My Liberal Diary

Tomorrows the 13th, Are liberals superstitious?

 

Day 197, My Liberal Diary
There is a dead stink-pot in the road just down from the house. For those that are not familiar with a stink-pot, it is a small turtle with a very foul body oder. Maggie, my Doberman, found it yesterday and gave it a cursory sniff before moving on to more intriguing aromas. Today, she poked it with her nose a time or two to see if it would squeak like one of her squeak toys. When I told my wife, the right-wanger, about it, she was a bit skeptical, never having heard of a stink-pot turtle. I had he google it but even though she found many photographs and even a Wikipedia on them, the apology that I had anticipated did not come. When I asked he the reason she didn't apologize for doubting me, she brought up rain crows, beach snakes, and pitchkens.
We were having breakfast out by the pool one morning down in Jacksonville, it was a bit overcast and rain was expected later in the day. There was a morning dove in a nearby tree cooing it's mournful cry and she asked what it was so I told her it was a rain crow and that it meant it was going to rain. Well, it began raining pretty steadily by the time we finished breakfast and I felt somewhat validated until months later, George and Bettye were visiting and we were having coffee out by the pool and that bird began cooing again so Jimi started gathering the trays and told everyone we needed to move inside because that rain crow meant we were about to get drenched. I tried my best to keep a straight face but Bettye? Not so much.
We had been walking a lonely stretch of beach and she noticed trails in the sand, leading from the water's edge towards the sand dunes and asked what had made them. I didn't want to tell her something as mundane as surfers dragging their boards so I said it was giant Florida beach snakes. Of course she didn't believe it, saying she had been coming to the beach her whole life and never saw a beach snake. "Well, you don't really expect to see them in daylight out in the hot sun, do you?" I asked. I went on to tell her that they buried themselves in loose sand during the heat of the day and those little crab holes were actually breathing tunnels. When she asked what they ate, I said they caught raccoons, stray cats, small dogs, seagulls, pretty much whatever they could catch. She called BS and we continued our walk until we ended up on a crowded beach pavilion and sat to people watch on a park bench. A heavily tattooed biker fellow with a 18' long Burmese python draped over his shoulders, came walking by and I said to Jimi "There's a really nice one, wonder where he caught it?" and she turned to look eye-ball to foot long tongue with the huge snake and was literally petrified. I sad to the snake guy "That's a really nice one, get it around here?" and he said yeah, it came from Neptune Beach, just a few blocks away. I mentioned that it must be pretty close to a record for this area and he replied "No. I got one at the house that is 26' long but she weighs over 250 lbs and I can't carry her over my shoulders." He continued his snake walk and once Jimi became ambulatory again, we headed back home.
I left soon afterwards for a salvage project that lasted a few weeks and when I returned, Jimi said she was bored stiff and had absolutely nothing to do. I knew she liked to take some cold beers and a good book to the beach so I suggested she do that and get a bit of sun. She declined stating quite adamantly " I am NOT going back down there with those damned beach snakes!"
We dined frequently at an upscale river-front place in downtown Jax. Before the place had been built, someone in the area had raised game cocks, really big ones and they had gone feral. If you dined outside at River City Brewing Company, these huge roosters with 2 inch long spurs would aggressively take over your plate of french fries sometimes, especially if the wait staff had been giving them little ramekins of beer.
I was working on the bridge fender system on the Main Street Bridge. My divers were underwater drilling holes in concrete to fasten huge timbers to protect the bridge from boat collisions. A movie production company was filming an episode of some detective TV show where the Italian hunk of the week was standing on the bow of a speed boat in pursuit of the bad guys. Unfortunately, the set they had chosen included passing right over where my divers were working and we were a bit behind schedule on the work and looking at several hundred dollars per day liquidated damages if we did not complete the project within the allotted time frame. The Florida Marine Patrol boats were keeping recreational boat traffic out of the picture while Clint Linguini stood at the bow of his charging runabout firing blanks from a revolver at the bad guys. They apparently wanted a lot of different takes on the same shot because after the sixth or seventh time they stopped our work to film the same damned thing from a different angle, I went ashore and found the Producer and had a few words with him, then a few more words with the Marine Patrol officers and ultimately was told that if I didn't leave peacefully, I would be arrested. When I got home that evening, I was not in a good mood but I hate to bring work issues home with me so when Jimi asked what was wrong, first thing that came to mind was "It was those damned Pitchkins!"
"What?", she asked.
"Pitchkins, baby. You remember them damned chickens at River City Brewing Company?" "You're not going to believe this. They have cross-bred with those pigeons down-town and are roosting underneath the bridge right there, where we're working. Damned things flying and pecking at you all day, shitting all over everything. And the all the little colored kids are out there with rods and reels, casting corn at them and flying them around like kites. Damnedest thing I ever saw." I figured by now, surely she had caught on that I was pulling her leg.
The next day when I came in from work, I over-heard her talking to her mother on the telephone. "Lord, I hope he's in a better mood today, Momma. He's been having to fight pitchkins all day, working under that bridge down-town. Pitchkins...you remember those roosters at the restaurant we took you to brunch when you came down to visit? Well, they've cross-bred with those pigeons and flocked up underneath the bridge and he's slipping and sliding around in pitchkin shit all day while they dive bomb them and...."
OK, so maybe she has a right to a tiny bit of skepticism.

