Skip to main content

Getting the Hang of It

After twelve years, I traded in my trusty pickup
for a newer, used pickup. (I missed making payments!)
When we first moved to this address, I bought a used mower.
After three years, it was time for a less tired, used mower.

The first week I had the newer pickup, a kind lady
backed into it, resulting in a new left door, and things.
The first time I used my fine, newer, used mower,
I nudged it up toward a power pole and smashed
the lower part of the front part of the whateveritis.

It wasn't really my fault. I was not used to the foot pedals.
The mower rather just leaped forward toward the pole.
The kind lady who backed into my pickup agreed.
"Those kinds of things happen," she said,
"when you are not paying attention to the real world."

I am willing to pay attention to the real world,
but there seems to be less and less of it.
You know: Obama is a foreign-born fascist communist;
Sarah Palin is a fighter, not a quitter; She thinks about things;
We have the best health care system in the whole world;
Newt Gingrich is offering advice on ethics; Socialistic
fire departments, police departments, Medicare, Medicaid,
military services, Social Security, highway systems,
public schools, State Universities, NASA, public libraries,
are really very evil enterprises, but on the other hand,
monstrous bonuses, insurance companies, banks,
financial investment schemes, and Bernie Madoff
are very good for us because they are private enterprises.

I decided that the problem just might be scale;
that I should pay more attention to the socialistic light pole
in my yard, and my used private enterprise mower,
so I fabricated a front bumper to save myself from myself.
It is a thing of beauty and a joy for a while.

That's a real-world problem!
Congress can deal with health care.
They are good at big-picture things
such as preserving insurance companies
and banks and big bonuses.

My new bumper cost me $20.
The bank gave me a loan;
complimented me for my free enterprise.

I am getting the hang of the real world.
.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more