJ of any involvement (or even discussion, really) of my child's continuing high school education by TJ administrators who absolutely adhered aggressively to the fallacious, sexist common principle prevalent in domestic law that "mother knows best."  I'm sorry for you, Jimmy; perhaps TJ wasted your life; instead you could have gone to Yorktown like your brothers who both graduated from VCU, or Lawrenceville where your grandfather (Carleton, Yale Law School), your uncle (Yale, Wharton MBA), and I went (CU, UVA Law School).

More dining in the age of coronavirus

My neighbor used the chain link fence that runs down my driveway separating her house from mine to grow a cucumber vine upon.  It grew several fat cucumbers just hanging down.  I would show you a picture of the one I selected for a meal, after I asked my neighbor if I could have one, but this blog stopped importing pictures from my computer a few months ago and aside from pictures already in my blog posts, I can't get pictures to populate here anymore.  (Shrug)

I cut off the cucumber and hurried inside.  I had already laid out three plate with slices of sour dough bread on them.  After I rinsed off the cucumber, I slathered a little bit of light mayo on the bread slices and partially peeled the cucumber, making it look striped.  I sliced the cucumber medium thick and laid a single layer of sliced cucumbers on the bread and sprinkled a light dusting of sea salt on them.

I put the top slice of bread on the creation and enjoyed a delicious sandwich which was very filling.  The key was eating the sandwich within five minutes of taking the cucumber off the vine.  I took the other two sandwiches next door for the lady whose cucumber I used and her husband.  They said they enjoyed it very much, that previously they had only created a vinegar brine for cucumber slices to enjoy them that way.

The next day my neighbor brought me a cucumber sandwich she had made with a fresh cucumber in the same way but with additions.  She added guacamole to the sandwich along with finely chopped red onions, which made the sandwich even more tasty than my simpler sandwich was.  The possibilities are endless.  And I didn't have to travel further than my driveway in these perilous times to enjoy a sumptuous lunch.

Dining Out in the Age of the Coronavirus

Dining out seems to be one of the things lost in this year-that-wasn't, thanks to the coronavirus, but I've made do by turning my front porch into a dining area.  A friend frequently comes over since she lives in an apartment in the city and doesn't have access to any outdoor seating by her unit and we sit at the Little Tykes table I've set up on my porch along with two plastic chairs.

We sit six feet away from each other, take off our masks and eat the fare we've carried out from nearby restaurants, pizza--bagels--frothy cold soup concocted like a smoothie.  We throw bread pieces into the yard and draw birds in to gobble up the dough balls for our amusement.

My friend has downloaded an app (Merlin) on her phone that tells us what the bird likely is when she uploads a picture of it--the app has identified house sparrows, northern mockingbirds, cardinals and bluejays.  The last two we didn't need help identifying.

I sit in the same dining area twice a month and have a FaceTime lunch with a friend and former colleague from work--he lives in Florida currently--and eat egg salad sandwiches I make and drink a beer or two as we recount out twenty-five years of work together.  We haven't forgotten a single one of those good times in the past.

Visions of ice-cream bars

I have been hunkered down since March, taking only essential trips while fully masked such as to BLM Plaza in the District in early June to confront those silent, foreboding, anonymous soldiers in full combat gear in a line keeping the people away from the people's house.  Yesterday I traveled to INOVA Blood Donation Center in Annandale to donate whole blood.

A disconcerting sign greeted me upon arrival, telling me to leave immediately if, within the last 14 days: "You have traveled to an area with an outbreak of COVID-19. Currently the CDC has identified outbreaks in the following areas-All areas of all countries worldwide [including] cruise ships or riverboat travel anywhere in the world." I looked real hard at it to see if it was a Trump Tweet, it was so ridiculous. Yes, I ignored the warning sign and donated blood because I think I am not currently sick and perhaps sick or injured people currently could use a little O+ blood infusion (very sought after).