 

It was pretty funny. We've had such a wonderful adventure.

 

Day 198, My Liberal Diary
I have been a very fortunate man. My life has been filled with adventure and I have been blessed with the health to enjoy it. I have always beed surrounded with quality people. I do not associate with people that are not exceptional in one manner or another. Some are liberal, some are conservative, I really don't care for one's political inclinations in the least. Some are white, some are colored, some are handicapped, but all are exceptional human beings and I am blessed to call them my friends. I do not believe in calling people names, even if I strongly dislike their comments or behavior. This is a practice not worthy of a gentleman. the exception to this rule is if I intend to have a direct confrontation that will not have a happy ending for one of us.
With that having been said, I found my wife's sun glasses in the bathroom this morning. We always go walking around the Flea Market on Sunday mornings then have a nice lunch somewhere. She is sort of a nocturnal creature, at least to the point where she insists on keeping the house too dark to read or even see what is on your dinner plate and will not leave the house even on a rainy, overcast day, without her sun glasses. As she was getting her traveling accouterments (blanket, pillow, news paper crossword and sudoku puzzles, paperback, pencil and sharpener, big-gulp glass of ice water) ready for our two hour Sunday excursion, I asked if she knew where her sun glasses were and of course she said "They're on the bathroom vanity". Like that was where they belonged but I can't imagine if she asked me where my car keys were and I said they were in the refrigerator, it would pass without some comment or at least a curious stare. Anyway, my puppies are first on my morning agenda. I was always taught to take care of your animals before yourself because they depend on you. I pet them a while and play with them while getting dressed. I don't share my tooth-brush with them because they lick the tooth-paste off. Then we go chase cats (a euphemism for walking down the road so they can bark at the crazy mother in law's feral pussy-cats), and I let them sniff around reading the local message boards. When we get back to the house and they have breakfast, then I get my morning hugs from the right-wanger and she always comments about being lower on the list of morning priorities than the weinerdog and Maggie. Today, I was excited when we returned from our cat chasing. I found an accent artifact buried in the gravel concretion of the road to Snake Haven. I was sure it would turn out to be definitive proof that Chinese once inhabited this region! I carefully cleaned the encrusted sand and dirt from the artifact only to reveal it was probably native Alabamian, a Buck knife. Still, it proves that rednecks once traveled Snake Haven road, possibly as a trade route, swapping smoked mullets for cold beer.

 

Day 199, My Liberal Diary
My wife, right-wanger, has some issues. I am not frightened of her and I find them some-what amusing but still just a bit South of the "Come on, just say what's on your mind..." region. I made the comment that some online friends were watching the Talladaga NASCAR race and there were only 11 cars out of 40 that started the race left and six laps to go and she suggested I call my father. It didn't register immediately, that she would be the type person that would call her son to ask about his health at the start of the send over-time period between Washington and Dallas and keep him on the phone until after the game was over (he would pause the game) then tell him who won, especially if it was the Red Skins. My Father loves NASCAR racing. He's a 84 year old Southern boy, what can I say? My sister and I were carried in clothes baskets, to the Garnertown dirt track for Friday night stock-car races when we were still in diapers. He knows most of the racers by name, except for some of their kids that have grown up on the NASCAR circuit and become drivers themselves. He may not know who won the race yet, but he sure knows all about the problems that I am having with plumbers, dry-wall, black-mold, and too much work.

