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!

The year so far?

What's been good about 2020?  Well, the pandemic, and especially our national response to it which was and is criminally negligent and extremely political and slothful (does the man actually have a job he does?) isn't one of them, as over 149,000 needlessly dead Americans could attest to.  But November 3d is coming up in less than 100 days and that is good after four four chaotic, dystopian years; make sure you all carefully vet the candidates this time, eschew wishing upon a star when you vote this time, and actually vote, and responsibly, this time!

I went to a wedding in a ballroom in a new hotel along the new DC waterfront in January and that was a great time, dancing well into the night, and I caught the very last train back to Virginia that night, by 3 minutes!  I went to see the Academy Award winning best picture Pandemic, er, Parasite, on Valentine's Day in a movie theater (perhaps my last visit to a movie theatre ever), and during the lengthy, dystopian foreign movie in Korean with English subtitles I started coughing, and by nighttime I was coughing my lungs out and spent the next two weeks with a debilitating malady that still goes undiagnosed ("you had the flu" everyone tells me, including a doctor I spoke with on the phone later trying to get an antibody test so I could participate in plasma therapy--naw, Kaiser doesn't that).  I went down to the Tidal Basin on a weekday morning in the spring and enjoyed seeing an early version of the Cherry Blossoms before the nation shut down in an effort to control the coronavirus which we have since squandered.

I have enjoyed infrequent meals at a Little Tykes Table on my front porch a have dozen times with a friend who comes over from the District (she doesn't have a place that would afford outside seating), and I keep up with a friend, former colleague and mentor who lives in Florida now via bi-monthly virtual lunches on FaceTime on that very same front porch.  I enjoyed reading, or re-reading, To Kill A Mockingbird, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel (I almost always read history for relaxation) that I thought I had read in ninth grade but now I'm not so sure because I wasn't familiar with any of it, and good on Boo Radley.  I finally put my eye travails of the last two years (detached retina) behind me, for now, by fitting my fifth and last procedure into the tiny window I had between my recovery from my February malaise and the nation shutting down, along with almost all health services, for a long time; the laser-shot treatment following my four eye surgeries improved my diminished vision noticeably, so that was good.

I went to two protests in the District on behalf of BLM and against our out-of-control president and his chief henchman the butterball inveterate liar Bill Barr, and I enjoyed treading on BLM Plaza a block north of the White House, and I tried to speak with National Guardsmen guarding various monuments who Trump brought into the District to "dominate" the streets but mostly they wouldn't tell me where they were from or why they were here.  I stopped going anymore when such gatherings seemed to sometimes turn into potential flash-mobs that might act upon a momentary notion to tear down statues as diverse as Andrew Jackson and Mahatma Gandhi.  I really enjoyed seeing a magnificently restored B-29 bomber roar over my house on July 4th at about 500 feet escorted by four P-51 Mustang fighters, two WW2 planes that played an outsized role in winning the war against Germany (Mustang) and against Japan (B-29); that moment still stands out as I just hang out in the house or yard these days.

The Dog Days . . .

What do I do in semi-lockdown when I'm not witnessing the demise of our formerly great democracy live on cable news every day?  I used to walk three times a week for three or four miles but now it s too hot for that.  Besides, I still don't feel right from the virulent respiratory ailment I had the last half of February, and my spells of shortness of breath come and go (with, fortunately, no accompanying debilitating cough as happened in February) and the past few days, I'm in a short period.

I have thrown over Facebook posting, which I formerly did once a day, for the month of July in protest of the unAmerican posture of its founder and Chief Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who wittingly or unwittingly allowed the Russkies to throw our close 2016 election to Putin's Puppet by spreading misinformation and verifiably untrue bot posts (but fully believed by Trump's cult followers--like the Pizzagate conspiracy nonsense which brought an armed gunman into the Comet Pizzeria in the District looking for supposed children sex slaves kept in the basement there (no basement) by Hillary Rodham-Clinton) on Zuckerberg's platform.  He still won't fix the problem dangerous conspiracy theories flourishing on his platform, hiding behind the First Amendment while both our democracy and greatness goes down the drain.  Perhaps I'll go back in August, or perhaps not.