I had wanted to get into some kind of plasma therapy program because I think I might have had the coronavirus in February because I was as sick as I have ever been for two weeks with a cough-your-lungs-out respiratory illness but there is no antibody test I can get ("You only had the flu" said the doctor I talked to over the phone last month, who would have had to write me a prescription to get an antibody test but, she assured me, Kaiser doesn't do antibody test anyway) so I just donated whole blood.  Oh well, dumping a bag of whole blood in twenty minutes is a whole lot better for me anyway than spending 90-120 minutes hooked up to a a centrifuge machine that takes fluid out, whirls plasma out and returns the blood because it takes 6-8 units of blood (your body's entire volume) to get a unit of plasma.

After the donation, I went to the post-blooding refreshment center where I noted with pleasure that the center had added frozen ice cream bars to the water, juices and cookies that have always been provided.  I opened the freezer and identified the ice-cream bar I was going to enjoy but I left it in the freezer while I finished the orange juice I was drinking.  Meanwhile another old man like me shuffled in and stood socially distant from me between me and the freezer while he temporarily removed his mask (as I had) to drink his bottle of water.  Suddenly he erupted in a big, juicy cough into the crook of his elbow but without a mask on and I stared in horror at the freezer on the far side of him.  In it was the ice cream bar I had already identified as being to die for and which I really wanted since I haven't had ice cream in over 100 days.  I could, however, figuratively see an 8-foot square area of expelled droplets swarming around this man, directly between me and that freezer in this restricted indoor space.  Practically crying out in despair, I immediately executed a 180 degree turnaround and walked very fast out of the center.

Three months to go . . .

Thank goodness that hot, long July is behind us.  Three months (and three days) to go to starting to restore America's former greatness, which is all gone now in three and a half chaotic, unstructured  years, poof!

Postpone the November election, really?  That wasn't done even during the heights of the Civil War or World War II.

Mail-in voting is "a mess?"  Sez who, the liar is chief?  Mail-in voting has been going on for years, decades, without any problems and it works well, especially in these times of a totally mismanaged national pandemic which has already killed 154,000 Americans in a mere five months because of Trumps's disorganization, incompetence or laziness, or all three

.

I'll be visiting city hall on the very first day of early voting to cast my ballot.  I can't wait.

What?

A 32.9% drop in the annual GDP was announced yesterday, the greatest drop in history by a staggering amount.  Yeah, I'm tired of winning.

The faux president yesterday tweeted that he thought the November election should be postponed.  Is this what you voted for in 2016?

Over 153,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 in five months in America (over 1400 on Wednesday) because of the criminally negligent response by our president to the arrival of the coronavirus on our shores months after it was unearthed in China.  That's the greatest number of deaths in the world by far, making America great, uh huh.

Herman Cain, a 74 year old businessman who in 2012 was for awhile the leading Republican candidate in the GOP's presidential primary that year as the self-declared ABC candidate (American Black Conservative) attended President Trump's "relaunch" of his 2020 reelection campaign late last month in an indoor arena in Tulsa, packed in with other attendees, none of them wearing masks or socially distancing, has died of the coronavirus.  It was criminally negligent to hold such a rally at such a time.

Summer's half gone...

. . . and I haven't been to the beach yet or even in the water other than the shower.  Last summer I took a July 4th car trip to get out of town so I didn't have to listen to our ridiculous liar-in-chief talk on the Mall about patriots securing all the airports during the Revolutionary War.  I swam in the ocean off Cape Hatteras, saw a baseball game in Atlanta, visited the Andersonville Civil War POW Camp, explored the Chickamauga battlefield, toured the D-Day Museum in Bedford and finished up the trip at Appomattox Courthouse where the Civil War came to an end.  But this year, nada.

I've planted many perennial flowers in my yard, walked the streets round my house to get some roadway miles in, went to BLM Plaza in the District twice to try to figure out why military troops were patrolling ("dominating" in our clown-in-chief's words) the DC streets, donate blood once, talked to a Kaiser doctor on the phone to try to get the coronavirus antibody test so I could engage in plasma therapy but she wasn't having any of it (of course--I live in America and there are no adequate tests anywhere for anyone except the for the White House and for major league sports) and I read three books including two pulitzer prize winners, but that's a pretty paltry summertime report.

