Last night I went to bed before midnight. I did my “personal hygiene chores”, as my autistic friend Scooter calls showering and brushing one’s teeth. I put a Seinfeld DVD in the machine, the voices and stories lull me to sleep most nights . I was really too wired to sleep and I had slept most of that day anyway. Retirement has done that. I sleep when I feel like sleeping. It is a deleterious habit and one I hope to break, but I can tell you it won’t be any time soon.

I awoke around 0315 this morning. I did not easily fall back to sleep, to which this blog post testifies. The trains grabbed my attention and, by accident, I started reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy in my Kindle. It struck a few common chords. Both his family and mine are “hillbillies”, his from Kentucky, mine from Tennessee. I will post more about this common thread as I delve more deeply into his story. I will say this. That there are sizable numbers of poor people in this country who happen to be white, who are afflicted with similar, if not the same, problems as Blacks and Latinos. This inconvenient truth does much to discredit Critical Race Theory. So I’m suggesting we listen to other voices in the current domestic debacle playing out before us.

What I do want to say is that American propaganda dictates our perception of our current crop of seemingly intractable problems. We are told what to think about everything, from COVID-19, to economic policy, to foreign/military policy, to race issues. Today the traditional media outlets, the pawns of the public relations industry, are losing their power to control the stories and what to think about them.

Now I’m tiring again. Drinking chamomile tea, as opposed to coffee, has assisted in stoking the fires of Morpheus. There are other things I want to talk about. For example, American Myths, not in the bastardised sense of that word, that equates myth with falsehood, rather than with deep and profound truths. Think Joseph Campbell.

I’m really just too tired to say anything more.

It is Uncle Wally’s birthday, as well as Dr. B’s. Both these men were profound influences on my life. I think of Uncle Wally and his cigars and the old-fashions my cousin Kenny would fix with a hunk of cheddar cheese in it. I think of Dr. B and his laugh and his obsession with pornographic novels. He would give me a lawn and leaf trash bag, filled with them. It finally occurred to somebody in his family that this wasn’t healthy, and they gave him some pills to deal with the obsessive/compulsive behaviour. He died not long afterward.

Uncle Wally was also a man of his appetites, whiskey, cigars, and, at one time, politics. He was big into Republican politics, even ran for Congress way long ago. He was an attorney and he told me lawyers were “parasites”, because they don’t create anything original or new. He was right. His own father, my grandfather, could build a house with the knowledge in his head and hands.

Yesterday, for the first time since the pandemic, I ironed some shirts and trousers, even a couple of bandannas. By the end, I was hot and sweaty and tired, but also deeply proud of those starched shirts and the creases I ironed into those trousers. It was after midnight when I finished. I used up an entire can of spray starch.

Before I went to bed, I showered and shaved around my beard, then trimmed my beard back a little, so I would look more “presentable”, as my Mother would say.

Mother had a birthday too, on 6 July. She was 102, although she’s been dead since 1995. She was the High Priestess of Crazy in my family, chronically depressed. I absorbed her depression, like a sponge takes in water.And I would drink alcohol, so I could soak up more.

Finally, on 10 July, 1994, I quit drinking. A new world opened up for me. It took me years to face my obsessions, all of them little reservoirs where pain was stored. Porn, as with Dr B, was big for me. These little distilled experiences , penned by authors, who could turn words into tumescence.

Now I read “erotica” where the longing turns into mental pictures and poems, where the characters want to connect, and share a life , if only in the moment of a fuck.

Dawn is here , another day of heat and sweat, with water to replace it.. I haven’t slept long enough. I will sleep some more. I will hope for a day where I wear my starched clothes and look powerful, with gravitas, filling the clothes with every inhalation into my lungs.

Bedtime, y’all.

I need some sleep. I can tell because my thoughts are growing darker.

Work From Home.

Not for accounting, analytics,, Human Resources, but War.

Some “soldier” could sit in their chair, joystick in hard, and direct a drone wherever their superiors in the military bureaucracies direct their pawns. Maybe it’s a village in Yemen or Syria, southern Lebanon, Chechnya, Ukraine, India. Maybe Texas or California will be targets in a balkanized United States, where one state will drone-strike another.

It’s not just the USA that has drones. Pick a nation, you can bet they have them. The living room will be the new trench. Gender is irrelevant. Moral discernment is an annoyance.

We won’t know the madness we have wrought til it’s too late.

“Did you go to college to get stupid?”- Santino (Sonny) Corleone

It’s a little thought I need to develop.

We don’t have “foreign policy”. We have the dark dreams and needs and wants of powerful people, who feed those dreams and thoughts to the poets and propagandists they control.

They, in turn, give us reasons to perpetrate the unthinkable on innocent people, then craft stories to dramatise the “heroism”.

Fucked up? You bet it is. Go to any military cemetery and see their handiwork.

Oh and this,

Do Not Trust The Other Side.

They’re simply playing the same game from another place at the same table.

So it is almost 10:30 PM. I am tired. I feel as if I need to say something.

The hearing aids are easily becoming an unnoticeable, though necessary addition to my life.

There is drama around my son’s injury.He doesn’t believe he had a seizure, merely a fainting event due to exertion at the high altitude of Denver. His wife insists he did have a seizure and is adamant about him not driving for six months, as the law stipulates.

She has now moved out their home. It’s a mess.

