We like to think our interest in politics, public health, and other current events is part of our civic duty to stay informed, so we can make decisions at the ballot box that conform with the pertinent facts. We are making a prudent decision, we think.

So we watch the “news”. We like to think that the producers of broadcast, cable cast and web cast journalism deliver content that meets our expectations and demands for accurate and factual reporting.

Think again. Electronic journalism, like print journalism, is a business. The producers sell advertising time (commercials) in order to pay the bills and, hopefully, turn a profit, just as every other vendor you employ, seeks to accomplish.

News is basically show business. Your eyeballs on your TV are what determine what your network can charge their advertisers to show the advertisers’ commercials, whether it’s Coca-Cola or My Pillow products.

If Bozo The Clown read the news and pulled in viewers, we’d be watching Bozo every night at 8:00 PM. That’s it. Any talk about allegiance to the truth or presenting the facts is just hyperbole.

These are the ground rules we don’t like to think about. This is not to say that any particular journalist of whatever perspective lacks integrity. We should be able to discern a perspective or a bias in any news presentation.

But the point is that whomever we’re watching or reading is there to sell air time or column inches of print media advertising space.

It sucks that these are the facts of journalism life. If Clark Kent wasn’t bringing readers to The Daily Planet, Superman would have had to find a new cover.

End of rant.

Those two things are the basics and they’re interconnected. Tractors use fossil fuels to operate. Tractors till the soil, plant the seeds, and combines, powered by fossil fuels, harvest the grain, so we have bread for our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

And we have a national governmental leadership that tends to ignore the basic fundamentals that our society depends upon. If one wants turmoil at the most basic level, have large numbers of hungry people. We’ve forgotten the bread riots of Petrograd in 1917, that catalysed the rise of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

We spend vast amounts of money on defence that “defend” ever emptying granaries. One can’t help but wonder if this is by design. The next question that follows is this;

“Is America worth conquering?”

On the way to getting my cataracts removed, the ophthalmologist discovered I have glaucoma. So I’m now using a beta-blocker eye drop, called timolol. Yesterday was my first day with this drug. All I wanted to do was sleep and I didn’t care whether I went blind or not. Hopefully, it gets better.

I had no interest in completing what few cleaning tasks I bother to do, as a pistachio hull stared defiantly at me from the carpet.

I suppose I’m actually healthy. Despair is a sign of metanoia. Knowing the world is mad isn’t supposed to make you happy. And here we are, with the killing business expanding into Sudan. Has CNN and The New York Times decided, or been told, who The Good Guys and The Bad Guys are in this dust up? Who is catering which side with the requisite armaments?

Does G-D own stock in Raytheon or Lockheed-Martin?

NSFW. Sort of naughty, but I’ve read naughtier things in the blogosphere

I pretended to be asleep, but with one eye, barely opened a slit, watched her leave the bed, pad to the bathroom, sit on the toilet and piss. A swipe of tissue across her twat, then off to the shower.She adjusted the shower controls and the water cascaded over her. Her back was to me. As I gazed at her arse, all plump and round and pretty pink, my cock swelled, affirming my appreciation, no, lust.

Turning around, I had a full view of her tits, focusing on her aureoles and nipples. I was eager to end the feigned sleep of my masquerade, but watching her was an intimacy unto itself. She would return to the bedroom soon enough,wiggle into her jeans and put on a blue Tee-shirt with Minnie Mouse on the front. She didn’t bother with knickers or a bra. That was fine with me, but peeling those jeans off would be a labour unto itself. I will savour that arse in all its denim glory.

When I throw over the sheet and comforter, she saw my erection, smiled quickly

“Morning wood, I see.”

“What can I say? He’s a connoisseur,”

Somehow, it’s all supposed to make sense.

Sex is for the long game. The passion brings babies and the babies grow up.

They discover passion and sex and babies. Those babies are your grandchildren

whom you hold and hug and listen to. Their dreams are now your dreams.

Cycles, you know.

This lobby is kind of plain, in a world that’s always been plain. Until thirty years ago, I would visit doctors or dentists at the Lee Medical Building, that was brick and had little Art Deco touches in the light switches, and door handles . Every office entry door was translucent glass, with the exception of the podiatrist on the first floor. Mother called him her “toe nail cutting man”. She was diabetic, so she needed this level of care.