 

Day 200, My Liberal Diary
My wife, the right-wanger, is always concerned about a family member or a friend reading something that I wrote here in my little diatribe that offended them or made them angry. She says, "Don't you dare say that, she'll read that and won't talk to me for a year." I just kind of ignore her. I am not a mean spirited person and I certainly wouldn't write anything here that I wouldn't say to a person's face. I am not intending to offend anyone, just babble about how I see it. I decided that it might be a good defensive move to further evaluate this possibility and see if I might think something I'm talking about is less than Politically Correct.
If I look at some of the past folks that I've written about, I might could see a pattern; Logic always has a way of working itself into anything that I think or say.

My Bat Shit crazy Mother in law? I don't know if she can read or not. She doesn't go on-line for any reason, ever ,but I I wouldn't say anything about her that I haven't already said to her. She is really a quite sweet person when she is on her meds and properly stabilized.
The Right-wanger that I am married too? She's might get a little pissed off once in a while but we always talk about it and I think we both enjoy the different perspectives.
The Admiral married to Jimi's sister has a very keen sense of humor and would laugh but my sister in law would definitely get pissed but then, I don't really care. That's been an issue for a couple of decades or more. She doesn't like me.
My Father in Law thinks that I stole his daughter and am after his wealth so it really doesn't matter what else he thinks. The Pinkerton guys will keep him informed.
My father apparently reads most of my posts. I can imagine him shaking his head and thinking "that boy has some issues" but mostly, I think he's sort of proud of my dissection of the day to day, sometimes.
Sea-monkies don't care. I know this because I once labeled a sample jar as a bottled "Fart: do not open " and left it with the other samples during a big oil spill and one of them opened it and let it go to see if it made a farting sound.
My dogs do not mind. They just like any attention they can get.
Our daughter doesn't read my diary because she suspects that I am not actually a liberal but rather, a redneck that has a warped sense of humor and a lot of guns, but several of her friends are daily readers. I imagine she does a lot of head shaking too.
To all my LGBTQ friends, if you ever come out of the closet I'll apologize for offending you little cock-suckers.
For my BLM and Afro-american buds, get over it and pull your pants up.
For you Trumpsters, I really don't think he's a doing any worse than what's her name would have.
For you gun controllers, "From my cold dead hands, please note the extended middle finger".
For those of you that still value me as a friend, God Bless you, whatever you consider her to be.

 

Day 200, My Liberal Diary
I took my puppies for a walk and enjoyed the first really cool evening we'd had in quite some time. I may even burn a fire outside tonight just to enjoy the crackle while I play some guitar. The Fall wild flowers, goldenrod, wild violet, lantana, mums, are blooming even if the tree don't really change much around here. A trio of bicyclers just rode by, the youngest was maybe 4 years old so I called Maggie to my side to sit while they passed. I didn't want her to frighten the child, even though Maggie loves kids and is very protective of them. I smile when I think of all the beauty around me, the clean fresh ocean air, squirrels playing hide and seek with the puppies. My wife and I are coping with a major over-haul of the plumbing, here at the casa. We had a picnic lunch today in a little wooded pavilion just cross the Bay from Dauphin Island. I am about to record a new song that I wrote a couple of weeks back, during a hurricane and have finally found the proper balance of melody and emotion and that gives me satisfaction.
If you don't get it, life is pretty amazing, so much beauty and even mankind hasn't been able to screw that up, not yet....not completely.
I am hearing rumors that a second shooter and former , albeit brief hero, the security guard that got shot in the hotel in Las Vegas, has been arrested by the FBI as a second shooter in the coincidental massacre by a lone Republican last week. North Korea just might start a nuclear war any day now, so I've been told. Our new boogyman, ISIS is really making an imprint all over. I will loose my honorary Liberal card if anyone finds out that I have a framed sketch of Nathan Bedford Forrest hanging in my gun room and a Confederate battle flag on the back of my favorite motor-cycle jacket. The plumbers that are causing me to have to sell blood to feed my puppies are doing a very crude and amateurish job but that's my fault for trying to save several thousand dollars. I suppose I will have to have more permanent repairs made if Mobile survives being invaded by North Korean scavengers. The casting couch has been ruined forever for the Hollywood film Moguls. It is now everybody's business who is sleeping with who and why except if you are LGBTQ, a Democrat, or a Baby-daddy.
i will not ask permission to enjoy as many moments of peace and beauty and music as I can in the days that I have left.I am looking forward to seeing our grand children and Amanda for a week, come Thanks Giving. I have indoor plumbing again, sort of. I will get to play some music with good friends later this week. I have quality people in my life that value me as much as I value them. I know the world is falling apart around us. We have reached a population density where true liberty and security cannot co-exist. Obama was correct about Hope and Change but not in the context he sold us on. I hear a distant sound,mixed with drones and marching feet. It is a frightening sound and I must turn the music up to obscure the crys for help.

