My Liberal Diary

Day 99, My Liberal Diary
A co-worker is a very nice black man but he isn't a Democrat or a Republican, he is just a nice man that could give a rat's ass about politics. He is functionally illiterate and speaks with a Birmingham Brown dialect, not ebonic but just plain old country rural uneducated black. He is a very thoughtful man, a very hard worker, and I am always proud to work along side him because I know that when I lift something, he is lifting his his share without having to be asked. He is my age and bald as an onion but you never see that he is bald because he is always wearing a hard hat. I was doing some serious welding repairs to a barge last week while he cleaned the inside ballast tanks on the barge, A steel barge in 90 degree sunshine gets really hot down inside, it's like an oven and yet this man worked all day long for three days, down inside the oven, scrubbing oil residue and pumping waste from one of our tugs that had been pumped into the barge holds during a three month long project. He had a confined space entry team but he refused to allow anyone else to go inside the barge to work. I threatened to fire him if he didn't let someone else share that hot and miserable task because he feels like he should be the one to do all the nasty tasks that nobody else wants to do. I told him that if nobody else wanted to do the dirty jobs, call me, I'll do it but I got enough sense to go get a fan to ventilate and keep some air moving. I asked him if he did this because he was black? He said no, we just don't have any Mexicans.

 

Day 100, My Liberal Diary
Everybody seems to think that today is a hallmark in my Liberalism, being day 100 and that I should list my accomplishments since embarking on my new-found Liberal sojourn. Unfortunately, the only accomplishment that I seem to have achieved is making a few folks laugh but I don't let that discourage me, as I was damned tired of all the snarky ill-tempered whining after the election and when I had several "friends" stop associating with me because I am a gun-toting, racist, ignorant redneck, I decided to try the other side and see what it's all about. It is much easier for me to list my failures, rather than accomplishments because it is failure combined with determination that eventually leads to success. That seems to be a problem that most Liberals encounter, they fail and instead of learning from their failures, just whine louder and get a group up (strength in numbers?) and start rioting and making a big mess out of everything. Even the Vagina suits and pussy hats seem to have lost their appeal for most since, instead of making the statement they were trying to achieve, they just became a bad joke and the right-wangers were waiting with their canned laugh tracks, just to see what we would try next. Personally, I thought we might have gotten better results by dressing up like penises instead, but i am sure that is just residual sexist thinking from my past days as a conservative prick.
To start my list, maybe I should begin with something credible, like global warming. Admittedly, the Gulf coast is sort of bias when it comes to it being just too damned hot. I have spent most of the past two weeks outside, welding on a steel barge that had a measured surface temperature of 128 degrees at 3:00 yesterday afternoon and an ambient temperature in the 90s. I like to use the terminology that I hear "meteorologists" use on television when I say "it feels like it is.... hotter than hell and I am not even a Baptist." If I had just a bit of shade, a nice breeze, and steel didn't conduct heat so well, I might be convinced that it is definitely getting hotter.
Second on my list is Black Lives Matter. I totally agree with this! Black lives matter a lot and if they'd quit shooting each other, pointing guns at policemen, and sneaking up on white people to play the knock-out game or rob them, I am sure a bunch more would live a lot longer.
Third on my list is that I am still waiting on many of our out-spoken Liberal spokes-persons to actually leave the United States and take up residence somewhere else. I would love to visit them in Venezuela or even Monsarat, pending another eruption of the volcano there.
Forth on my list is this impeach Trump thing, come up with something real rather than him doing exactly what he promised the majority that elected him he would do and I'll be all over it! Unfortunately, in spite of our pussy-clad militia looting Starbucks across the planet and screaming that it's the Russian's fault, we just can't seem to get past the little known fact that the majority of Americans still think he's doing a pretty good job, except for my wife, the right-winger, who is very pissed that he broke into an episode of Ellen that she had been waiting patiently to watch because she has had a crush on Johnny Depp ever since we helped with the making of those silly Pirate movies where he dressed up like a gay version of Black-beard. I think she may become a Liberal!
Fifth on my list is the gun control thing. We have not had much success at doing away with the second amendment thing, so I still think we should go after the BATFE and the 1934 and 1968 Gun Control Acts. I'll just bet you that we can shock the living crap out of the Republicans if we set out to repeal those laws.
Sixth, ABC canceling Last Man Standing because it portrays a conservative, is causing some serious couch-potato back-lash that we do not need at this critical moment in our agenda.
Seventh, It appears that the gay homosexual community has taken a hiatus from parades to go back to cutting glory-holes in public restroom stalls, although they still occupy a major share of paid by advertising television programming.
Number eight is OBAMA Care! Since these damned right-wingers repealed it, my insurance premium seems to have gone down a little bit and the $465.00 a month co-pay on my arthritis medication is now Zero, thanks to a Big-Pharm program that pays $9000.00 a year towards my co-payment.
Number nine, Berkley. I suppose I am missing something here, something like "who gives a fuck?"
And finally, number ten, I just can't warm up to doing away with statues, flags, and history of the South. The democrats were traditionally Southern, rebel flags, and statues of Nathan Bedford Forest included. We have bought into the simplistic revision of history created by the politically correct, Nigger Jim from Mark Twains Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckelberry Finn is now Mr. Jim and speaks the King's English. Since our biggest driving force is labor unions and labor unions were formed pretty much in the North, we Southerners just have to face the facts that Yankee carpet-baggers still control us and have since we lost the Great War of Northern Aggression.

