Under the Influencer

I finally figured out why I'm not more successful. I lack influencers. Following only my own heart and instincts has gotten me nowhere. What led me to this understanding was an article in today's Wall Street Journal, which started out this way: "Celebrity influencers like Serena Williams, Ciara and Chamath Palihapitiya have jumped on the blank-check company boom."

Full disclosure, I also don't know what a blank-check company is so that might be the real reason. But I suspect it's more likely because I never even heard of the second and third influencers on that list, and as far I know Serena Williams is a tennis player and since I am not one, in what way might she influence me?   Skorts and sneakers? As for the other two named in the article , I didn't bother to Google them because, honestly, I don't care.

Still, it got me thinking about who are my influencers and that's when I realized with a start that I have none. I used to have a couple but they died, and so now I'm on my own, unless you count my cat who definitely has heavy influence on when I get up in the morning. He jumps on my stomach at about five AM and starts lobbying for breakfast by pawing my face, meowing in my ear and turning up the purring to high. These behaviors influence me to get up and drag myself to the kitchen to feed him. By then I'm awake and make some coffee. So yes, I have an influencer and his name is Big Lurch.

But he's no celebrity. And he's not even human. So no wonder I'm going nowhere fast.

Spiritual Spring Cleaning

I have gained so much weight during this pandemic that even my mantra doesn't fit anymore. I've been waiting for Covid to cease and desist before starting my diet, but the way things look that might not ever happen. So now I need a new diet and a new mantra, two things that are hard to shop for.

My old mantra worked like a charm. Normally the minute I started repeating the opening lines in my head  -- "Let nothing upset you, let nothing frighten you" -- I would start to relax. But now I just figuratively roll my eyes and think, "That's a crock, since everything upsets me and most things frighten me." (Calling your mantra a crock is not a good sign.) Anyway, I think I found one. 

As for a new diet, that's easy. The one I'm leaning towards involves no eating whatsoever. No weighing and measuring, no writing anything down. All I have to do is keep my mouth shut and repeat my new mantra: 

Accept what is, 

let go of what was, 

have faith in what will be.

Just Be

Remember Frank Sinatra? 

He was one of the biggest superstars the world has ever seen, but he's long dead and his music is all but forgotten except for turning up now and then as the soundtrack for a TV commercial.

So what? 

So forget fame. Accomplishment is highly overrated; just being alive should suffice. 

Breathing in and breathing out. That's good enough for me.

The Coming Intelligentsia

Yesterday I heard a man on the radio giving a tribute to his niece, one of the unfortunate victims of the recent Colorado supermarket massacre. She was a young woman "with so much potential." She was "one of a kind." To illustrate this, he explained that "you never knew from day to day what color her hair would be, or what tattoo she would get next."

Apparently hair color and tattoos are indicators of this generation's talents, skills and brains. So I was surprised this morning at the market when the checkout girl with the turquoise hair did the following. When bagging my groceries, she set aside a large bottle of V-8 juice, a 4-pack of toilet paper and a cardboard container of Comet cleanser. The job finished, I was presented with two fairly empty large brown grocery bags, along with the other loose items. 

I asked, "What about these things?"

She responded, "They shouldn't go in with your groceries."

I asked, "Why not? How am I supposed to carry all these things?"

She responded, "They could contaminate the food."

Besides her turquoise hair, she had a tattoo of a teddy bear on one forearm and a unicorn on the other. Obviously this girl has a lot of potential.

What's So Funny, Kamala?

Wanna hear a sick joke? A Syrian-born naturalized citizen named Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa walks into a Colorado supermarket and kills ten people, one of them a policeman who has responded to 911 calls, and the cops arrive and shoot him in the leg and take him into custody where they tend to his wounds and give him clean clothes, three square meals a day and a roof over his head until his trial, which will be God knows when, but George Floyd, a black American who did nothing to nobody, they killed on the spot. WTF?

