It's the GREAT PUMPKIN.....

Rock ’n a hard place….

Well, that’s kind’a where the Grand Old Party is at the moment…that is, if you b’leeve the mainstream media who all seem to agree that Obama has them mean old republicans by the short hair ’n is shakin’ them to their boottops…for the more rational news seekers among us, Fox News, contrary to the liberal mindset, is taking the more nuanced view of allowing pundits from both sides of the aisle to express their differing viewpoints…(the most amusing aspect of this is that liberals will never know this because they never, never, never take their heads out of that nameless dark place to watch that lying Fox News….Ho Hum!)

The fact of the matter, as any schoolboy knows (or did know back in the day when they were allowed t’be boys) having someone by the short hair is a lot like having a tiger by the tail…(it ain't the easiest thing in the world to turn loose of)

On a personal level, I’m beginning to suspect that maybe Obama wants the USA to default…maybe he really is in the pocket of one George Soros who seems to have developed a strategy of pushing countries into backruptcy in order to feather his own nest…

Well, it’s his strategy, of course, 'n it worked in a couple smaller countries, but I don’t think even with all his fabled wealth that George is capable of pushing the USA into bankruptcy all on his lonesome, so it probably ain’t a coincidence that he makes his home in China…

I’m just speculating, of course…trying to come up with a reason why Obama would want to take the USA into default…I don’t believe Obama is smart enuff to come up with a scheme of this scope on his own dime….

I'm pretty sure he cheated his way thru school 'n he surely seems t'be a master of the 'Fake it 'til you make  it' Holly-woody perception is reality thingy...

Well, falling off a log is easy…any darn fool c’n do it’n he don’t even hardly have to try…’n it don’t take any practice at all, it just comes natural…the real trick to falling off a log is being able to stand on it in the first place, ‘specially if you’re a barefoot boy in the Ohio River trying to emulate the log rollers you saw in the Pathe News short at the movie…

I’m just sayin’ that falling off logs is basically a spectator sport...

Those Autumn leaves.....

"I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then."  Lewis Carroll

If you think of Harry Reid ’n Nancy Pelosi as ‘minions’….well, it puts a whole new face to things, don’t it?  Barack Obama ’n his minions…Barry ’n the gang are responsible for the gov’t shutdown…Barry ’n his minions are responsible for kids going hungry, old people suffering from neglect, hospitals going understaffed ’n national parks closing for no p’ticklar reason….Barry ’n the minions tried to close the ocean ’n open-air memorials (I know, that don’t make any sense at all, do it?)

Back in the ’70’s when Californians passed Proposition 13, California politicians and bureaucrats responded by cutting lean rather than fat ’n that’s exactly what the Feds are doing now…cutting off their nose to spite…well, our faces actually ‘cuz we’re the dopes that put ‘em all in office, ‘cuz you know Barry ’n the minions can’t do it without help…

Barry ’n the minions really do need to go but there’s 535 other A-holes in Washington that need to have their chains yanked as well…they need to be reminded that they work for us (which ain’t been the case for too damn long)…..

Y’know what it is, is that I’ve been blowing leaves around ’n breathing in all that dust ’n I don’t care how many leaves I pick up ’n deposit in the green cans, t’morra there’s gonna be more…When I wuz a boy, back in those uncivilized daze of yore, we raked the leaves (under threat of corporal punishment) into one large pile ’n put a match to it…all over Beattyville, you could smell burning leaves ’n if you took a walk around the village, most of the yards that you’d pass would have a small boy leaning on a rake, looking into a pile of smoldering leaves….Ahhhh, the good old daze……

“I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things ’n I have succeeded fairly well.”  Rob’t Benchley

King of the hill is definitely not a team sport but you can’t play it alone…

Noah told his mother that Grandpa John must’a had a terrible childhood ‘cuz he didn’t have any video games or even a television~’n that’s true, we didn’t have any of those things….Grandpa John explained that in lieu of ‘those things’ that he had to use his imagination, for example, a stick.  Grandpa John told him that a stick c’d be many things ~ a gun, a sword, even a horse…I’m told that Noah just shook his head ’n felt sorry for the old man….

While it’s true that we didn’t have ‘stuff’ to play with, we lived in a village where everyone knew everyone else ’n we could wander from dawn to dusk without fear ~ we had the Ohio River ’n the riverbank wuz sandy ’n overgrown with willows ’n water maples ’n you never knew what the river would serve up….’n the other direction brought us to the hills, tall, steep, ’n covered in honeysuckle….

