The End of a Crappy Week

It was a genuinely crappy week. I could tell I was stressed, because I cursed a lot. I even amazed my 14-year-old grandson, and I figure he hears it all in middle school.

First came the gas attacks in Syria, and the videos showing the victims, either dead, or gasping and convulsing with foam coming out of their mouths. There was a picture of a pile of dead children.

The next day, my grandson and his little sister (his “evil little sister,” he says, but from what I can see he’s kind of an evil big brother) and his other grandmother and her partner flew off to the UK for a wonderful vacation. Definitely the trip of the kids’ lifetimes so far.

I was wound up worrying about all the things that can happen when you fly around the world, and telling myself not to worry about plane crashes and terrorist attacks because the odds were so small. Please, please, please, let the odds be small.

Then Trump ordered the firing of Tomahawk missiles, first telling his friend Putin the attack was coming, and then gave a little speech saying that the gas attack was no way for babies to die and asking God to bless America. The missile attack killed four more children, among others.

Then a guy drove a truck down the sidewalk and into a store front in Stockholm.

Then Hillary Clinton gave a speech saying that sending off the missiles was the right thing to do, but we should be letting Syrian refugees into this country so they wouldn’t be over there getting gassed. The bonus of losing elections: you get to be the Monday morning quarterback on the actions of the guy who won.

Then people squawked that we can afford to shoot off millions of dollars in missiles but we can’t afford to fund Meals on Wheels.

Oh, children. Those missiles were built and deployed to ships in the Mediterranean Sea long ago. Before Trump. Before Gorsuch. Before funding was cancelled for so many social services. Before we realized how completely screwed we are. Obama was a classier act, but we’ve been spending most of our money on what is euphemistically called “defense” right along. We have never not had plenty of deadly weapons at the ready.

All this heartlessness and grief and worry about family members and gratuitous violence and death and the cynical use of the Lord’s name by the liar in chief is enough to render this person motionless.

My good friends Roy and Becky invited me to attend the VFW District fundraiser with them on Saturday night. It was a meal, and a raffle for several donated prizes.

It was old school patriotic. We said the pledge of allegiance. We sang the Star-Spangled Banner.

There were four tables with items you could bid on. You bid by buying raffle tickets and placing tickets in a little cup in front of the item or items you wanted. Most things did not appeal to me. I felt no need for a Seahawks blanket or a Keurig coffeemaker, a bottle of wine, or a camera lens for my cell phone.

But then, I saw them: the Yoga GI Joes. Little green plastic soldiers in yoga poses. I was stopped cold, and completely hooked. I thought they were hilarious, and perhaps you know that my son Drew is a yoga instructor.

I dropped a couple of tickets in the cup, the only two at that point. Clearly most of the VFW members were not as tickled by the little green soldiers in yoga poses as I was.

We had dinner, one table of stuff was raffled off, and then they started doing karaoke. It ended up being a couple of hours before they got around to raffling off the GI Joes. I had gone back up to check the cup, and someone else had thrown a ticket in, so I knew my getting them was no longer a sure thing.

Finally they came up – and I won them! Yay! I was so happy. Honestly, winning those little plastic yoga guys was the best thing that happened for me all week.

I’m going to give them to my son, the yoga instructor. Soon. When I’m ready. They make me smile every time I look at them. They’re so loony. I mean, yoga GI Joes? Come on.

“Drop and give me a downward dog!”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

Just My Opinion, I Suppose

A couple of months into the so-called Trump presidency, there is talk of Trump being mentally ill. I don’t know for sure if he is, but he sure seems to be a carrier.

I agree with the take that he is a distraction, a circus, that holds our attention while the Republican Congress busily removes our rights, stripping away health care for all with an emphasis on controlling women’s bodies, trying to do away with Medicare and Social Security as they now stand, further enriching the already obscenely rich while grinding the poor, the elderly, people of color, native people, non-so-called-Christians, LGBTQ people, the different, the Other, into a smooth brown paste under the soles of wealthy people’s Christian Louboutins. Or whatever they wear now.

I hear people are seeking help for the depression and anxiety brought on by the election of a toxic president. Apparently therapists are feeling depressed and anxious, too, so they and their clients are working it out together.

That made me think about all the screaming and whining back when Obama was elected. A relative of mine posted a graphic picture of Uncle Sam being tortured by electric shocks after the 2008 election. The country, my relative said, was a goner. I think he now believes that Trump and the Republican party will save the country from the disastrous path Obama had it on.

I feel like I have been so naïve. Back in the 1990s when Rush Limbaugh and then Fox News and their ilk came on the scene, I thought they were so ridiculous, so lacking in logic and reason, so unfair and unbalanced, breaking every rule of rational argument, that anyone could see they were full of poop. How could anyone with any intelligence possibly take them seriously?

To my astonishment people whose intelligence I respected swallowed that stuff whole. How? Why?

As Bud Reynolds, Malvina’s husband, used to say, when you’ve been weaned on shit, you’ll swear by it.

Most of us are aware of the hysterical hatred that was expressed toward Obama. That level of hatred was cultivated and harvested with this last election, but no one during the Obama years said, hey, these racist people are suffering from mental illness and they need help, except sometimes when they mowed down black people with assault rifles.