Who's in charge here? If it's that Jamaican-Indian-American woman who got no votes from anyone among 18 candidates during the campaign and so dropped out first, and who laughed her raucous stoned laugh yesterday when asked if she was going to the chaotic southern border (now under her domain) and said, "Well not today! Maybe sometime," it's no wonder things are screwed up.

Maybe we should all emigrate to Mexico.

Jewish Lives Matter

That's what I'm talking about!

Enough with the black lives already. Yeah, we get it, they matter. But you know what? So do some other lives that get no attention whatsoever. Like Jewish lives. At least where I live, they don't matter at all. There are possibly fewer Jews than blacks living in Maine, I'm not sure. Either way, we're supposed to take their holiday called Kwanzaa seriously but you hear not a peep about Passover, which is about 5,000 years older than Kwanzaa.

FYI, Passover starts next Saturday night. It lasts for eight days. During the holiday, Jews are forbidden to eat bread, instead eating matzoh, which is unleavened (no yeast) and thus afforded a quick getaway when the Egyptians were bearing down on the Jews all those years ago. I know, there are no Egyptians bearing down on me today, but it's symbolic. So yesterday I went off in search of some matzoh for my upcoming seder (dinner) which kicks off the holiday, followed by a week of no bread. 

First I went to Hannaford's, pretty much the go-to supermarket chain around here. They had a pathetic display in their "kosher" aisle, which amounted to about three shelves, two feet wide, at the end of the "International Foods" aisle. There was no legitimate matzoh, just Gluten-Free Matzoh Squares and a few boxes of Everything matzoh, for all those fans of Everything bagels. No good. Matzoh is plain, made of flour and water, and certainly no onions or poppyseeds or pepper or salt or sesame seeds!

Next I tried Shaw's, the other big supermarket chain here that everyone hates but goes to when all else fails. They had also had a Kosher shelf or two, but the only matzoh came "lightly salted." I bit the bullet and bought three boxes, assuming I would find the real stuff somewhere else. (I was wrong.)

Back home, I called my favorite small store, the Bow Street Market. The manager was eager to help. I asked if they had matzoh, and she said, after a pregnant pause, "In what form?" I took that as a no, or rather a no idea what matzoh is. My next attempt was a neighborhood natural foods store. The guy who answered responded like I was speaking in tongues. "What's that? Maccha? Some kind of tea?" he asked. "No," I explained, "it's some kind of cracker." When he said "Can you spell it?", I hung up. 

Finally, a call to Whole Foods in Portland, Maine's largest city, was not answered, despite my trying several times, although I found some of the real stuff on their website and could get it delivered to my door in about a week. Alas, too late. So I'll make my own and hold my breath waiting for the state of Maine to decide that Jewish Lives Matter.

Prince Harry's New Job

Prince Harry, who recently relinquished his role as a full-time working member of the British monarchy and moved with his wife, an Actress of Color, to a fancy neighborhood in California's Silicon Valley, has taken a new job. Rather than doing nothing for a living like he did before, he will now be an executive with a Silicon Valley startup, BetterUp Inc., a coaching and mental health firm. 

The new baby, Archie.

To explain his new role, Prince Harry wrote in an email, thus committed it to print and cannot deny it, "I intend to help create impact in people's lives." To be clear, he's not saying he will go all the way to actually creating impact in people's lives, just that he will "help" create it. 

I had to look up the word impact since I was stymied as to whether or not I have any or if need help from someone like Harry to get some. Besides the obvious definition like when something strikes another thing hard, I found this: To have a strong effect on someone or something.

So basically Prince Harry's new job will be to help have a strong effect on people. Hmmmm. His new boss said that Harry is expected to "advocate publicly on topics related to mental health." Hopefully he will start with his wife Meghan Markle, who is mixed-race and considers the entire British Monarchy to be racist because an unnamed person asked during her pregnancy what color skin she thought her unborn child might have. (Turns out it's white.) I'm pretty sure Meghan could use some impact.

How Much Worse Can Biden/Harris Get?