I went swimming tonight. Thank Heaven.

I’m tired. I need to sleep,

That’s all.

I need to drop the car off for its annual inspection.

I watched my neighbours leave for work.

With the hearing aids, I can hear the birds with clarity.

The lawn mowing guys are here. I’ll be inside pretty soon.

Today my elder son is 45.

Today was Hearing Evaluation v.2.0. I showed up at the other place. The Hearing Guy was not wearing a cheesy white lab coat , appearing to look like a medical doctor to the naïve. I fill out paper work. He checks for wax and/or blockages in the ear canals with an otoscope. I’m clear. Then I sit in the isolation room while he runs a series of tones and words and sounds in one ear or the other.

He’s done. He shows me the graphs of what I hear at what range in the auditory spectrum. I guess my Mother was right about the volume on those Jimi Hendrix albums after all. She is now singing along with the Heavenly Chorus in its evergreen classic, “I told you so!”

Moving on, he shows me an appliance. I like it. I buy it. Price? Let’s just say that the hearing aids cost less than a semester’s tuition at most universities, way less. Or a new motor vehicle.

He shows me how to put them in. It takes a while to get the knack. But I go out the door with hearing aids. And I hear what I have been missing.

I wait for the two year old who lives next door to get home. And I can hear him more clearly. I can hear birds singing. I haven’t checked to see if I can hear a cosmetic puff land on the green baize of a pool table, but I’ll bet I can.

Verdict? Worth it.

Do not put off a hearing evaluation if your husband, wife, spouse, child, or even your worst enemy suggests it. Just get the evaluation. If the evaluation says a hearing aid would be beneficial get a hearing aid 🦻

End of Discussion.

People have been telling me to undergo a hearing evaluation since I don’t remember. Hearing Loss runs in the family. So I got a mailing the other day offering a $20 Gift Card at Walmart if I underwent a hearing evaluation, a thirty day return policy and $1000 off the price of two of this company’s hearing instruments.

I call them up. Somebody in God-Only-Knows-Where answers the phone, schedules me for 14June at 15:15hrs (3:15PM). Cool. Later I get a text telling me to show up 15 minutes early to do the paperwork.

“Oh, your wife has to show up too, so we can see if you’re really just ignoring her and aren’t deaf after all.” They don’t say that but they should. One gets the same instruction (bring your spouse) if somebody wants to sell you a time share. Maybe they should bundle the two Time Share & Hearing Aid.

We show up, keeping in mind J has to be at work in two hours. The Hearing Instrument Guy is with another customer/victim. From what I can gather, she is a woman older than dirt, who arrived late and Hearing Instrument Guy begs our pardon and says he’ll be right with us. Only he isn’t. He’s still with the other person/victim.

The receptionist gives me forms, the last question says something to the effect. “Is there any reason why you wouldn’t buy a hearing aid today if we showed you needed one?”

The answer “Because you’re an asshole.” is not on the answer sheet. I’m sensing trouble, an ambush.

Meanwhile the receptionist is trying to confirm if there’s coverage for the hearing aid on the current victim’s health insurance. Not surprisingly, she can’t get a straight answer from the Medicare Supplement Insurer, as if this HUGE provider of hearing aids wouldn’t know this. The other lady’s appointment drags on.

We declare we can’t wait and reschedule. I’m thinking “No way am I going into this snake pit a second time.” I will call up and cancel this appointment, never to darken this door way again. Sadly I’ve passed on the opportunity to get a $20 Gift Card at Walmart.

Later, I schedule an evaluation with another vendor of hearing appliances. I feel slightly more confident. But I don’t know why. This company sold my late aunt her hearing aids and everyone else in the family swore they didn’t do her any good.

Oh well,

I’m a trainspotter, as my regular readers know. Today I was watching the North / South CSX double tracked line that passes through Ashland, Virginia. (YouTube virtual rail fan llc/ Ashland Va)

Passing Northbound was a train hauling empty coal cars, while a Southbound freight was hauling coal cars full of coal. The coal was either headed to coal-fired American power plants or the coal was bound for export, most likely to The People’s Republic of China. The Chinese burn coal, plenty of it.

Mistakenly, we think all that BTU-rich fossil fuel is staying in the ground, thanks to this Administration’s commitment to slowing the rate of climate change. Well it ain’t. Jen Psaki can read some release explaining why this load of coal is headed down the tracks, ultimately to vex the asthmatics of Beijing. The Climate Change True Believers will accept whatever is said.

But a big-ass train pulling coal tells me that whatever is said in the White House Media Center is just so much fluff, clouds of it, or more likely smoke.

Cognitive Dissonance. That’s the phrase the brain washers use when their lies conflict with the truth, except they want us to believe that the False is True. But I see that train a’comin’, and it’s hauling coal. Somebody(ies) is (/are) making a bundle of money off this. And those somebodies don’t care which man with the bad comb-over has his keester parked in the Oval Office.

It’s a bitch to admit that all this idealistic verbiage coming from The Progressive Democrats are prevarications, but they are. Kind of like Vietnam. We were winning,remember? All that was needed for “victory” were a few thousand more troops and a few billion more dollars. What they didn’t tell you were the billions of dollars went to defence contractors who were Lyndon Johnson’s buddies and campaign contributors.

You didn’t learn that in school. I wonder why.