Monday. Storm approaching. Clocks off an hour. March madness.
Alternative facts inevitably – if you believe in science – create an alternative reality. That’s the nature of propaganda.
Bernie Madoff’s sentence commuted? To be named to head Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). That’s just a rumor.
Billionaires nicknamed The Bailout King and the other The Foreclosure King already confirmed and serving in the Cabinet. That’s just a fact.
Sunday talk shows morph into Sixty Minutes. Pretty soon KellyAnne Conway is poisoning political rivals with heavy metaphors while Vladimir Putin answers questions with nonsequiturs spoken in riddles.
Life can get so jumbled these days. The old man felt like he was ten years old again, playing his favorite game, dodge-ball. Damn, he had loved that game. He had been big for his age then, a huge target admittedly but he liked to think he had twinkle toes and could throw his balls like heat-seeking missiles. Hit’em so hard, they’d squeal. Duck!
What memory recalls as joy in the middle of the last century seems a little like Chinese water torture in old age. As if aging isn’t enough, just try to move from radio theatre to Amazon Fire, abacus and slide-rule to iCloud, party line to FaceTime, Truman to Trump. Takes some adjusting. Thank God for Adele.
Just try to tell any old person who has been outdoors a few times over the years, there is no climate change. Tell any oyster farmer the seas aren’t rising. Tell any polar bear. Duck!
The old man was confident his government health insurance would be everything he’d been promised. Until he actually got sick. Duck!
Like Steve King says, you can’t be happily married with somebody else’s wife. Or hunting dog.
Secretly proud to have been a Cold Warrior. “The war we won,” he loved to say. Now this. When folks are being told to believe a former KGB operative rather than seventeen intelligence agencies… duck!
Ten years old. The end of the good life. And then he began to feel his entire existence had become some gigantic dodge-ball game and his toes were insufficiently twinkly. Thus began the ride, which as he grew into adulthood became a pinball machine. Always something about his balls.
First they tell you there’s a Santa Claus, then they tell you there’s no Santa Clause. Later, you learn there maybe may be or may not be an actual Santa Claus. For many many of us, seems Santa has misplaced our address. Or the neighborhood is too dangerous, somebody might steal Rudolph. Duck!
Regrets? About what I did? Not many. The results of what I did? God, yes. I am so sorry. Should have ducked. But now that you asked, can’t help thinking most of what hurt us most are inactions. What we didn’t do. And for whom. That and procrastination.
Strikes me. You can hurt and feel good at the same time. So, as you can see, aging can be sado-masochistic, if you look at it right.
The old man didn’t look at it that way.