 

Day 101, My Liberal Diary
I went to a gun show in Pascagoula today to search for these "loop-holes" that Libs are always talking about. Nobody there seemed to have any loop-holes for sale though I could have bought just about any kind of gun I wanted, since I am not a criminally convicted felon and am a citizen of the United States of legal age. The problem was that most of the guns that I was interested in were classified as "Curios and Relics" and are not even regulated. Weapons that use black powder as a propellent are not considered firearms either and may be purchased by anyone! It is probably fortunate that gang-bangers are not much interested in antique weapons, preferring the side-mounted Glock or AK. The modern weapons that interested me most are also available at Walmart and pretty much all the big-box stores for less than they were asking at the gun show. I think we should arm our Pussy Militia with black-powder firearms. The smoke from them will help hide us from the right-wingers shooting back after they quit laughing at our pink uniforms. An added benefit will be that we could sing kumbaya while reloading between each shot fired! Who needs high-capacity magazines when we can have folk music? I was asked to notify the nice policeman at the door, that I was armed when entering, but he wasn't concerned that my weapon was a 1911 model Colt .45 and only held 8 rounds in the Chip McCormick magazine and one in the pipe and didn't even ask how many spare magazines I was carrying, since there was plenty more ammunition available for sale inside. But not a single loop-hole!

 

Day 102, My Liberal Diary
Checking the scheduled lists of protests and riots for the day in Mobile, I have decided to go to the Flea Market and take my Republican wife to lunch. The Mobile Flea Market has signs up everywhere saying that firearms are not allowed, including concealed carry. As I may have mentioned, I always carry a loaded weapon or two with me and since I have seen no signs anywhere there stating that the Flea Market will provide me with personal armed protection during my visit there, then I just sort of ignore the sign and carry my gun anyway. I always try to find places to dine that serve tofu, bean sprouts, or entres with names that sound Liberal, such as anti-pasta or bean-curd quiche. These places usually have signs saying that firearms are not allowed too but I never see any stating that they will provide me armed security and personal protection from all the dangerous right-wingers that may have decided to shoot up the place with their AK-15 machine-guns or the Mexican buss-boy that decided to go berserk with a stolen kitchen knife and start chopping people instead of vegetables. Since these quaint little signs carry no "force of Law" in the State of Alabama, I ignore them, feeling pretty sure that as long as I don't unholster my weapon and set it on the table next to me, nobody is going to notice unless I have to use it to defend myself and I really won't mind if they ask me to leave at that point.
I have become a victim! Now is this liberal or what? one of my iPads has been taken over by ransom ware. I feel so violated. Can I get some kind of entitlement for this?

 

Day 103, My Liberal Diary
I couldn't sleep last night so I decided to watch some old horror films. The Curse of the Mummy, Frankenstien, a couple of Zombie flicks...I am having a problem with this. If you watch the Mummy, zombies, or Frankenstien, they all have one thing in common; they walk slow and clumsily, how in God's green earth, did they manage to catch anyone to kill or eat? Couldn't these people just run, or even jog or walk real fast? What kind of idiot slows down enough to let a hulking 8' tall reanimated dead person walk up and grab them? Now vampires, I get that, they can fly right up and bite you like a mosquito on steroids, but these Mummies are like 10,000 years old and parts frequently break off them even performing menial tasks such as grabbing Abbot or Costello and choking them? They are sort of like a gauze wrapped Rosie McDonald or Michael Moore, just walk away from them, don't just stand there and listen to their garbage until you become a zombie yourself! It is that very mindless kind of crap that has caused us liberals to loose control of our developing Utopia. Fortunately, since zombies seem to prefer eating brains, we should be relatively safe from them even if we do seem to mimic their actions a good bit.

 

Day 104, My Liberal Diary
I am borrowing a post from a Jacksonville musician that although he is an accomplished musician, has raised the bar on white liberal idiocy.
"If you go on a rant blaming Black Lives Matter and people with entitlement mentality for taking down Confederate Monuments, using white supremacist alternative facts as history, then try to rationalize it with the 'I have black friends' disclaimer...you are either a racist or deluded.
You don't see a monument to Hitler at Auschwitz or Truman at Hiroshima. There's no Jackson Statue at either end of the Trail of Tears.

Confederate Monuments were erected to intimidate African Americans in the Jim Crow Era. Call it "honoring the memory" of their sacrifice but it's still there to remind a disenfranchised segment of the population to remain in their 'place.'"
He refers to anyone that disagrees with him as an asshole and an idiot, racist, homophobic, and somehow thinks this attack on people elevates him because he's a pretty good guitar player, not nearly as great as he thinks he is, but pretty good. I tend to disagree with a lot of people but I still respect their opinion, at least to the point where they start demanding that I have to agree with them or I am a (pick one or more) racist, redneck, idiot, asshole, white supremacist, deluded, homophobic Trumpster. I tend to get a little pissed at wieners like this and would probably punch him in his big mouth, were he ever to grow the cajones to actually say these things to my face but the chance of that actually happening is pretty slim because these name-calling Liberals are not really into confrontation unless it is with ones and zeros or shouted from within a large group of like-minded people. I am pretty sure that is is predominantly white Liberals that keep stirring this race pot, don't hear many negroes doing it unless they are in the spotlight. I don't have many black friends. I do have some and they are family and I love and respect them as humans but most of the ones that I come into contact with, I am more concerned will rob me or assault me because I am white and in the wrong place. I enjoy a decent intelligent argument but I will confess to having shot a few folks over the years in situations where logical debate had little chance of a successful outcome. I have a cousin that was hanged by a group of blacks that stopped to help him change a flat, demanded money, and over-powered him and hanged him from a tree. Fortunately, a passing automobile saw the tree thrashing around and stopped to see what was causing it and cut him down before he strangled to death. A week later, the FBI came to his place of employment and took my cousin in for questioning about violating the civil rights of three of the four folks that had hanged him, with a 12 gauge shotgun. They kept him locked up for 32 hours, terrorizing him with threats of the death penalty, prison, and sexual perversion within the confines of their lock-up but had no evidence and had to release him, When the fourth member of the gang that hanged him was ran over two or three times with a rider truck, they didn't bother to pick my cousin up again. He has two things that will forever belong to him, the first being the world's record for the number of continual sit-ups when he was 12 at JB Young Elementary School in Bemis, TN and the second is a rope scar around his neck that he'll always have.I do know if he shot those folks or not but if he did, they needed their civil rights violated because the complaint my cousin filed was negated by one man's word against four. I realize this is not a very liberal position to take but I just don't believe that when a gang decides to lynch a person, they should be cut any slack and this includes black folks that got lynched in the past. If you are going to kill somebody, it is prudent to investigate alternatives before preceding to shoot them, but if shooting seems to be the most viable option, blow the bastards away.