And every time you c’d get three or more t’gether, one of the fav’rite games wuz ‘King of the Hill’….there wuz a spot overlooking the curve in the two-lane blacktop that separated the village from the hills that wuz steep ’n hard to climb but had a sandy outcrop close to the top….it wuz two or maybe three wide at its widest ’n maybe four feet long ’n we c’d fight for hours to maintain the position of King of the Hill…well, I told you we didn’t have toys ’n suchlike…it wuz an age of make-do….’n not only for the kids, for adults also…it definitely wuz not a ‘disposable’ age…A money source for kids wuz gathering what t’day is known as ‘Recyclables’….we just gathered bottles for the two-cent deposit that had been paid (didn’t have aluminum cans in that stone-age period)…Ah well, seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same….

“Life obliges me t’do something, so I natter on.”  Justin Other Smith

October should always begin with a trip to APPLE HILL!

A bad hair day don’t even begin to compare to a bad foot day ’n Wednesday wuz a baaaaaaad foot day….I hobbled up the street ’n down with da boyz ‘cuz they don’t give a big hoot in….well, you know, don’t you?  Anywayz, I wuz rolling along like a drunken sailor, limping on both feet, feeling picked upon by life in general which ever’body does now ’n then but it don’t help to complain ‘cuz nobody ever listens so it ain’t a helluva lotta use to cry…besides, it come to me that I wuz still walking ’n on the green side of the sod at that so things ain’t never so bad that they can’t get worse…

Anyhow, I wuz up ’n down thru the night as old men are won’t to do  (old dogs also)

popping a few pain pills, washing ‘em down with crackers ’n milk ’n when I still cudn’t sleep, playing computer solitaire…

So it wuz, that I kind’a slept in this morning ’n when I finally got out of bed ’n stumbled into the kitchen, found that Millyrose had made my coffee for me ’n had a couple biscuits in the oven ’n the paper wuz on the table…(I wuz immediately suspicious but I didn’t let on)….what it wuz that I had forgot wuz the planned roadtrip to APPLE HILL with our friends, Annigan ’n Willy ’n that I wuz the designated driver…we, all my fault, ran a little later than the plan called for but only an hour which in the grand scheme of things don’t amount to much at all….

Annigan ’n Willy were sitting on their stoop waiting patiently (I made up the patiently part) ’n we quickloaded them into the little Matrix ’n up the hill we went….wuz a lovely sunshiny day, light traffic, off in the distance the clouds topping the sierra looked like snow ’n as pretty much usual, when we arrived at APPLE HILL, since I only get up there once a year anymore, we drove up ’n down the highway searching for the signs that would direct us to the various ’n sundry apple farms that we intended to visit (y’know, every year I wonder why I don’t go equipped with a map but that, I guess would be another story)….

Anyway, we found the stops we wanted to find…had some apple pie, well, the others had rhubard ’n apple pie ’n I had an apple turnover ’n coffee, well, two cups of coffee actually ‘cuz I spilled the first one all over me when I turned over the pickanick table ’n dumped Millyrose on the lawn…(turns out that wuz pretty much the highlight of the day)…

We got home some six hours later to find that one of the dogs had eaten a book (Sophie’s, I think, not one of mine)…the cat had hidden herself upstairs (I didn’t tell you about the cat…I’m sorry, I’ll do that another time)…and,,,well, that’s pretty much our Thursday…

I know I haven’t been blogging as much as usual but it’s been a stressful September what with one thing ’n another(sighhhhh)...

On birthdays 'n Autumn 'n stuff like that....

“Two things are infinite~space and the stupidity of humans ’n I’m not sure about space.” Einstein

September Song….

“It’s a long, long time from May to December and the days grow short when you reach September….” lyrics by Maxwell Anderson

September is a little different from when I wuz a boy…

In those ‘wayback days, school began after Labor Day, after the freedom of what had seemed in Spring to be a long and glorious summer, the all too soon end wuz nigh…’n we were stuck in a dreary classroom as the lingering days of summer ticked off one by one, gazing forlornly out the windows at the warm sunshine of a Kentucky afternoon, the dusk coming earlier every day, the last gasp of summer coming to a close right before my birthday...