I got my taxes done, that was a big thing for me.  Basically I moved piles of documents around my dining room table for weeks and then on July 9th shoved a disorganized sheaf of jumbled papers in an envelope and overnighted them to my accountant in Colorado (I used to live there).  He was hopping mad, I thought he was going to discharge me but he got them finished and filed on time and I have even received a refund already.  Trying to do taxes drives me into the thrall of lassitude and days pass by with no progress.  After I spent a day trying to get my 2019 W-2, I learned that retirees like me don't get W-2s, they get 1099-Rs instead.  My 401K continues its dizzying (sickening?) decline but I anticipate a change come January and hope it'll come back then.

So what to do?  Stay home and read more books and each day's copy of the Washington Post?  There's no baseball to go watch in person, which could have otherwise afforded me a satisfactory small side trip.  I've thought about taking a short trip to North Carolina where I could be on the coast and take a dip in the ocean but I don't want to get or spread the virus.  The shortness of breath, which makes it so I can't sleep and I have to get up no matter how exhausted I am and sit upright or walk about downstairs or in the cool of  the early morning air outside, occasionally comes back and causes me to wonder if I have or still have or had the virus and my lungs are scarred,  It exhausts me thinking about it.  There's no testing in Trump's America, have I already say that?  So I can't find out in these lonely hours as the weeks and months pass by whether I'm sick or have been sick or not; am I hypochondriac or normal, stalwart in my enforced semi-isolation or depressed by it?  The whole reality of where we are and what we've become is driving me crazy.  Good job, you 63 million reckless voters of four years ago who brought about, predictably enough as to the ultimate outcome albeit not the actual event itself, our disastrous response (151,000 American deaths in five months headed towards maybe over half a million or more) to this predictable enough worldwide calamity.

Happy Birthday, Jim

July always makes me think of my 4 or 5 year divorce, that cost me a quarter million dollars.  What I got out of it beyond becoming thankfully clear of Sharon who is, in my opinion, a destructive covert narcissist, was the extra-judicial extinguishment of my fatherhood of my three minor sons though extreme Parental Alienation Syndrome ("PAS") perpetrated by Sharon, a form of child abuse in the opinion of many including me, and, get this, lifetime alimony.

Lifetime alimony exists pretty much only in Virginia, a state that still clings to contributory negligence, versus the modern doctrine of comparative negligence in the courtroom which effectively ensures some form of righteous compensation from wrongdoers for injured persons.  The reason July makes me think about this stuff is because Jim, her older second husband (I am younger than Sharon--she didn't age well--but Jim is many years older than her), was born in July and after many years of me paying her alimony, he married her and thus ended my lifetime alimony.

She sent me a certified letter to notify me of her remarriage (although even so, per usual, she didn't fully comply with the information required by the divorce decree) but what my corrosive, expensive divorce taught me was never present yourself to receive an unknown certified letter.  You see, I was litigating for years against low-down dirty-lawsuit experts and that's what they did; yes, those scumbags she surrounded herself and our children with taught me a lot.  But eventually my agency accepted her letter notifying me that she had re-married (she always needs someone around to do her manipulative drama on) and I found out on my own what county in North Carolina the happy event took place in and sent away for a certified copy of her latest marriage certificate so that, many weeks later, I could send it to my payroll office to get rid of my lifetime alimony.

That certificate, a public document, was a thing of beauty, giving the full names (including mother's maiden name, if I remember correctly), dates of birth, social security numbers and current addresses of everyone involved, including witnesses.  All that PI stuff in the public domain is good to know, I guess.  I know exactly how old old Jim is.

I wish I could meet Jim so I could thank him for saving me hundreds of thousands of dollars over my lifetime by taking this economic sponge off my books.  She was costing me $18,000 a year and I still wasn't seeing my kids.  How does that work?  Only in current America.