I haven't even been to Westover, a flourishing two-block commercial area, with free parking, only four miles away in Arlington that has plenty of free parking, a library, an old-style hardware store and several popular restaurants with outdoor seating, not even to return a library book I took put in early March.  A friend comes over once a week and we have bagels on my porch, or perhaps a pizza or a salad on my porch along with some appropriate beverage.   She started throwing small balls of bagel dough to the birds who cluster in my yard and make a godawful racket all day long; now they're all my "friends" and even come up onto the porch looking for scraps whenever I am out there.

I nap sometimes in my bedroom as it is the only relatively cool place in the house because it has a decrepit window A/C unit, and I retire there to read while lying on the bad.  Daytime dreams are different from nighttime dreams which often are nightmares, and I dreamed recently of my middle child (seen below at age two, now the lad is in his thirties) that he had stopped by my house recently.  As I haven't heard from the lad in a decade and a half, ever since he wrote to me and asked me to provide for payment of his full tuition and fees at his four-year university, which I did gladly; but his silence since then indicates his otherwise loathing for me and all Lambertons, who he hasn't contacted in two decades; I guess that was a teasing, taunting daymare.

A Horrible July

This month has been horrid, just like the year has been so far.  Over 1,000 Trumpvirus deaths in America for the fourth day in a row yesterday, with no end in sight thanks to NO national leadership from the Republicans with a stranglehold on the country even though, in the Senate as a representation, they represent about 20% of the population.  Two days ago the Pacific rim of countries like Australia and South Korea, with a conglomerate population of 325 million, recorded four such deaths, the US with a population of 330 million had over twelve hundred deaths.

Woodrow Wilson was a racist president, it turns out (he segregated the Federal bureaucracy which till his first term had been integrated), and he presided over the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic (it actually arose in America and was given to the world by us) with 640,000 American deaths due to Wilson's absolute hands-off what-are-you-talking-about role.  Trump is on track to produce an even greater death count if Americans turn out to be so ignorant or blindly cult-driven (addictive personalities, you know, like druggies, or alcoholics, or gambling-addicted wrecks who lay down their last chip to turn their luck around to start winning back the thousands they've lost) to return him to power in 100 days.  Meanwhile, the red hinterland is now burning up, just as the blue states did months ago with much Fox News condescending clucking about the "radical left" controlled states.

The country is burning up, not the Democratic cities as Trump falsely claims in his bid via the secret and anonymous DHS Palace Guard to give him the mantle of authoritarianism, but the country's Covid-19 infection rate (we lead the world in confirmed infections, with over four million).  My region's rate of positivity is climbing again.  And the weather where I live has seen a record-breaking string of 90-plus temperature days, made to feel like over 100 degree days due to the humidity.

These months I hang out in my bedroom with its twenty-year old dilapidated window AC unit that cools the room a little (the rest of my non-airconditioned house feels like 100 degrees at all times) and read The Liberation Trilogy by Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson, having enjoyed volume one on the American war in Africa, and plowed through the penultimate volume covering the excruciatingly interminable Italian campaign, and now in the final volume the Allies, having broken out of Normandy, have sprinted to the German border where their armies have been rebuffed, having smacked headlong into stout resistance at the West Wall (the Siegfried Line) while suffering from an acute lack of critical daily combat supplies and munitions like winter clothing and artillery shells.  The spring flowers I planted are all dying or gone, I shirk from any human contact closer than twelve feet, and I wish I had more than two or three people I could call who will answer their phones.  The month of July has been horrid, as has been the year, and I can't wait for the opening of early voting in Virginia, on which day I will don my mask, drive or walk down to City Hall and cast my vote for a return to a formerly great America.