 

Day 105, My Liberal Diary
I have spent part of today trying to be persuaded that Southerners are considered traitors to the United States and that is why they are taking down all the Confederate monuments and raising so much hell about the Rebel Battle Flag. Well, and that it is apparently racist too but I haven't really noticed any black people getting their panties in a wad about it, just liberal white folks. It seems that the colored people are pretty much content to wear their Black Power shirts while watching BET and waiting on us dumb-assed liberals to start another protest so they can get some new shoes or a bigger flat-screen. This traitor thing upsets me though, or at least, makes me wonder what the British called us from 1776 to 1812 or so? The South couldn't reach a suitable resolution with the North so we quit the United States and started our own country and had a war with them and lost it. I just found out today that Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was only directed at the 3.1 million slaves in the ten Southern States that formed the Confederate States of America and didn't free the ones North of the Mason-Dixon line. This really surprised me because I have always been taught that it was to free ALL the slaves but it turns out that they really didn't want to free their own and in fact, many Northerners still owned slaves well into 1874, when they finally got around to saying OK, nobody can have any slaves now so let's ratify this thing and make it the law of the land. This sure seems to shoot some holes in the story about the war of Northern Aggression being fought over slavery. I am not joking about this, do a little research. If the Yankees had payed a little more attention to the Constitution for the United States For America, that's right, it is FOR the United States, not OF the United States, they would have realized that all powers not expressly granted to the federal government belonged to the individual States and we were well within our rights to succeed from the Union but Big Business needed our cotton, they just didn't like our two-legged cotton pickers.The industrial age was just being born and slavery would have died on it's own regardless because John Deere is much easier to maintain than Kunte Kente, but the taxes and tariffs that the north had saddled us with were a different matter. Want to know the true story then follow the money. Wars were not fought with tax dollars back then, income tax didn't exist, bonds were not sold...someone with some deep pockets paid the bills and sent an army into Dixie and conquered our land and people. The victors got to write the history books, as is always the case and put the spin on it that they wanted the world to see . What difference would it really have made if we had succeeded? We let Mexico stay there and Canada? They were never part of the Union mostly because we knew better than to piss off Spain or France, whipping those jolly Brits almost did us in. Wonder when Mexico did away with slavery, oh that's right, they still have slavery except they are called Peons and their Masters are the drug cartels that provide us upstanding U.S. citizens with the finest cocaine and heroin that money can buy and validates the loss of our liberties further by giving credence to our "War on Drugs". It sure seems to me, as a new Liberal, that there are so many more important issues we should be dealing with rather than pissing off Southerners, who are traditionally democrats, by destroying their monuments because it offends white liberals that want to pretend that black folks give a damn about it.

 