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

 

Day 201, My Liberal Diary
My favorite Niece is a liberal. She finds me offensive in epic proportion but can't seem to present an intellectually sound argument, only argument based on emotional response and skewed statistics obtained from extreme left-wing conversations with no bibliography. I love her anyway and respect that she has a much different view of the world than I; a much more innocent and simple view and I envy her this idealism. As a newly christened liberal myself, I wish I could believe that some of the Utopian beliefs would come true, if we only repeat them enough but unfortunately, even if everyone believes a lie, it still isn't the truth. The truth is that this world is a wicked place, filled with wicked people intent on furthering an evil agenda and no amount of tinting our glasses in rose will change that ugliness. My hope and prayers aren't wasted in removing the tools they would use for their evil intent but rather, to heal their heart and make them want to cease that vileness, well that, or just kill the son of bitches and be done with it.

 

Day 202, My Liberal Diary
Watching squirrels outside, I see they are industriously harvesting and gathering large quantities of food, hiding things away in hollow trees to sustain themselves through the winter. They seem more industrious this year, much more so than in the past several years, like they are anticipating a long, wet, cold winter. The rednecks will say that Global warming is pure crap, other conservatives might say yes, but weather patterns on planet earth are constantly evolving and this is just another cycle and neither one are completely incorrect any more so than we are, in predicting irreversible climate change faster than we will be able to evolve gills. Sure, we want to leave our children's children a better place, our parents wanted the same for us but got lost in the struggle of just feeding and keeping a roof over their families. I am doing the same thing, I am guilty. I am preparing for a very hard winter. My first concern is for the comfort and well being of myself, my wife and home, I can't see a lot of compromise happening anywhere, so I believe it is a safe assumption that things are not going to improve any time soon. I've had a good run, life has been an adventure filled with hard work, love, strength, and understanding. I wish all could be so fortunate. We have lived on a shanty-boat on a beautiful quiet Southern river, filled with fish and alligators, and eagles soaring above with con-trails of fighter jets streaking the beautiful blue sky behind them, flying off to drop bombs and missiles. What an interesting time we live here. A piece of plastic spends the product of your indentured servitude electronically and eliminates the need for people to be able to count change. And if you don't work for that intangible electronic blip, you can still get your own piece of plastic and spend other people's money. Ain't this world a grand place?

 

Day 203, My Liberal Diary
I think I'll let Bob Dylan say everything that is on my mind today through Edie Brickell's voice, since Bob can't carry a tune in a 5 gallon bucket.

 

Day 204, My Liberal Diary

I do not know if I believe in ghosts or not but I like Halloween, does that count? I sometimes see shadows moving where there is nothing and I wonder if that was a ghost? I saw one last night. It made the hairs stand up on my arms. I like conversation though so I spoke out loud and said “If you are a ghost, come on out and sit a spell and let’s talk. I am a good listener so if you got something on your apparitional mind, pull up a chair.”

Well, the ghost didn’t respond, so I just kept up my end of the conversation, hoping it would eventually break in and dispel a few stereotypes that I have garnered over the years from Bella Lugosi and Bill Murray movies, but no such luck. I remembered that Amityville movie and wondered if maybe that’s why I miss-place so many things? Or was that Poltergeist? Anyway, the sum information that I possess about ghosts and apparitions comes from B-movies and Saturday morning cartoons so I can certainly understand that my information is probably skewed and somewhat less than accurate. I do not pretend to be an expert on ghosts, I actually know very little about them at all, if they even exist. I know people that swear they see them and can tell you all about them. I do not know where they got their information, but then again, I do not pretend to be an expert on ghosts, I do not know where they got their information, but the seem pretty certain about it and I am not one to argue with them about a subject that I know very little or nothing about. People that will start a debate about a subject they are totally ignorant about, using skewed data and statistics, unverified sources, and syllogistic reasoning rather than logic, are boorish, and usually Democrats.

 

The Belle Witch is a beauty alright.