July 4th in The Year That Wasn't

My neighbors were having a backyard barbecue on the Fourth of July with some guests invited over.  We are friendly, banter across the fence lines, and if I needed something that I couldn't do for myself, I would ask them if they were around.  Like the time I had a splinter in the back of my head and I went over to their house and asked A to dig it out with a needle, which he hesitantly did (I had to tell him at the moment of hesitation, Go Deep, Man, I know it's bleeding but I'll be alright) did, since I couldn't do it to or for myself because I couldn't see the splinter directly.

The brother of the lady of the house is my gardener and has become a friend of mine, although he is notably a proud, prickly man, easily offended.  He was there so I knew if I went outside my door where they would see me, they would call me over to join them.  But six feet of social distancing over there more like four feet or even much less and not one of them was wearing a mask.  They were engaged in eating and drinking, after all.  I knew if I joined them they would pile me with food, which I always enjoy since, being from South America, the meats are made the South American way and is invariably delicious.  In these extraordinary times, I did not want to join that party.  The pandemic, you know.  I don't want to become part of the problem overwhelming this forsaken (by its leaders) nation by becoming sick with Covid19 or maybe, getting it again.

I surreptitiously drew my curtains and went up to my bedroom to read.  My dinner was slowly roasting in the oven.  My cell phone had rung, I saw it was from my gardener but I did not answer it.  I left my phone downstairs, recharging.  But then I heard thunder in the sky.  A low, loud roar was coming nearer, from the east, the direction of the National Mall.  I knew from the morning's paper that The Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds and some WW2 vintage planes were flying over the Mall at about that time and perhaps they were flying west to Dulles to land.  I ran to the door and stepped out and was rewarded with the majestic sight of a B-29 bomber flying overhead at about 500 feet accompanied by four much smaller P-51 Mustang fighters, one on each of the four corners of an imaginary large square with the plane that dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan and ended WW2 before a million more Americans (and untold Japanese) had to die, one of them being my father with the First Marine Division.

Those twenty or thirty seconds as I watched the formation recede to the west imprinted in my memory banks a sight that I will never forget.  I saw vintage WW2 planes fly over the Mall in 2015 in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of the war but they were much higher and not so easily distinguishable.  This was special and worth what followed, I think.  (B-25 bombers fly over the Mall in 2015.)

I was immediately called over to my neighbor's backyard, now that I had emerged.  I went, sat in a lawn chair between two people who were each perhaps six feet away, or perhaps five feet of four feet.  I ate the food heaped upon my plate with insistence and pride, and enjoyed myself with my neighbors and some strangers for about an hour, being neighborly.  I went home then, turned off my oven and saved that food for dinner the next night.  I saw that I had been called four times by my gardener the previous hour with voicemails calling me over.  I hope he doesn't think I rebuffed him by not answering, did I say he's prickly?  Leaving, I was going to go out their front gate but someone in that direction executed a robust sneeze, without a mask or covering the sneeze in any way, so I executed a hard right and went out the other way using their back gate.

I like my neighbors and most of their relatives and many of their friends, a lot, but anxiety gnawed at me throughout the hour as I thought about reckless exposure.  Anxiety still gnaws upon me eleven days later because now I'm still a few days removed form the outside festering time for the deadly disease.  I've quarantined since then (i.e. I haven't changed my behavior of the last four months one whit) but a few nights ago I awoke in the early morning hours and had severe shortness of breath that didn't abate even when I sat up in bed.  It reminded me of my acute oxygen hunger I experienced for three or four days in Leadville in 2001 when I stayed at my sister's place there at over ten thousand feet with my three children during my interminable divorce (it was altitude sickness) and I was desperate to get a true or deep breath.  That was how I felt in February for two or three nights, except then I was coughing violently, when I was sick for two weeks with respiratory problems.  But those night terrors haven't returned the last two nights so perhaps it was just anxiety.  I don't have a cough, I just feel vaguely "off" with semi-sore lungs, as I have felt since February.

That was my Fourth.  How was yours in these extraordinary times?