Day 106, My Liberal Diary
Guy Clark sang "Home grown Tomatoes, home grown tomatoes; there ain't nothing like home grown tomatoes. There's just two things that money can't buy...that's true love and home grown tomatoes." Our tomato vines are loaded with fruit. They are growing larger but still green, we have yet to get our first ripe tomato this year. Jimi watches them each and every day, waiting for that first delicious ripe fruit and, like the watched pot that never boils, we keep waiting.
This is a tough time of year for me, it nears the third anniversary of our son's violent death and the emotional melt-down that the saddened memory rekindles from ashes each year. To loose a child from violent death, in their prime and with so much ahead of them, is a sleeping dragon that awakens each year to so many unanswered questions. I have written many songs about the emotions that this event rises but I have yet to discuss the events that happened, as I understand them. It is one of the reasons that I decided to become a liberal, because apparently, Liberals can get away with murder.
Tommy was my step-son. I acquired him when he was ten by marrying his darling mother and that was without any doubt, the very best thing that ever happened to me in my life. He was wild, spoiled rotten by both parents and grand-parents, and was adept at working both sides of that fence to his advantage. He was curious and quick to access and form conclusions based primarily on how to turn them to his advantage. He joined the navy right out of school to defer a prison sentence for providing recreational chemicals to his friends at rave parties and he was prone to drinking way too much and always getting into trouble with the law. I bailed him out of jail after the navy gave him a general discharge and I put him to work on one of my salvage crews where I trained him as a crane operator, diver, and boat captain. We traveled all over the world together aboard salvage ships, I was the captain, his mother was our cook and he was a crane operator salvage tech. He was a fast learner and soon became one of my most valuable hands but he still was prone to binge drinking that over-loaded his hummingbird ass with his alligator mouth. During a victory party after completing a major wreck removal in Green Cove Springs, Fla., he spilled a great-gulp cup of assorted mixed liquors on one of my prized guitars while trying to help and I had the Seamonkeys take him back to his hotel and keep him there and out of trouble the rest of the night. The next morning, at our tool-box meeting, I asked my first Mate, Robert Stamps, to fetch the ax handle I had sent him to purchase and to present it to Tommy. The boy looked confused and asked what that was for so I told him. "It seems like we have an issue understanding just who is boss on this project, boy. I have decided that at the end of today, after you have the fine dinner that your mother is preparing, you and I will take a walk over the the other side of that tree line and have a contest to determine which one of us is actually in command of this operation. Since I have about forty pounds on you, I had Robert buy that ax-handle for you to sort of even up your chances; don't want to be unfair." That boy worked his ass off that day and every time i turned around, he was asking me what I wanted him to do next. At quitting time, I told him to go on into the Lana Rose and eat his dinner, that I would be waiting for him and don't forget to bring his ax handle.
An hour later, he had still not emerged from the boat so I went inside to fetch him; he was no-where to be found. I asked Robert where he was hiding and was told "I don't know, D. He didn't stay for dinner." Jimi and I lived in a shanty-boat about 200 yards across at the next pier, so I walked around to ask his mother if she had seen him. She came out on deck with her arms crossed and said "You're not gonna whip my boy's ass, Mister. I told her that was yet to be determined, that I had bought him a perfectly good ax handle and there was a better than even chance that he just might whip my ass. "You'll have to whip me before you get to my boy" She was serious as hell and would have fought me tooth and nail before I would get a shot at her son. That is the level of devotion and love that a mother has for her child. I told her to get his ass out there on deck, I had something to tell him,. He was dripping wet still, from having gone into the Lana, up to the wheelhouse and swimming across the river to hide under his mother's skirt-tails. I told him that his mother had made it clear that I would have to fight her first before he and I could tangle and wanted him to hear something. I turned to my wife and told her that if he screwed up one more time and she stood between us, she could pack her bags and take her sorry assed son with her, then I went back to the Lana and spent the night in my cabin, leaving the two of them to share their evening. About three in the morning, Jimi awakened me in tears and said, "go on and whip his ass" I still don't know if she was feeling the thought of loosing her marriage or if he had continued to drink and justify his misbehavior until she saw the reason I was determined to establish a proper hierarchy.
His drinking still managed to cause problems. especially when combined with his immediate gratification complex and inspite of him being one of the hardest working and best crane operators that I have ever worked with, I had him put on a bus from Texas, where he was working, and sent to Mobile to address the problem with his binge drinking. I gave him the option of getting into professional rehab or being unemployed and homeless and likely in jail. He was a smart boy and took the rehab and months later, I had an impartial evaluation conducted by our company personnel group to determine if he would be allowed to return to service with our salvage company. Resolve didn't want to take a risk on him so I pulled some strings and got him a job operating a crane for a construction company and I talked him into taking up sky-diving and USPSA shooting. He was good at USPSA but the sky-diving became a passion and he found that drinking was no where near the rush of flying. He found a woman and fell in love, she was liberal and had some emotional problems. I wasn't especially fond of her but love is blind and they married. Tommy came to me and told me how much it meant to him that I had taken to time to train him and teach him responsibility and I do not believe that I have ever felt a prouder moment in my life. He was finally becoming a man.
Six months after his marriage, the young couple were visiting us and I asked him if he had had any good jumps lately. He looked down and told me that he had sold his parachute rig for a fifth of the 15K it had costed him because he was married now and didn't want to risk being injured and not being able to provide for his wife. As I mentioned, I wasn't fond of his wife. She was kind of fat not overly attractive but that was ok, she was a liberal and I could deal with that, she was tremendously in debt and Tommy was working extra hours to bail her out but that wasn't any of my business; love is blind. Everything in their relationship seemed to be totally about how it related to Virginia, that he worked so many hours was such a hardship on her having to be alone. She had been under treatment for bi-polar disorder for years and this bothered me, but I never mentioned it. I tried to tell him that you couldn't give up your passions for the piques of another and she jumped into the conversation with both feet. She said that they would never have children, that he was her husband and made it very very clear that it was all about "Me, Me, Me..." Tommy told me later, that it was actually Virginia that was posting all the sappy "love of my life" crap on his Facebook page but I had already suspected as much. He just wasn't that poetic and certainly not that co-dependent.
Sunday, a week later, Jimi and I were about to leave the house to have brunch, when Virginia's mother called to inform us that our son was dead. Jimi collapsed onto the floor and I had to carry her to bed. His death was ruled suicide, shot by his own hand with a .45 1911 that I had given him for his birthday the year before. I cannot attest to all that happened but these are the facts that I have verified:
1. Tommy and Virginia had been to a shrimp boil at a friend's and he was drinking heavily. They argued and left the party together.
2. Virginia called her mother, a noted criminal attorney to tell her that Tommy was shot and her mother arrived and was present for approximately 40 minutes before they called 911 to report the shooting.
3. There is a 20 minute discrepancy between accounts of when neighbors heard the shot/shots fired. Gunfire isn't particularly unusual in New Orleans at that hour and some reported hearing two shots that night, several minutes apart but admitted they could have been mistaken.
4. When the police arrived, they were greeted by Virginia, freshly bathed, wearing a house-coat with her still wet hair wrapped in a towel and under the advice of her attorney mother as to what questions to answer.
5. The police report states that the weapon was lying next to Tommy, a Taurus 1911 .45 cap. The officer stated in his report that the weapon was in "cocked and locked" battery, so he moved it to one side to allow the paramedics to attend Tommy. For those of you that are not familiar with the 1911 pistol, cocked and locked means a round was chambered, the thumb-safety engaged. This is also called "condition 1 carry" and is common to this particular pistol, given that it also has a built-in grip safety. The problem is that a pistol cannot be fired, dropped and then the manual thumb-safety engaged by the hand of a suicide.
6. Tommy was still alive and transported to the hospital where he was finally pronounced dead FIVE hours after the police arrived at the scene.
7. There was in GSR on one of Tommy's hands and none located on the freshly bathed Virginia's.
8. Louisiana law provides that his estate would revert to his next of kin,his mother, rather than his wife of six months but Virginia's mother prevented us from obtaining any of his possessions by writ and they disposed of all his personal property, letters, and the many firearms that I had given him over the years.
9. Tommy's memorial service was filled with friends and co-workers that were very angry and tried to convince us that he had been murdered but there just wasn't any concrete evidence that would stand in a court of law, in spite of a rumored second .45 shell casing removed by the Mother criminal attorney prior to calling the police. Virginia kept referring to him as "the love of her life" as if this six month event carried any relevance at all to the woman that had carried this boy in her womb for nine months and spent the next thirty years loving him so much that she would have given her life at any point for just one more moment with him.
We have never gotten any closure over this event and likely, never will. I was so proud of the man that I helped raise and teach but that cannot begin to reach the depths of love and adoration his mother felt, nor her loss. I left his memorial service, after delivering my eulogy, to go off-shore for two weeks on a project because, reality was that we could not afford for me to miss any work, we would have fallen so far behind on our bills and obligations. Responsibility is a hard mistress, at times. I purchased a locket to place some of Tommy's ashes inside that Jimi still wears around her neck on a silver chain. She took the rest of his ashes and we traveled to his sky-diving club and my darling wife boarded the jump plane and jumped from 15,000 feet and scattered his ashes while I watched from below. She showed absolutely no fear, just a sad resolve to release her son's remains into the sky that he so much loved. When she reached the ground, the sadness was still there but there was an understanding in her eyes that she had never suspected. Words cannot describe this, it is one of those things that you have to bleed before you can understand the loss of blood.

