Random Saturday Thought Episodes

Max is driving me out of my mind.  He only knows one way to get what he wants—ramming his head against the wall as hard as he can, as fast as he can, until the wall breaks or he is knocked unconscious.  I can’t imagine why anyone suffers from empty nest syndrome.

Albert is enjoying an excursion out of his cage.  Well, I am not exactly sure that enjoyment is the emotion he is feeling; these things can be hard to tell with a mouse.  At any rate, he is rambling around on the couch, whiskers twitching and ears perked, depositing mouse poops hither and yon.  Horus has taken to sitting by Albert’s cage, peering inside intently and with a concerned expression on his face.  Bring him nose-to-nose with Mr. Mouse, however, and he backs away with a look of cat-horror.  But just the other day, his brother Tiger snacked on a field mouse for lunch. 

I think the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard anyone say came from the lips of that ditz Valerie Jarrett at the White House:  “We’re going to speak truth to power.”  Her mouth must be on a reflex loop to her spinal cord, not engaging her cerebral cortex.  She just has tired Lefty cliches that spill from her and she doesn’t have enough imagination or insight to understand how utterly ignorant and fatuous she sounds.  I can’t believe these people are allowed to drive, let alone try to run the government.

The Tough Life Lesson Liberals Never Learn

Life isn’t fair. 

Max is having a hard time with that one right now.  He isn’t his brother, and he can’t get by with some of the things his brother can.  He has to adhere to a strict sleep schedule (chronic insomnia plagues him otherwise), and he can’t eat anything he wants (his dad’s metabolism, not his mother’s).  He wants the rules for living to be exactly the same for him and Tobie (and for some reason, for Charlie, who is four years older); and he is struggling ferociously against the inequities he perceives.  I’ve chosen not to shield him from this particular horrible life lesson by force-fitting all three boys to one regimen; he will have to come to terms with life since he can’t make life come to terms with him.

Washington is filled with people who refuse to accept that life isn’t fair—or more precisely, they know it isn’t (and they don’t really care, not deep down, because they came out on the up side), but they have discovered all the power to be had by pretending to the less fortunate that they can force life to be fair, if they just have a little more money and a little more control.  We call people who refuse to accept the basic unfairness of life victims and our politicians have declared victimhood a spiritual calling, one which all too many are ready to follow.  Now we have an administration run by ex-patriates of various Angry Studies departments busying themselves with activities designed to make life equally unfair for everyone—themselves excepted, of course. 

The rhetoric issuing from the Obama administration is practically indistinguishable from the dribble one can find in just about every liberal arts department in any university in the country—predictable, banal and warmed-over mush about social justice and capitalist hegemony.  None of the Obamists have lived long enough in the real world to learn that none of that stuff actually works, in the sense of producing a world that sane people want to inhabit.  They share the fatal flaw of every other Utopian—they think that the only thing missing every other time someone else tried to enforce fairness was their particular genius.  That’s the only explanation for someone actually coming up with the solipsistic babble of “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” 

I say this, but I think that at least Obama—and probably quite a few of his closest cronies—really do know that life isn’t fair, isn’t meant to be fair, and can’t be made fair (not in this world).  They’re just the ultimate cynics, manipulating the naifs who buy the dreamy equality bullshit and ruthlessly suppressing the realists who don’t want to be controlled by the state.  Obama and his ilk are simply taking advantage of the adolescent angst of millions of people who never came to grips with the fact that life isn’t fair.

You Don't Need India

When you can outsource your mouse-keteering just across the street.  So we had to make a trip to Petco to purchase mouse accoutrements…Albert is now comfortably ensconced in his Mouse Hilton, with fluffy blue (!?) bedding, wheel, tube and platform.  No mouse could ask for more, unless it would be a mouse-spouse, and that ain’t gonna happen.  Albert will have to make do with human companions.  He is the center of attention for now, but I know that soon all the care & feeding of the royal rodent will fall to the same person who takes care of everything else that breathes and poops in this house.  At least Albert won’t clog up the toilet.

Random Sunday Thought Episodes

Oh, I have been gone awhile.  Busy with a special project at work; Tobie has been hogging the computer; depressed over the statist drift of the country.  And Max and I have become addicted to “Heroes,” catching all the back episodes on Netflix.  I’ll catch up to things today, dribs and drabs of thoughts.

In our quest to share living space with every genus of animal on the planet, we have acquired a mouse.  Seems the mild-mannered critter was left in a box on our across-the-street-neighbor’s front porch, apparently as a practical joke.  She is not a mouse-admirer and was happy to off-load said rodent on her all-too-willing neighbors.  He (she? it?) is an inoffensive little beast, latte-colored, and currently hiding in the sleeve of my shirt, up by my elbow.  The cats, interestingly, were blase about having Mus musculus paraded in front of them, perhaps planning a sneak offensive for a time when Mus is unguarded.  At any rate, we’ve named it Albert, which I guess means it will be living with us for the time being.  After snakes, lizards and psycho-rabbits, a mouse is no trouble at all.

Re:  The afore-mentioned quest.  No birds.

Who watches fishing shows on TV?  Is there really q wide audience for them?  I don’t have the imagination to know how desperate I would have to be to sit on the couch and watch two men in a boat periodically drawl about a large-mouth bass.  Pretty damn bored is my guess.

My Own Twisted Little Fantasy

While we’re making stuff up.

I have a film short I run in my mind every so often.  It plays, for instance, whenever someone with whom I am visiting (or a random stranger who falls within my ambit) shows a preference for bits and bytes over being polite and courteous to those actually taking the form of flesh and blood in front of them.  In my fantasy, I remove the cell phone from the user’s hand, throw it on the ground and smash it to bits with my feet.  Then I look up, smile apologetically, and say, “Oh dear.  Your phone just lost its signal.  Can you hear me now?” 

I don’t carry my phone with me most of the time.  I never take it into offices.  I don’t keep it with me in movies or at dinner.  I don’t sleep with it on.  Thus, I never have the opportunity to check my email or answer a text when I am supposed to be giving my time and attention to a real human.  I figure whatever someone not with me has to say and/or whatever event of moment occurs, I will have time for it later.  After all, homo sapiens sapiens has flourished over the course of millennia without instantaneous digital communication.  I presume I can make it a few minutes in the same fashion.  I find people who have formed an almost organic link to their phones to be not only irritating but, dare I say it, self-important.  No one is indispensable.  Although most of Washington thinks it is. 

I just began a book by Mark Helprin that covers some of this ground.  Aptly titled Digital Barbarism, he makes the argument that individual liberty is at risk from the technological strides we are making—not from their intrinsic evilness, but because we are not acting deliberately as we use our new machines.  He uses the idea of the copyright to make his argument, precisely because it embodies both the idea of information management and personal property.  That much I know from the preface and the reviews of the book.  I plan to enjoy reading it, without my cell phone anywhere near me.