I awoke about an hour ago, around 0230. J is at work, moving stock from the delivery truck and the stock room to the shelves. The holiday overnights should end soon, maybe another two weeks.

I am watching a freight train go through Ashland. Spotting a train is like catching a fish. I sit and wait and see what happens.

I made the mistake of reading a Reddit thread from someone who possessed more opinions than facts. There are a lot of people like this person, myself included. Like Montaigne, I will now write about the one person I do know. Me. Gets a little tedious, reading opinions from gas bags who castigate people they don’t like as “bloviators”. Jesus spoke about people who call out others for having specks in their eyes, while they possess logs in theirs. Yeah, some things never change.

I guess the internet serves as a huge safety valve. It allows people to fulminate about some public figure or another, without resorting to messy assassinations. Maybe Oswald would have remained a harmless loser, had he possessed a Facebook© page rather than a Mannlicher Carcano rifle with a telescopic sight.

Most of us, though, go through life with a large assemblage of hunches or intuitive feelings that the whole story on any subject, issue , or person is never fully revealed or disclosed. It’s similar to that subliminal sense of danger that keeps a good soldier alive. We know things are incompletely revealed. We know we are being told stories. We sense when we are getting “spin” around a person or situation or legislative proposal. That’s why politics reads like a melodrama most of the time.

Powerful people want to hold on to the power that they have, whether that power is money, political influence or marketable charisma. Getting the news that the days of power are over is most unwelcome. Like the alcoholic, who is the last person to comprehend his alcoholism, the “has- been” is always the last person to know the glory days are gone. It’s what makes those commercials Joe Namath does for Medicare Advantage plans so agonizingly cringe-worthy.

(Joe, the game is over! Half the people watching you don’t know or remember who you were.)

Sic transit gloria mundi.