 

Day 107, My Liberal Diary
I have been reading stuff about "Rompers" and wondered what they were so I asked my wife, the Republican, and she said she didn't know so I googled them to find out that they are like baby suits with the shorts and shirts attached into one garment but adults are now wearing them. I think I will stick to my jeans, cowboy boots, Stetson, vest, and shirts with sleeves. I just don't much care for these modern androgynous trends. Yeah, I got a smartphone but I still wear a wristwatch. I do wear shorts, t-shirts and sandals once in a while around the house doing yard work or if I decide to walk down to the beach with the puppies to play in the water but I cn assure you that Rompers are just not on the agenda. I got two Stetsons, a white one and a black one and a Tully hat for the warmer days. They are to keep rain off my face and sunshine out of my eyes, not to make any particular statement. Ball caps, if worn, are always worn with the bill pointed to shade my eyes and never cocked around my head unless I need the bill out of the way to peer through a rifle optic. I do not own an automobile, the company I work for provides me with a pickup. I own two motorcycles; one for the highway and one for getting off the highway and going cross-country. I do have an old conversion van that I use to haul my music equipment around when I am touring, I also sleep in it because most the gigs I get don't pay enough to stay anywhere but the sleaziest hotels and me and bed-bugs just do not get along and the smell of hot-sheets sort of freaks me out. I do own a kilt and enjoy wearing it sometimes while participating in outdoors activities but generally have determined that my wife's laughter just isn't worth the comfort so I don't wear it often, well that and the fact that it isn't a very practical garment for motorcycle riding. I have noticed, since I do not cross my legs in a very lady-like manner, people are always trying to sneak a peak when I wear my kilt so I'll tell you right out of the box, no I do not have underwear on, defeats the purpose.
I read the article that male liberals are mostly the more androgynous, feminized, weaker of the general male population, gay homosexuals, feminist and many try to over compensate with lumberjack boots, bushy beards, and blue jeans that have fake dirt on them, but I am 210 lbs, 6'3" (two inches shorter than I was 25 years ago), and still wear the same sized jeans I wore in my 20s. I do not have a pot-belly and I still use my arms and legs enough doing hard labor, that you can still see the muscles and callouses on my hands. Yeah ok, my hair is now white, but I have always heard that blonds have more fun. I thought about dying my hair red and painting some freckles on my face but I am usually too darkly tanned for freckles to be seen unless I were to paint them white. I do not usually use make-up unless I want to hide in the dark or bush to shoot something undetected. I do not know what most Liberals are supposed to carry in their pockets? My daily carry items are a stag-handled switch-blade knife and a Stag Case carbon steel pocket knife, a Jack Daniels Zippo lighter, two rings of keys (one for work and one for my stuff), a Cross pen, smart phone, a .45 ACP 1911 pistol with two spare magazines, another small pistol in my pocket, a flask of good sour mash whiskey, a thermos of green tea with honey and cider vinegar, a ziplock bag of walnuts, almonds, banana chips, dates, and figs, and a shoulder bag with some spare ammunition, first-aid items, toiletries, P-38 can opener, water filter, some silver coins, medications, binoculars, charging cables, a tablet, notebook, burner phone, a silenced Sig .22 Mosquito and spare magazines, a Colt Gold Cup 1911 with extra magazines, knife sharpener, a sling-shot, fire starter, a Puma White-Hunter knife, a fishing kit inside a Prince Albert tobacco tin, a thumb-drive with all my important documents, a few freeze-dried meals, and a ziplock baggy of M-80 fire crackers. I will admit that I began carrying these items well before I ever thought I would become a liberal but old habits die hard.

 

Day 108, My Liberal Diary
Dammit! If I could just find one special interest group to belong to, I'd feel, well "Special". The white supremacists didn't like my floral sheets but the gay folks tried to buy them, the neo-nazis were definately out because with my banged up knee, I just couldn't get that goose-step down, the Black Panthers said, well never mind what they said....the religious right took offense at my mathematical dimension and ballast calculations to Noah's ark, the Jehovah Witnesses thought that I might better apply my skills with telemarketing. Acorn didn't agree with my ideas of organizing communities to take over Mall Santa operations. I offered to spy on the ACLU for the CIA and they told me to GFMS. I've been married to a Jew and a Catholic but neither one of them thought I might fit into any ceremony that involved wine, fire, and speaking in any dialect other than Southern. And while I'm on this subject, why do those African-American folks want to confuse me so? Are they African or American? Do their lives matter too or is it just the black ones?

