Today is the neighborhood’s biennial yard sale, an event during which one hopes against all reason that strangers will cart off one’s useless bullshit and leave money in its place. This makes the tooth-fairy tale seem reasonable by comparison.
And now for something completely different: There is no truth to the rumor that Bradley Wiggins is skipping the 2013 Tour de France in order to stand in for the late Graham Chapman in a revival of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”
Today started and ended well, lightly toasted slices of metaphorical bread comprising an actual shit sandwich.
On arising I recalled that we had a huge slab of meaty Ranch Foods Direct bacon in the fridge, so breakfast included coffee, eggs over easy, American fried potatoes, buttery English muffins and great thick rashers of pigmeat. Your basic heart-attack special, but I like it.
My plans for the workday hinged on breaking a piece of new technology to harness, but despite a hearty breakfast I couldn’t even get my rope on it, much less my brand.
Being something of a persistent cuss — you may call it “obsessive-compulsive,” I call it “persistent” — I kept working at it, trying first this and then that and finally the other, all the while taking copious notes on each fresh dysfunction with an eye toward eventually tattooing same on someone using an icepick and ball-peen hammer, with a sack of wormy dogshit for ink.
Thus the hours passed and the daylight faded, and the technology breezily countered my every move. By late afternoon, which saw the mailperson deliver an overdue check for services rendered that was redeemable for slightly less than half the expected quantity of Dead President Trading Cards, I was at a rolling boil, hissing like a teakettle full of vipers, blistering steam boiling out of both ears.
Herself and I had earlier scheduled a joint birthday dinner with friends, so I stuck my head in the freezer, counted to a thousand in Irish, and off we went to The Blue Star, where the four of us ate all manner of good things while discussing music, metaphysics and literature. Also, we solved every last one of the world’s problems save mine (you’re welcome).
Now I’m hardly pissed off at all. But tomorrow is another day.
As the coronation of King Socialist Muslim I proceeds in DeeCee, word on the streets in Bibleburg is that job growth locally is confined to pitching greaseballs at motorists through drive-up windows, answering phone calls from pissed-off Comcast customers and blowing shit up, in part because the locals are too fucking stupid to sell legal weed.
The good news is, gas is cheap for anyone who wants to leave town in search of greener pastures.
The local unemployment rate has been at or above 8.9 percent for three and a half years, and would be more like 12 percent had not some 4,000 Bibleburgers given up looking for work altogether, according to the Gazette.
Interestingly, local number-cruncher Tom Binnings of Summit Economics LLC estimates that 24 percent of Bibleburgers are self-employed, “making money where they can and finding a way to survive, but not much more.”
That number seemed steep at first, until I started thinking about most of the local folks I know. A couple are educators, one has a gummint job, and a few are private-sector employees, but a substantial percentage of the others is self-employed: artist, screen printer, construction contractor, bike-shop owner.
We’re not all struggling to survive, but I’m certain we’d all like to be doing better. Thing is, how do we get there? Ranching the view doesn’t put beans in your burrito, blowing shit up seems likely to go out of fashion if DeeCee ever gets serious about reining in spending, and cheap gas isn’t much of a solace if you have nowhere to go.
Ah, Black Friday: The gift that keeps on giving. As some Walmart employees are agitating for a living wage, Sears customers in San Antonio are throwing hands and drawing firearms. Some people clearly did not enjoy enough mood-altering tryptophan on Thanksgiving.
At the higher-end shops, meanwhile, those mannequins you’re inspecting are inspecting you right back, with cameras and facial-recognition software not unlike that used by les flics. Hey, there’s one … whoops, nope, it’s just Mitt Romney.
Meanwhile, here’s something to leave on the shelf, no matter where we are in the shopping season. And fuck Weepy John Boehner and the horses’ asses he rode in on.
This is May? What, did the GOP manage to privatize the weather, hand it off to Halliburton or Goldman Sachs? It rained last night, the wind is flat barreling out of the northwest at 24 mph and there is the usual chance of snow “with little to no accumulation,” which means, “Just enough to kill anyone who thinks 4WD helps you stop.”
It’s just as well, I suppose. I had work to do this morning, and were it not so dismal outside I might have said piss on it and gone for a ride instead.
Speaking of rude awakenings, it seems the mainstream media have finally sniffed the java where Punkinhead Boehner is concerned. Bloomberg News reports that the House speaker’s economic “theories” depend upon “several assertions that are contraindicated by market indicators and government reports.” The Washington Post‘s Ruth Marcus cuts to the chase and calls him a lying sack of runny orange shit.
Careful, now, Ruthie ol’ scout. You’re liable to set off Weepy John’s sprinkler system bringing that kind of heat. Thanks to Steve Benen at Political Animal for the tip.
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