Neanderpundit

and then I cam home to a late night semi emergency car repair, which would have been FAR easier if the manual I have for the car actually showed the correct wiring diagram!!

Bastards.

I have not commented on the government shutdown because my patience is at it’s end. I am deliberately ignoring the whole affair lest my better angels lose the battle they have been having for a very long time now.

I have an overdeveloped sense of justice, and I do not posess what others would refer to as a conscience. There is little between who and what I am now and what most would consider a monster. Only an herculean force of will and ignoring the petulant games of assholes is keeping me on the straight and narrow at present.

Yesterday I chased all over hell putting out fires, looks like I have more of the same tomorrow.

Late Tuesday night I downloaded ‘Travels with Charley” onto the droid, and as it had been a long day I was only able to read for a few minutes before I drifted off.

Still: A man who rescues his launch from morons and swims ashore in a hurricane, a man who owns a dog that can say “Ffft”, a man who brings a bottle of fine cognac to a group of Canuk migrant workers… That’s a man you have to like. His words climb off the page and point your eyes at things you have seen every day but never saw once. You are as astounded at the things he dleiberately avoids describing as those he describes in detail.

In snatches yesterday I read some more, and drifted to sleep reading. I will be done soon, and I will be sad, because there is no sequel.

Fraud? Really?

I was a very small lad, and very shy. Yaw, mynheer, dot is so. I used to like to hide behind my dad’s legs, and if he was wearing his trenchcoat, sometimes I would slip inside it and stand there, making us look like a black wooly quadruped with large muscular back legs and tiny front legs, like an improbable kangaroo.

I had followed Dad onto the escalator in Sears at River oaks mall- at that time, it was an outdoor mall and Mom was shopping at SS Kresges, while dad looked at shoes for me (I seemed to need a new set every six weeks) and Dad held my hand as I stepped up and in front of him, then tucked into his coat, my secret hiding spot. it smelled like wool and VO-5 and Old Spice.

Riding up the escalator, I peeked out from between the buttons of dad’s coat to see we had gotten on just behind a young lady (Well, young to me, now, but a “grownup” to me then) who was wearing a one piece dress, of the kind that was popular in, say, 1964. They were knit, and it had gaps between the material big enough to stick your finger in. I knew the type, my aunt had one just like it, but SHE wore a slip under hers, where this woman had nothing on under hers but underwear! Shees, you could actually see part of her buttcheeks! I don’t know if I even knew what I was looking at, at the time, but I felt it was something that had to be touched…

…So I reached up my five year old finger and pointed, and before I could even get close, a spark of static electricity about 2″ long leapt from my finger and zapped the woman right in the right buttcheek. The shock startled me so I withdrew my hand back into Dad’s coat, and she turned around and slapped dad right in the face so hard his hat flew off and down to the jewelry department.

Dad, who had been looking to his left as the display of fall sporting goods went by, was completely taken unawares. We had just about reached the top so the woman in the open knit dres stormed off and dad grabbed my hand, we walked off towards Shoes.

I wonder if he ever figured out what he had been slapped for, and how he explained the loss of a hat and the huge red weal on his cheek to mom later.