Sermons and Rants in Normal entries

Today was the service for interning my brother in laws ashes in the small garden plot at Peoples Church, a church where his parents ashes were interned, and where his daughter attended and where his wife still does. For some reason his daughter became an Episcopalian, I have a guess or two as to why, but, have never asked. My opinion is her answers to questions like that have more drama than truth to them; not saying she’s a liar, or, doesn’t lie with intent or forethought. That being neither here nor there, her and her husband played Cello and guitar for the ceremony. Spring came late here, and left quickly, so in summer heat the garden had spring blossoms.

My sister came up from Nashville, by request of my widowed sister, to do most of the ceremony. A new assistant pastor from the church did bits and pieces of it. Even so, it was pleasantly short. I mean that in the exact way you thought I did, and in the sense that I haven’t spent forty-five minutes standing up outside all month. I always feel lazy when I do that, but shit has hurt hard enough to remind me why. This month and parts of the last few have involved a healthy helping of drugs and an unhealthy helping of Television, via Hulu, Vudu and Netflix. Drugs ease pain and anxiety. Television eats IQ points. I’m not suggesting TV should only be used in moderation; it’s a numbers game, how many IQ points can you afford to lose? Me, I can count them with my paws and only one shoe off. Hmmm, or maybe I forgot how to put both shoes on.

I was watching some Rom-com with someone like Heather Graham in it, Christ, it was Heather Graham (I think that’s her name) and saw one of the grossest things I’ve seen on a screen of any size. It was one of eight zillion New York based rom-coms, one of the seven zillion that Woody Allen did not direct, and like the rest New York is a character and they talk about streets as though the street had a culture all its own and that anyone outside of the city gave a fuck. I’m strongly considering demonstrating my lack of a fuck by refusing to watch anything based North of Boston or East of Detroit, but, you know, that’d involve a remote or an easy way to get up and switch things, which, if I had, I wouldn’t be watching the mind killer to begin with.

Oh, yeah, the grossest thing. At some point during the show when I had my eyes open and my attention was drifting towards the lottery or donuts, the Heather Graham character goes into the public rest room in this hip but dive club. All the attention to detail of every New York Rom Com ever made was put into making this public rest room look like the real thing; not too trashed, the right amount of realistic graffiti, it looked like it smelled of ammonia, piss, hamsters and pencil shavings. The character has something on her mind, pulls down her skirt and sits on the toilet. I am the least OCD, germ conscious, prissy guy you are likely to meet. If you knew me and I offered to cook you a meal, you’d be torn between my mad culinary skills and the idea that neither knew where my hands had been. I’ve know that getting a venereal disease (other than crabs) from a toilet seat is impossible, but, for public restrooms in New York Clubs, I’d go with improbable. They didn’t show anything weird or creepy, I think the main reason for the scene was to show that the director was hip enough to pull off casual pissing, and, you know, seven zillion movies worth of attention to detail, and nothing happened, physically. If I were following everything I’m sure a mental issue was resolved, just saying it wasn’t meant to be gross, just provocative. I’m hardly ever grossed out by stuff that’s supposed to be gross, ok, in the first aliens when the kid alien popped out of the chest, I was a bit freaked, but, to be fair, I was with the seahag who lost her shit altogether and that freaked me out at the same time. I’m a jaded old guy now who is seahagless.

Bits and pieces of everything I watch are usually good. I will watch something for one or two good lines or a spectacular shot of blowing shit up. I’ll watch things, too, for a curious POV (a polite way of saying, for the most, a POV the vacillates between ill-informed and propaganda, the former mostly an opinion, the latter is true even if, or especially if, I agree with the premises). I watched Looming Tower recently, I think I watched it from beginning to end in a single sitting. A major plot point was that, despite directives from Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton, the FBI and the CIA didn’t share information. The show leaned heavily towards the CIA withholding information from the FBI. It painted the CIA as creepy power mad spooks (probably not a bad outline if one is pressed for time) and the FBI as well-intentioned cowboy cops (not sure that’s a credible outline regardless of time constraints). Politically it made Clinton seem burdened with press problems and, sort of, the victim of CIA spookiness. It made Bush look criminally stupid by proxy. You have the heads of intelligence talking to Condi Rice, and her telling them she doesn’t have time for rumor or happy horseshit and neither does the president, but, they were only going to be told that by her as the president wasn’t interested in happy horseshit at all. There were a few nods late in the season, with Bush 43 in the white house, towards keeping a good relationship with the Saudis.