I've seen Jim, I believe, at least three times but I have never met him.  I believe he was the date of Sharon when both came out of her house one Friday evening while I was on the sidewalk calling her number on my cellphone (my calls to her house asking for the children to be sent out for court-ordered visitation were never answered) to say that I was there at the appropriate time for my visitation of my minor sons.  While the wimpy-looking male hung back, she asked what I was doing there and I told her that it was Friday at 5 pm and I was here to pick up my children for my visitation as required by court order.  She dismissively told me that they weren't there (that's "cooperation" in encouraging the children in visitation, as required by the court order, for you) and she ordered the male standing back in the shadows to get in the jeep at the curb so they could depart.  As she came down the steps to the sidewalk to get in the passenger side, I retreated off the sidewalk into the street 15 feet behind the jeep in observation of the learned, unwritten rule that if you hold your ground during an encounter relating to a divorce, and anyone in her camp comes too close to you, they're likely to later claim that you were "menacing" somehow.  Yeah, that's how bad divorces go, and how females can play the Fright card which is a close cousin to, and enhances, the Victim card.

The male got behind the wheel and started up the jeep.  There was plenty room to pull forward out into the travel lane (there was no traffic on this residential street) but suddenly the back-up lights came on and the jeep lurched backwards rapidly maybe a dozen feet and I was frozen in fear that I was about to be struck by it when the gears clunked and the jeep changed course and pulled forward and away.  I've described this encounter in a past blog entry.

Whether the male was ordered to back up by Sharon or he did it on his own, to scare me, or it was a mistake, it left me shaking but I think that was Jim behind the wheel.  It might not have been him though, maybe it was some other older loser.  After all, I've never been introduced to Jim, "dad" to my youngest child at least (Danny so loves being in Jim's summer house on the Outer Banks, that's where he proposed to his wife, at his "dad's" house on the beach, as I learned a couple of years later from reading the wedding book on the Internet to my child's wedding that I was never invited to nor told about until a neighbor mentioned it to me).

I did see Jim once trying to use an ATM outside a bank as I drove home from work one Saturday after they were married.  They lived two miles from me and I was driving past going home when I saw Sharon on the sidewalk by the bank near her townhouse.  Of course I scrutinized the scene as I drove by and there was this poor man trying to get money out of an ATM as she supervised his efforts.  Sharon had her mouth working in a fury, and her visage was as I remembered it, typically furious and impatient when not in the the sight of others.  After all, if she thought people were around when she was haranguing someone close to her she wouldn't want to besmirch her phony image of sweetness and reveal her true character of being a user of all those around her, in my opinion.  Poor guy, but better him than me.

The next time I saw Jim has also been mentioned in a past blog post or posts. I was once again driving home on a public street from work on a weekend, and I saw a large knot of people walking a large German Shepherd dog on the sidewalk not far from where she lived.  I recognized Sharon and I, missing my children as the years dragged by with no communication from these ruined now-adults (PAS is essentially a form of brainwashing immature minds and can have a lifetime effect, especially upon young, susceptible children), parked at my first opportunity on this street so I could ask Sharon, on this public street, how my children, our children, were.

I walked up to the group of people which included Sharon, with Jim next to her, and a few other adults including other men, the large dog, a teen or two and maybe a pre-teen.  I maintained proper social distance, as we would call it these days, didn't impede, block or confront them in any way and asked, taking less than a minute total since I received nary word in reply from anyone, these five simple questions for each child of mine (and hers): Is he alive. Is he well? Is he married? Does he have children? Where does he live?  I encountered only stony silence during that minute as they walked along, and I walked away.

Anyway, your birthday was earlier this month, Jim (I know the day), and even if you didn't want to give a distraught father even a trace of information about his sons in response to his desperate questions about them then (not even an encouraging: They're all alive, okay?), Happy Birthday, old feller!  At least you saved me a lot of money!