 

Day 109, My Liberal Diary
I went to Butch Cassidy's tonight to listen to some friends play music and got introduced as a "Celebrity" to the entire place because apparently a lot of folks are reading my misadventures into liberalism. This was probably the high point of my day, or would have been if they'd passed the hat around for a little sharing of the wealth, I am a little behind on my mortgage payments and do not seem to be having much luck with these entitlements that first attracted me to the Liberal side. As it is though, I probably wouldn't have gone there if I had been injured this morning by the angry redneck republican at work that got mad at me because I had chained the torches he wanted to take to the electrical conduits in our shop. He was really ill-tempered because I refused to let him take the torches that I set up for the shop, telling him there were other sets available so go get one of them. He kept shouting and getting madder so I offered to go get a set for him if he was too damned lazy to do it himself. This just made him even madder so I called him a son of a bitch and told him if he wanted a piece of me it was right here for the taking and I think he got the message because he went a got the other torches. My point isn't that I intended to be a bad-ass, quite the contrary; I offered to get him a set of torches rather than letting him take the ones that I had worked to put together for a project that I was working on. He just felt he was entitled to them. This probably doesn't sound very liberal, but I wasn't about to let him take my torches and when he started getting personal about it, well that just tripped my trigger and I wanted it to escalate to violence because, sometime violence is the most effective means of communicating with brain-dead lazy bastards. It always amazes me, just how fast a loud-mouthed whining nasty-tempered bully changes their attitude when you get right in their face with 210 pounds of ready to whip your sorry ass, damn the consequence.There is such a great difference in being a nasty shit with 1s and 0s on the internet and getting into someones face with the absolute willingness to be injured while inflicting damage to their actual physical being.I realize that as a Liberal, I am supposed to rely on being snarky and litigation as my primary means of defense, but I didn't have the benefits of schools that would send you home for fighting, we just got paddled. I always have a gun and a knife or two with me but the thought of shooting him never crossed my mind the way that most of us liberals think it should. No, I just wanted to get physical. I will argue and debate all day, as long as it remains on a professional level but when it gets personal, then we'll fight and I don't mean in a court room though it may well end up there after you get out of the hospital. I know that eventually, as my Liberalism evolves, I will probably start sending nasty emails instead of punching assholes in the nose then rely on my gay homosexual lawyer to sue, but I just can't seem to master snarky or saying anything that I am not prepared to defend with my life.

 

Day 110, My Liberal Diary
About 10,500 years ago, some damned Paleo Republican killed the very last North American elephant, the mastodon, and no doubt had a big fund raising dinner. He probably used a high-capacity razor sharp stone pointed assault spear. There have been no native elephants in North America since, unless you count the stupid mascot for that Alabama baseball team or whatever it is. If this vile deed had never happened, the entire lyrics to Home on the Range might have been quite different. Asia still has elephants, so does Africa, but here in America, greed and hunger wiped them out. They could have domesticated them, had huge corporate mastodon farms, franchised elephant burger drive-ins, but Grog wanted to impress his buddies, "Ya'll come on over for dinner. I done killed me the very last mastadon in Mobile County!"
There apparently were not many Liberals around then or huge roving bands of lesbians dressed in vagina suits with Save the mammoth banners would have surrounded Grog and his village, bearded Paleo homos would have sat cross-legged in the road in their plaid flannel lumberjack shirts, beating drums and chanting "Mastodons have rights too!" There wouldn't have been many colored folks there because they hadn't migrated from Africa yet and wouldn't for several centuries because they had their own elephants. Novelty shops would be selling fake rubber elephant poop. Western movies would have been as entertaining as the old Tarzan movies when herds of angry mastodons stampeded through Dodge City, trampling the Earp Brothers as they tried to escape through the OK corral. My point is that man has been responsible for wiping out entire species here on earth since we got here. We did away with the carrier pigeon, dodo birds, free roaming buffalo, hundreds of entire species of animals, yet we still have mosquitoes, fleas, roaches, and Republicans. You think we'd use a little better judgement when it comes to eradicating a species.

 