 

Day 205, My Liberal Diary
I spoke with an old friend today and he told me that I was the best boss that he ever had and the best friend. We worked together on some pretty decent projects around this globe. A little over a decade ago, I was salvage master with a world-wide marine casualty company. I specialized in large cranes and heavy lifts, deep air commercial diving operations and was their senior boat captain, as well. I have made lifts where I've had millions of dollars on my hook. I have commanded vessels at sea under duress from wind and weather. I have held dead friends in my arms. I have traveled to foreign countries and managed complicated projects for millions of dollars and made a profit. Thanks to all the regulations, I am no longer a captain, I cannot operate cranes, I cannot weld, and I cannot run diving operations for most of my former clients. I have been regulated into obsolescence. Apparently actually doing something for 40-something years with zero accidents or injuries no longer counts as qualifications to perform a job. It now requires paper, lots of paper. Well, I use paper to wipe my butt. I can't support myself by playing guitar alone so I'll keep working these meaningless jobs until I die because the things I know best how to do have to be done by people that learned how to do them from training videos. I am seriously considering moving back to a proper third-world country where actual skills are needed and useful.

 

Day 206, My Liberal Diary

My wife, the right-wanger, surprised the heck out of me last night when she suggested that we sell Snake Haven and everything in it, repair the sailboat, and just leave and wander the globe. She said we could just leave the bat-shit crazy mother in law with her sister, the dogs aren’t going to last much longer, and we don’t really need all this stuff. Actually, she suggested we buy a motor home but when I pointed out that we already have a large sailboat, she said “I’m all in”. So everything we own is now for sale or trade for things that is useful aboard a sailboat. Here is a list of some of the items we need to sell to get started:

A three feet tall leather elephant with genuine imitation ivory tusks

A set of red conga drums

A 4-bore elephant rifle with Arabic writing on it

Two slightly used 16 year old dogs, one tall and one short one

A two feet long catfish named Nancy (after Nancy Pelosi, a true bottom-feeding, scum sucker)

Assorted lawn mowers, weed whackers, leaf-blowers, chain saws, garden tillers, and various tools associated with lawn care and gardening

A freezer full of dead rabbits and other edible creatures

A large cactus (you dig it up)

And a really big house filled with musical instruments, recording equipment, furniture, house stuff, guns, fishing stuff, tools, clothes, pictures, and assorted accumulations of 120 combined years of traveling this planet. Price is negotiable.

 

Day 207, My Liberal Diary

Many of my aquaintences are “Preppers”, many of us liberals have often refered to them as “Survivalists” and paint them all as paranoid nut-cases, hording away guns and ammunition, and supplies for the coming apopcylpse. They, it turn, have pretty much labeled all us liberals as “Snow-flakes” and I have to tell you I really can’t see where that is any different than seeing all the black folks as Snoop Dog with a stable of crack whores instead of a few platinum albums. I have worked the past several decades, in the wake of hurricanes and diasters and 99% of the people there that we were rescuing, had made no provisions for surviving a diaster. They had made no plans for survivng a diaster and in fact, do not believe that they had even given it a thought right on up until they were up to their asses in it. But there was that 1% that had food and drinking water, some had emergency shelter first-aid supplies, alternate means of communicationg with the outside world when cell towers crapped out and there was nothing to keep those smart-phones working. Oh, they had guns and ammunition too, lots of it. I really can’t say I blame them in the least because a fair percentage of the 99% that weren’t prepared surely wanted desperately to take what they needed from those that had “Prepped” by any means they could achieve.

 

Day 208, My Liberal Diary
Nancy Pelosi is missing!
Our patio koi pond has been the home of a large slimy scum-sucking bottom feeding catfish named Nancy Pelosi, for several years now. Nancy is mostly black but has a white under-belly, very slick and slimy, has whiskers, and smells like , well she smells like a catfish. She was last seen about a month ago, eating a loaf of stale bread. It would take a very large raccoon to carry her off or a bear and I have it on good faith, that she never walks anywhere. I searched the pond over for her yesterday, checked under all the rocks even tried to entice her out with grasshoppers. She is gone. She is over two feet long and probably weighs about as much as a dog but has no tags or jewelry or identifying marks. There was, however, what I expect is a pile of bear poop in our back yard near the pond last week. It is entirely possible that may be the remnants of Nancy, God rest her fishy presence.
On the positive side, we have completed replacement of all the plumbing here at Snake Haven and repaired the massive holes in the walls. Now all that is left to normalize our home is a bit of painting. My wife, the right-wanger, and I had a difference of opinion about the color scheme needed through-out the domicile. I may have mentioned my preference towards wild violets and goldenrod being my present favorite colors and an opportune period to apply my impeccable tastes upon numerous walls while she visited her father, convalescing in a hospital 400 miles away. I recently come to understand that 400 miles is not an adequate distance to insure completion of such an undertaking and we have now come to an unanimous agreement about a pale shade of green. I shall not mention my favorite Fall colors again in the vicinity of painting products or implements.