Five White House staffers were recently fired for having smoked marijuana in the past. Too bad VP Kamala Harris was not one of them, despite publicly stating that she has smoked marijuana and she "did inhale," and that "it should be legalized because it brings a lot of people a lot of joy."

The Gruesome Twosome has only been in office for a couple of months. God knows how much worse things will get until they are mercifully impeached. 

$elling $adness

A snuff film, or snuff movie, is "a movie in a purported genre of movies in which a person is actually murdered or commits suicide. It may or may not be made for financial gain, but is supposedly 'circulated amongst a jaded few for the purpose of entertainment'. ---Wikipedia

A reader responds....

Having completed the Sunday crossword in record time, I held my nose and turned the pages of yesterday's New York Times magazine to see if there were anything else of value therein. Turned out very little, unless you count a recipe for a peanut butter wafer cake I will not bake but the accompanying photo was pretty. A quick glance at the letters to the editor, a weekly declaration of love to the Times from its adoring subscribers, contained the usual shouts of glee. Several dealt with a past article I was glad I hadn't seen. Some phrases from a few of the letters follow:

"I was emotionally thrown by the cover photo...."

"This was heartbreaking."

"Perhaps people do not know someone who has had to watch a family member die on their smartphone. They should look at these images."

"The photograph of a man in his hospital room after his ventilator was shut off, his bereaved family watching, was poignant."

"The despair in the picture of a woman saying goodbye to her husband made me cry for hours."

"A story to break your heart."

Hey, I'm sad enough about all the horrors of the world, I certainly don't need some greedy newspaper publisher making me feel worse. To what end? I'm pretty sure that most of us have just about all the sadness we can handle; seeing more is hardly beneficial. Just donate to charities that help people in dire straits. You will actually accomplish something and make yourself feel good at the same time.

Kama, Kama, Kama Chameleon

Kamala dusting off her Indian look.

With the recent murders of several Asian-Americans, thank God we now have, according to the Huffington Post, "an Asian-American woman at the helm." So there it is in black and white: Nobody thinks Joe Biden is at the helm. (That's a relief, I thought it was just me.)

More to the point, who knew when we elected our VP that she was such an all-purpose figurehead? One minute she's black and celebrating Kwanzaa and loving Tupac, the next she's Asian just like those poor ladies in the spa. And her husband is Jewish, so we can assume that if anyone targets a synagogue she can claim she's Jewish by marriage.

Sadly she is not at all white so we are all on our own, what with Joe being, well, you know, not at the helm.

Kamala's Woke Vagina

The most important part of Kamala's Vogue magazine cover: Her Keds.

Most American adults do not mature past the level of about the 9th grade in high school. Well, most men. I know this because my post yesterday had the word "vagina" in the title and my readership numbers went through the roof. Apparently vagina is click bait. I realize that's a sexist statement and not very woke, but I am less interested in being woke than in being honest, something that matters less and less since Biden took office and started blaming the immigration crisis at our southern border on his predecessor, who in fact had all but eradicated the problem.

Intelligence is also a less valuable commodity today than fame. All you have to do to rise to the top of the heap is become an "influencer" online and have a huge following, then pay to get yourself on TV, which is how it works in many instances. Another route to fame and fortune is to publish a self-aggrandizing autobiography. Or you could simply get hand-picked for greatness based on your skin color and gender. A great example of this is our current Veep, who self-identifies as black and female and gushes over childhood memories celebrating Kwanzaa with her family. But according to several reputable fact-checking organizations, Kwanza would not have loomed large in her family. 

The Director of the Media Research Center put it this way: "Harris was born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother in 1964, and Kwanzaa was created by radical lefty (and convicted felon) Maulana Karenga in 1966. Kwanzaa is celebrated by a tiny fraction of black Americans, to the point where even NPR ran a story asking,“Is Kwanzaa Still A Thing?”

Despite a tendency to stretch the truth, Harris is clearly very woke. Proving the point, she wore Keds for her Vogue magazine cover photo! And by all reports she definitely has a vagina, hence the title of this post.

