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Carrying Hot Air to Tucson


If you owned a real estate company, would you want the medium for your message to be a bag of hot air?  Or a contraption over which you had almost no control?  That what goes up must come down?  I phoned Mari, because she was home entertaining Jao, to look up into the sky.  But it soon became evident that the hot air balloon was coming down near Sweetwater and Silverbell.  Principal and interest:  it all came down.


It is not only real estate that goes up and then comes thumping down.  Consider the program to buy unwanted guns from people and then destroy them.  We tried that here in Tucson.  Just over 200 people turned in guns they did not want in their homes, and each was given a $50. Safeway gift card to buy groceries. Gun advocates howled--about twenty-five of them according to reports, and the legislature passed a law making it illegal for the police to destroy the guns.  The guns have to go back into the market, except maybe for sawed-off shotguns or other illegal weapons.  You could hear the trial balloon thudding back to earth.



I do not know what it is about hot air balloons that causes me to think about politicians.  But since we are already there, how about all those budget cutters who are insisting that the Army ought to have more Abrams tanks, even though the Army says, "Please don't do that!".  

 Then there are all those hawks who have filled the hot air balloons with speeches, and said that they now see clearly that Syria has weapons of mass destruction, just like Iraq did the last time they sailed high, and that our only option is to go to war.  And maybe take out Iran, too.  People who ride balloons do not learn from experience.  
Who patches those gas bags?  Balloons, I mean.  You cannot always land in a patch of gravel. I watched the crew drag the balloon out of the bushes and out into the open.  Daniel backed into a prickly pear once, and I--more than once--have bent over too near an agave.  I still hurt.  Dan is still pulling stickers.  I do not understand why all balloons are not covered with inner tube patches, or Band-Aids.  There are grassy fields in Iowa, but people in Iowa skip the balloons, and hold Presidential debates, instead.  

 "Sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Something like floating free in a balloon basket.  Thunk!
















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