Day 111, My Liberal Diary
Did I ever mention Beech Bluff? I lived near there from the time I was 12 years old until I was 18. I don't know why they called it that, there was one small hill but it was mostly river bottom land, flat as a pancake and I do not recall ever having seen a bluff. there The Forked Deer River used to have paddle-wheel boats transit it but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers turned it into a forty-feet wide, straight ditch that wasn't really navigable by much of anything bigger than a canoe. There was a cotton mill there, Fowlers Store, a post office, a methodist church and for a while, a gun shop, . Oh, there was a school there too. I graduated High School there, so did my father. It wasn't just a high school, it was a general public school, grades kindergarten through High School. I think there was maybe 300 or so students, we had 26 in my graduating class in 1974.
Life was different then. I won a large hunting knife for selling advertisements in our yearbook to local merchants and it was presented to me by the principal. I did not really have any close friends during the six years that I lived there and I never dated any of the girls there, even though some of them were down right pretty. We didn't have a football team but we had sort of a basketball team and I played on it but I do not recall ever actually winning a game. It was fun but winning just didn't seem that important. My favorite teacher and mentor was a cantankerous old man named David Crossno. Everybody called him "the Bird" behind his back but I don't remember why. I had decided to study agriculture. I always wanted to be a farmer and had dreams of someday, buying back the beautiful farm on the creek that my grandfather had owned. It's a subdivision now, I think. The Bird taught me how to judge a cow, a pig, chickens, how to make rope halters for cows, how to identify pretty much every seed grown in our temperate climate, land measurement and surveying, how to cut a rafter or stick-weld steel into functional objects, and Roberts Rules of Order. We won state wide competitions in all of these skills on a regular basis. I also had an interest in math and history so I had three majors. My first year algebra teacher, Katie Strickland, was put in prison as a mass murderer, having done in most of her family for insurance money.
During my freshman year in high school, the Federal government mandated forced racial integration of public schools. Beech Bluff School was integrated with West High School, a colored school. We didn't know what to expect, not having been around very many colored people except during the summer while working alongside them on a farm, harvesting beans or strawberries. Mr. Crossno was the only teacher that I had with the fortitude to insist that each and every one of his students would complete their studies with a total understanding of not only the subject but the rational behind the subject. You would understand not only why things worked but how they worked together, whether it was an internal combustion engine or Parlimentary Proceedure. He had too much honor to condescend or bow to lowering his standards to meet some kind of funding quota; if you took one of his classes, you were going to learn or leave, simple as that. He was not a likable person but I truly respected his directness. I don't think I wasted my time playing basketball during my senior year. I was working nights at a grocery in Jackson and playing guitar in a honk-tonk band on the weekends. I did still manage to graduate with honors, had a 4.0 grade average and was told that I would have been Valedictorian if I had actually attended enough days but that was a complicated time in my young life and I was well ahead of the grading curve so I didn't bother to attend as much as I probably should have. My family was having some difficulties, so my plans for college were based of the GI Bill. I did attend graduation, I was hoping my father would give me the gold Hamilton wrist watch that my grandfather had given him when he graduated but he didn't. He gave me a hand shake and asked me what I was planning to do so I joined the army and volunteered to go shoot little brown people in South East Asia but that was winding down in 1974 and I had a bad case of psoriasis and all I got was a bus ticket home and a 4-F Draft rating. When I got off the bus in Jackson, I had no idea what I was going to do. Paul Dougy, a bassist friend in a local band, picked me up and we had some beers and he asked me what I was going to do now and I said, "Probably something pretty stupid." and I did; I mistook some really great sex for love and got married. I never saw Mr. Crossno again, I think he moved to Florida and would be somewhere around 130 years old now, but probably has a great tan.
Now Jump ahead 43 years and I find myself sitting in Mobile, Alabama remembering David Crossno and realizing that he must have been an Oracle. He was convinced that small events like dropping Civics from the curriculum and subsidizing a particulate of the population would eventually allow well meaning people without any understanding of how our country operated as a Constitutional Republic to convince every one that we lived in a Democracy and in a Democracy 51% of the populate can deny 49% of the people their rights, opinions, choices, and possessions. He predicted that the small American farm would be eradicated, much like the mastodon, and the bonds of rural community would be destroyed because we would buy all our foods from processing plants owned by giant corporate farms, genetically modified foods that would be laced with chemicals to expand their size and production so that those of us that lived and worked on small fartms would have to migrate to urban areas to work in chemical plants rather then spending time alongside our brothers and sisters tilling the ground to grow food for ourselves and our neighbors. He predicted that machines would replace money with biometric cards keeping tabs on how much or little money you had, thus preventing you from being able to dig up your emergency stash and pay for something without the over-watching government knowing about it and collecting their portion of it to pay for those subsidies. He said the last war fought for Freedom was when 10 States succeeded from the over-powering corporate government in the name of States rights back in 1860 and were quashed and labeled traitors with history being re-written to make it all about a warm and fuzzy ideologue such as freeing our fellow man from indentured servitude yet retaining the right to imprison them to work as slaves for punishment or conscript them to fight in wars against people because Exxon wanted their oil and all the while, using mass-media to convince us that was fighting for Freedom and Patriotism. He predicted that giant corporations would spend billions of dollars lobbying our elected representatives to pass laws to grant them favoritism in the auspice of public good because a portion of those billions would be spent building highways across once family owned farms so people could get to work at their chemical plants and building dams on land that had supported families and communities for generations to make electricity to put street lights up alongside those highways and run their factories. Mr. Crossno was convinced that we would all be under a giant surveillance net by the government to insure we didn't break any dangerous traffic laws or grow an allotment of soy beans that might effect the prices of those produced by Monsanto. He spoke about money no longer having any value other than the fiat value assigned by the owners, our new masters in the slave trade. He predicted that laws enforcing political correctness would prevent the few of us that stood up against the encroachment ot totalitarianism would be struck down by overwhelming public outrage. He predicted the slow painful death of traditional family and even that homosexuals would emerge from their closets and become a major force in reinventing the traditional family. He predicted that the two political parties were nothing more than different sides of the same coin, totally ittelevant except in that one side wanted socialism and the other wanted totalitarianism. Mr. Crossno thought that allowing women to vote would be almost as bad as allowing socially dependent people to have a sayso in the distribution of wealth. He was fond of Quoting Robert Heinlien,
"... Once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome."
I haven't thought much of Beech Bluff in several decades and barely remember most of my time there but I will always remember Mr. David A. "The Bird" Crossno; it was he that predicted that our Democratic Party would become the bastion of Liberalism that we have today and I can thank him for my recent conversion. If you can't beat them, join them.