Bad Vagina

Censorship is growing at an alarming rate these days. This morning I read an article about the actress Ellen Page who decided she is really a man and so changed her name to Elliot, got a boy haircut and is now "very comfortable in his body." I was perplexed as to how those things made her feel more like a man, and so in the comments section following the article I asked, "Does Elliot have a vagina?"

My comment was disallowed because of "inappropriate language." So I rewrote it to ask if the body part located between her legs was unchanged. That comment was fine. So then I wrote the word "Vagina" all by itself as a comment, and it was disallowed due to "inappropriate language."

"Penis" was also not allowed, but "breast" was fine.

Who Cares About Meghan Markle?

Growing older has its perks. Nothing scares me anymore since I've already done it at least once, with the exception of bungee-jumping due to an inborn fear of dangling at the end of a giant rubber band from a very high place over a deep body of water. Since I have no desire to conquer this fear, I will amend my statement by saying I've already done everything I've wanted to do at least once.

What I haven't done yet is die, and so can claim no understanding of what it's like. I have read many books on the subject which have been of little value since none of the authors of those books have died either, so what do they know? Conjecture is not knowledge.

Most, if not all, people share this not-knowing (and thus fear about) death with me. To avoid thinking about it, they instead focus on whether or not Governor Andrew Cuomo touched someone inappropriately, whether or not the Royal Family of England is racist, whether or not Donald Trump hurt or harmed America as president, whether or not the climate is changing because of man-made reasons, whether or not men who change into women should be allowed to compete in women's sports, whether or not red meat is bad or good for you, how many illegal immigrants crossing our borders are too many, what words are unacceptable to utter in a civilized society and which TV series offers the best distraction to all of it.

What you don't hear much about is death, which is a shame since we're all headed there; it would help so much to be prepared. The clearest depiction of death can be found in the movie Synecdoche, New York, a 2008 film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman and starring the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I believe that if people watch this film followed by the movie Groundhog Day on a regular basis, they would stop arguing about petty things and instead learn how to bake a pie from scratch, paint a self-portrait, knit a sweater, go fishing, refinish furniture, plant a garden and sail a boat while they still can. 

Dead Man Talking

I make it a point to avoid scary movies. They stay in my head for a long time and add to my general anxiety, which is already plentiful. So I covered my eyes and ran from the room where my husband was watching a horror movie on our giant TV last night. But it was too late; the image had quickly burned into my consciousness.

It was some sort of a robot speaking into the camera. It was old and pasty, wrinkly with squinty eyes. It spoke in a monotone and barely moved a muscle. It seemed dead, yet it was hoisted up behind a lectern and purported to be the President of the United States! I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but stifled a scream and ran up to bed, seeking solace in a good night's sleep.

Yet this morning, the nightmare continues -- there are news reports given by people in the media who watched it and thought it was a great speech actually written and delivered by a great man!

God help us all.

  

Just Say No to Bad News

In the interest of having a nice day I have decided to write a post that has nothing negative in it. 

No criticism of anyone, no mention of how the number of fat people is growing out of control and taxing our health care system, or that Joe Biden, the leader of the free world, cannot complete simple sentences, or how Covid rages on despite the vaccination of millions, or that Americans are still talking about the British royals like it matters to any of us, or anything concerning the thousands of unaccompanied children crossing our southern border illegally who will have nowhere to go and nothing to eat -- just all good things. So here goes:

Here in Maine the temperature will soar to 52 degrees by noon. That should melt some the piles of snow surrounding our house, making my cat happy, although it will drop to 12 degrees by Sunday night so I won't pack away my down puffy coat just yet.

Blonds On Parade

What with all the women coming forward to accuse Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment, it's interesting to see how far women have come since the start of the MeToo Movement, which brought to attention the fact that women are sick and tired of being treated like sex objects. Below are photos of just a few of the women who have risen to the top in the TV news business. As you can see, they are striving for individuality and obviously seek to accentuate their intelligence and downplay their feminine wiles.