September is a month chock full of birthdays..me, my mother, one of my brothers, my oldest daughter…’n a neighbor lady down the street born on the same day as me ‘way back in ’37…Come to think on it, Sonny Stockham was born on the same day as me also…Sonny fell asleep in a chair in the waiting room of a hospital in Portsmouth, Ohio ’n crossed over as they’re wont to say back home in the States…

My buddy, ‘Pig’ Phillips was born on the 1st of September in 1937 also which makes him oldurn me by three weeks…

Pig is, as they say, the spittin’ image of his grandfather ’n Mort Bradley lived t’be 103 or 104, I think…Anyway, Pig is liable to live longer’n that just out of plain old spitefulness which I’ve been told he inherited from his grandfather…

I’m thinkin’ I might have to stick around just to keep an eye on him ‘cuz he has a powerful tendency to get into trouble when he’s on his own for any length of time…

Ah well, birthdays come ’n go for all of us, at least for the period of time that we’re here…In the beginning, birthdays are big celebrations with all the family ’n friends gathered ‘round…there’s parties ’n cake ’n ice cream, happy times….then, as we age, birthdays happen whether we want ‘em to or not 'n a lot of time, we'd just as soon skip them...Jack Benny (a once upon a time famous comedian) famously never got past the age of 39...anyway, when we get old, if we get old, they become occasions for celebration again…not quite sure how I feel about that howsumever so I’ll just take a wait ’n see attitude toward the whole thing...

Not quite sure why I’m dwelling so much on age…it ain’t a p’tickularly interesting subject…after all, anyone can get old, all you have t’do is live long enuff...

Imagine, a whole entire day devoted to work....

...makes a body tired just thinkin' about it!

Well, it’s Labor Day ag’in ~ comes around every year just like clockwork ~ kind’a nice to have some stability in what seems t’be an ever-changing world…   I don’t know if the world has really changed or if it’s just me getting older ’n find m’self saying things that remind me of my grandparents…

John Sam ’n Nora Smith were my grandparents, well, along with Hannah Bradshaw Howard, my maternal grandmother who lived in northern Michigan, but I barely remember my great grandparents ~ my great grandma was blind, had been for twenty years or so by the time I came around…macular degeneration, I think, altho’ it certainly wudn’t diagnosed as such back then…My father ’n my Aunt Eunice both ended up with the same malady ’n I have a cousin that endures it now ~ I’d say I have something to look forward to but Gawd!  I hope not….

Anyhow, I was a boy during World War II and the country as a whole was fiercely patriotic…Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or FDR, as he was popularly known, was President and the country, even those who vilified him, stood four-square behind him…(four-square, an adjective but also an adverb meaning firmly or resolutely)…

FDR’s picture hung in every classroom in every schoolhouse the length ’n breadth of this land ’n every child in each and every classroom placed their hand upon their heart ’n recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning whether they understood all the words or not…but, we were patriots, ever’ last one of us ’n we didn’t take any guff about it either…

There were a few Civil War veterans still alive when I was a boy ~ not many, ’n those were dying off as fast as they could but there were a few of ‘em left ’n they pretty near always started their stories about how the world sure had changed since they were young…

I’m thinking that I read somewhere that the only certain constant was the inevitability of change which conflicts with that old saw, the more things change, the more they stay the same….

Ahhhh me, life is full of contradictions, ain’t it?

The Democrat Bellweather......

My Democrat Bellweather (who shall remain relatively anonymous) tells me that Obama is really sticking it to the Republicans by forcing them to vote on whether or not the USA should intervene in Syria ~ I told him that I tho’t Obama was more like the schoolboy sissy who boasted to his friends that he’d punch out the school bully if only his mommy’ud let him…The Bellweather didn’t think that was funny ’n insisted that the latest poll showed that the majority of Americans supported military intervention ~ I told him that I didn’t think so ’n that the last poll I’d seen saiid only about 25% of Americans supported that view but he insisted that ABC or maybe it was CBS said definitely that 75% of Americans supported Obama…

When I pointed out that ‘way back when the devil incarnate, George Bush, was President ’n Commander-in-Chief of these United States, the majority of Amerians ’n indeed Congress itself (including Democrats) had supported the intervention in Iraq, he then insisted that this is totally different today because the Syrians had used chemical weapons on their own people…

When I pointed out that Saddam Hussein (’n his co-hort, Chemical Ali) had used chemical weapons on his own people, the Bellweather then insisted that was different and that the devil incarnate Bush had lied about MWD’s and that made all the difference in the world…

Then he bet me a cup of coffee that if the do-nothing Republicans dared to vote against him, Obama would just take command and do it all himself as he had declared on national teevee  that he didn’t need Congress anyway, thank you very much…

Well, I had to admit that I’d heard the big O say that myownself during his teleprompted speech but that I still tho’t that he was just looking for Congress to give him an excuse to back out of the threats that he’d made previously…

Which just goes to show that when you walk the dogs down Crestline in the gloaming, you just never know what lurks in the minds of men...