I put it to you that racism, irrational fears and paranoia, behavior that is controlled by someone and something other than your own rational brain and perception, is mental illness. If you have been taught not to believe what you see with your own eyes – for example, that you’re more likely to be killed by a white racist in this country than a Muslim terrorist – or what you hear with your own ears – for example, Donald Trump saying he grabs women by the pussy (“He didn’t mean that”) – then you are cognitively whackadoodle.

Just my opinion.

My mother was a racist, and she wasn’t a liberal closet racist, either. She was a Phyllis Schlafly-reading, conspiracy theory, Goldwater Republican, scream at the civil rights news stories on television racist.

There weren’t many black people in the little farming town where I grew up, but about a third of the population was Hispanic. My mother would mutter about how, “They do this,” and “They do that.”

“What about Reuben and Maria?” I asked her once. “You get along with them.” Reuben was one of my father’s best friends.

“Oh, they’re good ones,” my mother replied.

That is an example of what I consider whackadoodle racist thinking.

I didn’t try to argue my mother out of her prejudice. I knew better. I knew I’d only hear about what a dupe I was of the communists and the Jews, who were at the bottom of everything.

You see, all the blah blah about the threats that we are supposed to be facing are quite familiar to me from ‘way back. The liars don’t even feel the need to write original lies. I read an anti-homosexual article in the 1980s that was a recycled anti-communist article from the 1960s, with “homosexual” plugged in for “communist.”

If you believe that the Republicans and Trump are doing great things and I told you that you are being had, would you believe me?

I do not say anything to my friends who voted for Trump. I figure that, in the words of Tom Lehrer, we will all go together when we go. We and our children and grandchildren will all suffer together the fallout from the actions of the best darn government money can buy. So we may as well start seeing each other as brothers and sisters right now, because we are.

Again, just my opinion, I suppose.

Adventures in Fine Dining

So. I asked the cashier at Taco Time to throw away my old Taco Time cup from the last time I was in Seattle, and that's where the trouble started.

Her face registered deep disgust. She turned around, grabbed a plastic glove to protect herself from my contagion (fair enough, I had a cold), took the cup and tossed it away, took off the sanitary glove, took my payment, then handed us the bag with our order.

And off we went to catch the ferry.

So we go down the hill and get in line, with the help of a lady walking a collie. She saw me waiting to hang a U-turn as traffic stopped for her and her dog crossing the street, and she ordered me, "Go ahead! Get in line!" She walked back INTO the street, holding up her free hand in the "Stop" gesture to northbound cars, and told me to pull in to the (still stopped) southbound cars. I did what she said, the cars parted like the Red Sea for Moses, and I zipped over to the curb to the ferry line.

I am so grateful to that woman and her collie I can't tell you. She was my saint du jour, and she had no reason to do it - she just took it upon herself to get a stranger safely into the ferry line. Which the more I think about it, the more awesome it is.

Okay. So now we dig out our food and start to eat. My favorite meal at Taco Time is the chicken tostado salad with ranch dressing.

I opened the box, looking forward to my feast, and asked Benny, "Is there by any chance a fork in that bag?"

He looked inside, reached in and moved the remaining items around, and said, "No."

Now, there is no way to know if the cashier left the fork out on purpose because I asked her to dispose of my drink, or if it got left out because I broke her routine of cash/plastic in, food orders out. Who knows?

But I had been the beneficiary of an act of uncalled-for generosity from the woman with the collie, and I wasn't going to let the lack of fork come between me and my salad.

I decided I'd eat it with my fingers, that being all I had available to transport food to mouth.

I quickly realized that I was only able to grab rather small pieces with my thumb and forefinger (mind you, I'm also driving down the hill as the line moves, so I keep handing the salad box to Benny and taking it back). It caused me to reflect that this particular pinching motion was probably evolved to pick parasites off my friends.

I've seen movies of monkeys picking over one another often enough. I think part of the preening is that you get to eat the parasites, but I'm not sure. As a homo sapiens (which makes me laugh because I am neither a man nor wise) I don't use this marvelous pinching action for its original function. I'd lose what friends I had if I tried, too. They seem to be a pretty parasite-free bunch, and some, I know, would be offended if I subjected them to an unasked-for louse reconnaissance.

But I digress.

A chicken tostado salad with ranch dressing is not something that can be eaten by hand without a lot of messiness. Fortunately I am not much bothered by messiness (oh, be quiet), so I sat in my car and pinched my drippy chicken, refried beans, tomatoes, shredded cheese, fried tortilla bowl, and lettuce into my mouth as well as I could. There were a few misses, but mostly I hit the target, and as I got nearer the bottom where the chicken chunks were I could grab larger lumps of food.

I finished up my primitive dining on the ferry dock, and cleaned up as well as I could with Taco Time napkins. The cashier did give us a good half dozen of those.

Eating salad by hand is not for the fastidious.

Look, I've worked as a cashier and I have sympathy. I remember being handed some object by a mother which she had just removed from her toddler's mouth. Eeyew. But I was a mother of toddlers once, so I have to have sympathy there, too.

But the guy who handed me a piece of used pipe that actually had poop in it - I still have no sympathy for him. Boy, I wish I'd had a box of plastic protective gloves to put on that day.