Man Up, Meghan

Being an American who has visited England once in the last 50 years, I ignored last Sunday night's much-publicized interview of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the former Duke and Duchess of Somewhere, instead watching the final installment of an engrossing Netflix documentary about the Mormon Church. But no matter; the interview with Oprah Winfrey as interrogator has been a staple of the news, including radio, TV and print, since it aired. With so much coverage, you'd think it mattered. It doesn't. Unless you are a member of the royal family, which nobody in this country is. 

So what's all the hype about? America's favorite subject: Racism. Seems that Meghan, pregnant with her first child, had to endure the horror of "someone in the royal family" asking her "how dark his skin might be when he's born." No doubt the question was prompted by the fact that Meghan is biracial although she looks white. 

I'm trying to imagine just how much that hurt her. She said she was suicidal during her time in the royal family. Was that one of the reasons? Hmmmm, let's take stock.

Meghan is very beautiful, fabulously rich, lives in a gorgeous home in an exclusive neighborhood (Oprah is her neighbor), and is now so famous she can command acting roles that would otherwise be out of reach due to her mediocre talent. She gave birth to a healthy baby with all his parts in working order. He is not missing his upper lip, or attached to a ventilator in order to take a breath, or suffering from autism. He is not retarded due to the umbilical cord cutting off the blood supply to his brain. Not sure about his skin color, but for sure he's not a leper.

Instead of whining loudly and in public about how much the royal family stifled her, Meghan needs to get down on her knees every day and thank God for the riches he has rained down upon her. or else, who knows...maybe suicide is her best option, since life doesn't;t get much better than hers right now.

Reframing Aging

Before the virus forced us all to stay home I enjoyed a brief volunteer stint with The American Red Cross of Northern New England. I didn't save any lives or give cookies to blood donors, but I did help a team of first responders install new fire alarms in a crumbling  apartment. Anyway, my name remains on their email list so I get to read about what's new at the Red Cross. Today I was alerted to an upcoming lecture that piqued my curiosity: 

 "This presentation is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Feel free to disseminate. Join us as we learn more about what aging means, ageism definitions, theories of ageism, explicit and implicit bias, inter-generational tension and (re)framing principles around aging from our guest speaker with the Gerontological Society of America and the Reframing Aging Initiative."

I looked up the word "reframing" and learned it means "changing the way situations, experiences, events, idea and/or emotions are viewed." I must say that as a 74-year-old I was pretty excited, since I'm sick and tired of how older people are denigrated in America. Just this morning my son related a negative encounter he had with one of his students recently, and he explained her lack of credibility this way: "She turned out to be like 65. Sorry Mom, but you know -- she's old." (There's some of that inter-generational tension they will be discussing in the lecture.)

Anyway, who isn't interested in finding out what aging means? I always thought it meant that over time your body starts falling apart and eventually stops working altogether, but I guess I'm wrong. I might have to check it out.

1984 Updated

Last night during dinner there was a pounding on the front door. Who could it be, we wondered? It sounded urgent. Mitch, quickly putting on his face mask, ran to the door and opened it to a team of men in uniform, all wearing badges that said "Gender Police." Oh no, what had we done? Of course we let them in and asked why they had come. One of them said, "We have a strong belief that you are harboring a Mr. Coffee pot."

It was true. Begging for mercy we explained that we no longer used it having graduated to the popular Genderqueer Krups, but Mr. Coffee was a back-up when we had a crowd. Naturally with Covid we stopped throwing parties, and things being what they are we should have taken it to the dump long ago just to be safe. Still, we asked how they found out about our old Mr. Coffee stuck way in the back of the cupboard.

"An alert neighbor spotted it at a party here and sent us this photo," one of the officers said. It was from a Christmas party two years ago! Who could have taken such a picture and then turned us in to the authorities? We were dumbfounded. The fact that it was a first offense allowed us leniency, so we were spared the embarrassment of it being made public. It was just a $300 fine and we had to relinquish the offensive coffee pot, plus filters. 