That’s basically how it went, not like I’m spoiling the plot or anything, if you are in your late twenties or older, and live in North America or the Mid-East, you know the story. It’s just the way they told it … it kind of dawned on me that it was made shortly after Comey lost his seat at the table. I mean it wasn’t really pro-transparency, but it definitely preferred the FBI to the CIA and Clinton to Bush 43. With the exception of adding in human interest by focusing on a handful of agents and directors, it was pretty straight-forward. Which is to say, nothing you didn’t already know. I’m positive there’s a bunch of shit I don’t know, and I AM talking about transparency and the lack thereof, hell, I think we are still keeping secrets from our citizens over WWII. Every now and again there are flares of citizens giving a shit about that bothersome stuff, every now and again citizens realize we are still at war or that we have army bases all the fuck over the globe, some in hostile — wait — in places that aren’t happy to have us — and they make some noise about that. This last year most of the noise has been about sexism and racism and Trump being a Douche basket (it’s like a douche bucket only wider and more orange). I’m not going to call myself a liberal, but I am a guy with ideals that used to be liberal. I’m a lot more concerned with women and minorities (In America at any rate, globally, like say the entire continent of Africa, black guys are not the minority. Africa has had was, ethnic cleansing, bad blood, famine, pestilence, etc. somewhere on the continent since the day I was born. Yeah, my birth is not the litmus test for anything, just saying, during my entire lifetime to date.) getting blown up than whether white males have an easier time of shit.

Sorry, I lose a sentence in a parenthetical rant sometimes. I also apologize for the gross generalization, I know the protests have been more complicated. I’d never heard the word misandry used out-loud until this year. That just has to be more complicated. A lot of the racism protests have to do with cops shooting black men. I have never thought of me and cops as having any direct or indirect association, but I sure do understand being pissed off. Not a great apology, what I mean is, if citizens want to make noise about parity, maybe basic human rights to be alive is a better basic leaping off point, especially when you are a citizen of a country that is ambiguous and non-transparent on the issue. I don’t know, I think humanity needs to come first before self-segregating ones own sub-group. My country is a threat to humanity with their current environmental policies too, what little they tell us of them.

Where is the outcry in North America for the fucking Rock we fucking live the fuck on? Pardon me, Canada and Mexico. I was traveling through north western Canada in the mid seventies and was a bit shocked by two things I learned. Granted, one of them might have been some guy pulling my leg, the other, though, I saw with my own eyes, and most “guys” were pretty tight-lipped about answering questions. What I saw with my own eyes, shortly after Carter declared and “energy Crisis” was newly capped oil wells all through north Alberta and the Yukon, some lower and more easterly too. These were live wells capped instead of pumping. The most obvious reasons were to save Canadian gas for Canadians after, say, WWIII. The other, less likely, reason, was to drive up oil prices.

The thing that might have been some guy pulling my leg, was the idea of “purple gas”. Allegedly every Canadian farmer knew about this, a lower grade gas for farm equipment, like tractors, combines, maybe even chain saws and weed whackers. I think for this to work the equipment would have to be modified. I can’t imagine either Canada or the US keeping “purple gas” a secret. No, wait, I can imagine that, I can’t think of a single reason why. I saw similar capped wells in Texas that year too. In Texas you tell when a well is dry because a lot of people move out of the nearby town and those left look like extras in Grapes of Wrath. Ok, so, that’s a gross generalization, but it’s not untrue.

Aw shit, if I don’t end this son of a bitch it’ll just sit on my desktop making fun of my Bejeweled Scores.