The Lee Medical Building was named for Robert E. Lee, whose monument stood outside in a traffic rotary. It stood there over a century until a spineless governor engineered its removal through the General Assembly. This same governor was photographed in both blackface and Ku Klux Klan regalia in his misspent but privileged youth. He was joking, but we proletarian shit kickers wouldn’t understand his sense of humour. The Marxists and the African-American haute bourgeois power elite found the Confederate monuments offensive after everyone else just considered them works of art. They wanted them gone. So now they’re gone.

But I digress.

Today I was sitting in a medical office building lobby. Outside is a giant parking lot, paved with asphalt. No Monuments loom outside to offend whatever sensibilities our brutalist culture has yet to destroy.

I sit and wait while my wife has her urologist’s appointment.Through the lobby comes a procession of the sick and their accompanying family members. Some infirm and elderly rich have an aide to help them. Some infirm and elderly people have no one. And they get confused about appointment times and locations. The healthy, more or less, go up for a venous stick and a blood draw. They emerge with a circle of blue stretch tape at the elbow. Children and their mothers go to the dentist. A frail elderly woman, grasping her health aide’s arm as if for dear life, goes to the pharmacy.

All in all, this sitting and watching is a humbling experience. I am healthy, lucid and coherent, unlike the folks I observe. My wife eventually returns from her doctor’s appointment.

We go to lunch at a luncheon space in a fancy furniture store, where the haute bourgeois of all races, creeds, sexes, sexual orientations and genders buy their overpriced furniture. Their children, grandchildren, cats and/or dogs must not mess up white fabric furniture. These consumers must not need, or avoid, clear vinyl slipcovers.

My lunch, an homage to my congenital Southern Whiteness, is a variation of the BLT. It is a sandwich with bacon, a fried green tomato(FGT), and pimento cheese, along with some Bibb lettuce. The sandwich is tasty even though the FGT falls out. A minor inconvenience.

So this day’s foray ends, the anniversary of the Branch Davidian blood bath in Waco , the Columbine massacre, the bombing of the Alfred G. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Oh and one hundred thirty four years ago, Adolf Hitler was born in Linz, Austria.

It used to be that the Sunday newspaper, especially the Sunday New York Times,  was something of a leisurely reading treat.Summer days spent at the shore with the Times (and a Heineken) were particularly decadent. I fancied myself successful as I read Russell Baker or Tom Wicker, attempted the crossword puzzle, or considered the  Women’s Fashions,  as to their appeal and/or good taste.

Then I got sober, divorced, and my drinking friends died. Perspective shifted. The Sunday paper became like orthopedic hosiery to me, unfashionable and unnecessary. Today I looked at the Times   and it seemed totally weird. Because I think the WASP World has changed. The so-called “Country Club Republicans” have been replaced by  Trump supporters. They died out with George Herbert Walker Bush (41).

Like it or not.

I swam a mile today, took me 59’52”, but I swam a mile. I felt righteously tired afterwards, the feeling I have when I do something I’m supposed to do.

Tomorrow, if I wake up in time, I’m going to an Al-anon meeting, because I’m a hot mess around codependency, with R, my elder son. Having an alcoholic in one’s life is a nightmare. I can’t give them their recovery. That recovery is that alcoholic’s responsibility.

Wish me luck.

Why is it that older women who like sex are cougars, but older men with a functioning libido and corresponding anatomy are dirty old men?

Doesn’t seem fair, does it? As an older man who can get it up, both in my head and further down, sexual intimacy is one of the great joys of life. Of course, during the lusting phase, excessive ogling is awkward and embarrassing to both the ogler, and the ogled.

Then again, I suspect women still want to know that they’re wanted, as in hike up their skirt, and pull down their panties wanted.

Everything is supposed to balance out, The husband and wife being equally randy, particularly for each other. But it never has quite worked out that way. King David was married when he got the hots for Bathsheba, and she for him. Her hubby, Uriah the Hittite, ended up with the short end of that stick.

So human behaviour hasn’t changed much since the Late Bronze Age. We now have firearms, electric vibrating dildoes, nuclear weapons, and Pop-tarts. Still cocks still get hard and pussies still get wet.

May it ever be so.

Who wishes that you should be unknown, unremembered? Who else? But a small and puny creature who can seduce a crowd of cowards, but trembles before the valiant, even the memory of the valiant. Fittingly, the valiant have no uses for another Alberich. We take our comfort in knowing this Niebelung will also be vanquished

Their fathers were once heroes, alas, they are mere punks. Old punks, dead punks at that.

The world has plenty of room for tenured fools.