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.