Tongue In Check

In another shameless act of blatant thievery, I am grabbing hold of Joey Polanski’s shtick and running with it:

Twittering

Blogging

Man, it has just seemed like that the words don’t want to come lately.  I have no idea what the problem is. My mind is still sick and twisted, but I feel like I’ve lost the ability to transfer that sickness to paper.

Is anybody elses WordPress blog under attack from spammers? WP uses this Askimet spam catching software that usually catches the stuff, but yesterday, Askimet caught over 200 spam comments pushing all sorts of prescription medicine. Typically I get 3 or 4 a day, but 200 seems a bit much.

Long time readers of this blog probably remember my endless whining about cold weather. When temperatures drop below freezing, which was about 7 months out of the year in Michigan, I immediately go into whine mode and hibernate.  Well, temperatures here in Texas have been hovering right at or above the 100 degree mark for about a month now and there has been no rain, and guess what?

It still beats the hell out of 20 degrees and freezing my ass off.

[Cue Bob Hope's ghost] Hey, how about that recession, ladies and gentlemen? Isn’t it wild? Isn’t it crazy?

I was getting pretty depressed about things the other day because ever since I have been down here working at this company, there has been a constant stream of lay-offs, early retirements, pay-cuts,  hour reduction, etc, etc, etc. Fortunately, so far, I have been spared, but I know that my days are numbered if things keep going the way they are.  Naturally, there’s a huge amount of frustration at what is going on in our government and the fact that nothing seems to be helping the employment situation.

Then I started thinking about the recession of the early 80’s. It’s interesting to me that by all accounts, that has been considered Jimmy Carter’s recession.  In April of 1981, I lost my $15.00 an hour job as a millwright apprentice job working for US Steel.  The unemployment rate at the beginning of that year was 7.5%. By the end of 1981, I had a job making less than $6.00 an hour and the unemployment rate was 8.5%. Ronald Reagan told us in September that there might be a “slight” recession.

By August  of the following year, my daughter Jackie was born and my wife and I wanted so badly to buy a microwave, but we had trouble affording one. I think at the time Anne might have been making $5.00 an hour. Unemployment in America was 9.8%–probably about what it is now. Ronald Reagan, that darling of the conservative movement, had an approval rating of less than 35%.

I can remember seeing Reagan on TV talking about the jobless rates and America’s economic policies. Things went from bad to worse. Everyday brought more bad news. Companies were closing. Companies were laying off people. God, it was an awful mess.

From September of 1982 through June of 1983, unemployment danced around the 10%  mark. Somehow, my wife and I managed to stay employed but I’ll be damned if I can remember how we were so lucky.

Anyway, buried somewhere deep in this rambling missive is a point. Somehow, the recession of the early 80’s was Jimmy Carter’s fault. I guess maybe it was if you consider that economics is usually like a slow train coming and policies made today take a while to take effect. Ronald Reagan spent almost all of his first term trying to fix things and a lot of his policies failed miserably while some worked brilliantly. So I guess my question here is, why is it that some folks expect Obama to have fixed this recession in 6 months?  It ain’t going to happen.

By the way, all those unemployment numbers I mentioned up there are verifiable. You can look them up if you wish.

Anyone want to buy a house in Michigan? If you don’t mind tumbling housing values (down almost 70K from the height of its value), rising unemployment rates (almost 15% now), and 6 months of winter, you’ll love there. God knows I did.

Now for the question of the week.

How many American soldiers died during our long national period of mourning for Michael Jackson?

I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t know.

This woman needs a serious trim:

Robert Strange McNamara

June 9, 1916-July 6, 2009

There’s 50,ooo angry souls waiting for you on the other side.

Bet that just tickles your fancy, don’t it?

For the rest of you…..

She could Red, White, and Blue me any day of the week.

*THUMP*

August 29, 1958-June 25, 2009

….or alternately titled Separated At Birth –Politicial Edition

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “winner” of Iran’s 2009 election.

 

George “Tater-Head” Bush, ” winner” of America’s 2000 election.

Stick Figure Man (SFM), never won anything in his life.

I just read that Chastity Bono was going to get a sex change operation, and aside from the fact that I thought she has already had one, something dawned on me………

Chastity (soon to be Chaz) Bono

Val (soon to be Chastity Bono) Kilmer

About 157 years ago in June of 1972, I graduated from high school. I didn’t really want to because I knew that hell was waiting on the other side, but they forced me to.  Once the ceremony was over with, my dad loaded me into his 1970 gold colored impala with power everything and a 454 cubic inch engine and drove me home.

There was no oil shortage.

There was no 9/11.

There were no computers.

There was no global warming.

No one died of AIDS.

We drove home in relative silence except for this song on the radio:

Later that evening, I went out and took my sister’s pink bananna seat bike with the streamers coming out of the grips on the handlbars. I rode down by Lake Huron and the sound of the wind and the streamers was all I could hear. The constant, never ending, never stop voices in my head were quiet. 

I drove that pink bananna seat bicycle to a bar called The Rainbow Lounge and ordered a Lime Vodka and 7 UP. I wasn’t old enough to drink, but no one asked for my ID, so I drank for as long as I could. My girlfriend was looking for me. My parents was looking for me. My sister wanted her bike back. Everyone wanted something. I just wanted to take it easy. 

So it’s kind of come full circle.

Or maybe not.

Because I still love taking it to the limit.

Even though “the limit” is no longer “the edge.”

You know, life’s been hard lately. I mean here I am after 54 years of treating my body like a tent trying my dead level best to do all the right things and my life is so fucking boring I could just die.

Let’s recap, shall we?

• I wake up in the mornings without hangovers.
• I rarely piss on myself or someone else anymore.
• I regularly wear my underwear on the inside of my pants.
• I try my best to be a good corporate citizens and regularly use the latest buzz words.
• I haven’t called one single co-worker a cocksucker yet.

In other words, my life is boring as fuck.

Excuse me one second, be right back.

Okay. Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, I remember now. I’m boring as fuck.

I go to bed around 9. I’m up at 5:30.  I say things like “time to make the donuts.”  God, the end must be mercifully near.

And that brings me to last night’s vision. It wasn’t a dream. It was a vision.  Let me start by telling you that I am not Catholic so the concept of the Virgin Mary means nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. My wife’s Catholic, but she got over it. I’m pretty sure Carmen’s Catholic because I saw a picture of some of her relatives.

At 1:14 in the morning, I woke up and looked over at the clock on the table beside my bed and there, much to my surprise, was the Virgin Mary sitting on my table. She was about the size of a bottle of nasal spray and glowing.

I shit you not.

I closed my eyes for a few seconds. Thought about what I saw and then opened my eyes again. She was still there. Just kind of sitting there.  Not doing anything. Not saying anything. Just sitting there.

I decided that I should take this opportunity to go take a piss because at my age, not taking a piss when you need to could have disasterous results.  I pissed, came back to bed and the Virgin Mary was gone.  I was hoping we could have a little talk and maybe I could have one of those sell my soul moments or something because I was in the mood to bargain something for a bottle of Gin.

Me: I’ll give you a leg for 5 more years of Gin drinking.

VM: I’ll think about it.

Me: How about a leg and some fingers for a few more years of Gin drinking and a few more years of cigarette smoking?

VM: We’ll see.

If she would have talked to me, she would have actually talked just like that with the words coming out all bold and shit.

Anyway, on a whole different note,  I have a new laptop and it didn’t come pre-loaded with porn, so I have to start all over again. My old laptop was 4 years old and had just become impossible. I don’t have spell check on this one yet, so forgive my awful spelling.  My new computer is blue, so that should count for something.

Perhaps someone should pray for me.