 

Day 112, My Liberal Diary
I am sitting outside under my patio awning, listening the rain fall and a couple of frogs peeping from the koi pond. I am enjoying a Cuban cigar that a boat captain gave to me, dipping it in sour mash whiskey that just escaped an oak barrel after 12 years. I don't usually smoke but once in a while a really good cigar is a wonderful way to relax. There is a nest of wrens in the hanging flower pot beside me. We have watched them build their nest, lay and hatch five eggs and now they are engaged around the clock, one guarding the nest and the other fetching bugs, worms, and whatever else they think will feed their little family.The rain doesn't stop them from their tasks, their family is the central focus of their agenda at this point in time and I spent a good part of the day reminiscing times when that was how life was spent with us all. We kept bandaides handy because we knew our children would get cuts and scrapes, even a broken arm or leg once in a while because being a child had risks but those risks were about learning and about surviving to become something useful to your progeny. Now children are created, sent to day-care, pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, school, college and both parents spend all their time trying to provide as best they can but never really having any quality time to spend with the human being that they have created. Television, Jim Henson, and institutionalized education will have a greater influence on what they will become and people wonder why so many of them end up shooting their class mates?
My father gave me my first rifle when I was four years old. It was a single-shot.22 Stevens rifle, shortened for my size. He kept the bolt, the component that allowed it to be fired, locked in his automobile glove box until Friday afternoons, when he would come home from work with a box of ammunition and we would go shoot tin cans in a ditch. I waited for him to come home on Fridays because it was the time I got to spend with the man that could do anything but he chose to do this with me. Firearms safety was instilled in us at the earliest age and 61 years later, I have still never been tempted to shoot anyone that didn't present themselves as a direct threat to my life and had no other reasonable alternatives. As a liberal, you might think that is the exception, rather than the rule but you would be mistaken. I grew up as part of the gun culture, firearms were for protecting your life and home, but also for feeding your family and most of all, for providing friendly recreational time with a touch of competitive spirit between family and friends. A new rifle or shotgun added to the family, was a reason to invite friends over to shoot clay pigeons or tin cans, make some home-made ice cream or cut a water melon. The topic of shooting up a school or business never was even considered. Accidents were very rare because we had all been taught that a firearm was a deadly tool that could cause grievous injury, death or destruction, if used improperly. There were never any exceptions made that would allow anyone present to violate those rules. If you pointed a gun at something, you had to be prepared to destroy it and deal with the consequence, whether it was dinner, paying a wager, or a funeral.
As a liberal, people would expect that I should be in favor of more stringent gun control laws but sorry about that, will not happen. I am in favor of teaching people to respect one another or suffer the consequence.

 

Day 113, My Liberal Diary
OMG! Bill Mahr, a true Liberal Icon is a House Nigger! I am so glad that thousands of people expressed their outrage on Twitter and demanded that racist bastard turn in his HNIC (Honorary Negro Inductee Card). Next thing you know, he'll do a Kathy Griffith on Maxcine Waters and hold her bleeding head up on national television. Everyrbody knows he should have proclaimed himself a "House N-word," just who does he think he is that he could use such a derogatory word to describe himself? As a Liberal, he should know that people are too ignorant to understand sarcasm or satire. Many are demanding that he be fired for being a closet racist, fist bumping African-Americans and pretending to be one of the crew, but firing isn't enough. I think we should drag him outside, strip him down to expose his little naked white-boy wiener and tar and feather the racist bastard then Lynch him from the nearest Freedom bush.

 

Day 114, My Liberal Diary
My Australian friend, the one that convinced me to become a Liberal by offering to knit me my very own pussy hat from his pink Australian sheeps, scored better on the American citizenship test than I did. I haven't taken the Australian test yet so I don't know if I'd fit in with the wampuses and kangaroos or not but I do have two pair of really nice cowboy boots made from a kangaroo. I have a friend that wants to come remove five raccoons from her cat herd. Apparently the raccoons are eating most of the food and the cats are bitching about it: must be liberals. I just looked up wampus and I think I might be mistaken about that critter, I could have meant wombat.
My sister in law and the Admiral are visiting my crazy mother in law this week and somehow, we got stuck with feeding them some of our catfishes. We were going to do this yesterday, a day that I was off work but they were too tired from sitting around all day drinking wine and watching television so they decided we would do it tonight after I spent ten hours out in the hot sunshine, welding a barge. It is that kind of consideration that makes me such a warm and fuzzy family member. They sort of invited themselves when I mentioned that I had just put 25 more lbs of catfish in the freezer. I might get lucky and one them could choke on a bone? As a Liberal, it is my understanding that I should wait on Obama-care's primary physician to approve treatment before administering the Heimlich maneuver and that could take some time here in rural South Alabama!

 

Day 115, My Liberal Diary
The Smith family re-onion is about to convene at Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee. Yeah, I know it's supposed to be reunion but re-onion sounds more appropriate for this painful event. I've never been to a Smith Family reunion, that's my wife, the Republican's family. My family stopped having annual reunions a few decades ago when we realized that we really didn't know most of the folks that showed up and didn't like most of the ones that we did know. I do not get invited to Christmas, Thanks Giving, Halloween, and such, barely manage an invitation to funerals. Her sister and the Admiral are on their way there. Her Father put a caveat on his attendance, that the Admiral has to leave his gun at home, though I am not sure how he plans to verify this. Last years re-onion ended badly with the Admiral threatening to shoot him. I am sure there was ample justification for that; I have met her father and can certainly understand why someone would be tempted to shoot him. Did I mention that I am not the favorite son in law? Or at least I wasn't until Jimi's sister married the Admiral, who happens to be about the same age as her father. Now, by process of elimination, I suppose that I either am the favorite son in law or possibly (probably) that category has been eliminated altogether.

 

Day 116, My Liberal Diary
Saw in the MSM headlines today "Trump Fires Back"? It didn't say what Back had done to get fired, probably consorting with Liberals or Russians. I am sort of confused about this Russian thing anyway. Are they for or against Trump? I thought they were communists, aren't Liberals Communists? Are communists and socialists different or are they sort of like Republicans and Democrats? Andrew Jackson got called a Jackass and that is how the Democratic Party got the jackass as a mascot or symbol. You'd think that if Trump is a Jackass, he'd be a Democrat. If Trump is a Democrat, then we have usurped the Republicans again and actually are in charge.