Fortunately we had put our face masks on before we let them in so they hadn't noticed we're Jewish. (Somehow our dinner of brisket and potato kugel on the dining room table did not give us away.) If they had, oy vay, I don't even want to think about it. I know one thing for sure -- I would not be writing this post on my computer. The punishment around here for Obnoxious Religious Separatism is much tougher than the one for Blatant Archaic Genderism.

That's Life

I give up. The wave is overwhelming. My petty protestations against fat people and mutilated genitalia are meaningless since those atrocities have been embraced lovingly by the masses. Any lamenting of their prevalence in society is too late and of little consequence.

What's got me thinking this way is a comment I received from an anonymous person, of course, who likely is obese and transgendered and who called me every name in the book (of mean names) for my past criticism of those particular qualities.

So go ahead: Be fat and mutilate yourself if you want. It's none of my business. And to anyone who may have felt insulted by things I have written in the past, well, that's life. 

How Offensive Can I Be?

Godammit, what's a person got to do to get cancelled around here? I would LOVE that! My blog would shoot to the top of everyone's reading list and I might even make a couple of bucks! Dr. Suess books are now selling for over $700 on Amazon, and not just the six that got cancelled for "racist" content but a lot of his other titles too.

I suppose I could say things like Chinese people really do have slanted eyes, most blacks have rhythm and Jews are way smarter than everyone else. That might be a good place to start. I could go on and say that Latinos have funny accents, Irish people are drunks, Germans are dictatorial and follow directions too easily and French people are snooty. Pit bulls should be eliminated as a breed. Ditto Democrats.

Hey, this is fun. Obama wasn't born in America, we never landed on the moon, 9/11 was an inside job, Sandy Hook was staged (the dead kids were actors), Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster murdered and Michelle Obama is a tranny. Biden stole the election. Kamala Harris isn't black. All Lives Matter. Fat people are hideous and unhealthy and cost our health care system billions of dollars.

The food at The Olive Garden is atrocious. Tennis is boring. So is golf, except for Tiger Woods who is a hoot. Michael Jackson was into animals, not children. Covid was cooked up by Pelosi and the Chinese to get Trump out of office. The vaccine is a hoax. All Muslims are terrorists. Rachel Maddow is a man. So is Caitlyn Jenner.

Life on the Plantation

A plantation of basketball players.

A basketball coach at Creighton University was suspended indefinitely for saying the word "plantation." The school is currently considering further punishment. Apparently the word causes "undue pain" to black people, and since many if not most basketball players are black, well, that's a whole lotta pain. I wonder, did any of them have to go to the ER or was it strictly emotional pain caused by not knowing what a plantation is and being embarrassed to admit it?

Brace yourself. Here's what coach Greg McDermott said after his team suffered a loss that brought them to below 14th place in their league, which is where they were before the game: 

"Guys, we got to stick together. We need both feet in. I need everybody to stay on the plantation. I can’t have anybody leave the plantation.”

I can just imagine the chaos in the locker room after that statement:

Player #1: What's a plantation?

Player # 2: I think it's like a banana, only smaller.

Player # 3: No, that's a plantain. It's something like an Indian reservation for black people.

Player # 4: Hey man, you can't say Indians anymore! It's Native Americans.

Player # 3: No shit! Please don't report me.

Player # 4: Sorry nigga, but I'm gonna have to turn you in.

The Lure of Fame and Fortune

A while back I started watching cooking videos posted by an Alabama grandmother named Brenda Gantt. Her natural innocence was charming. No makeup, dowdy as can be, she was teaching people who don't know the first thing about cooking how to turn out reasonable, albeit unhealthy, foods for their families. Along with her cooking she included a dollop of religion, often reading from the Bible when the mood struck her. Her down-home style and southern accent were infectious, and her following grew, not only in number but probably in girth since all her recipes are very fattening, thus yummy.

Soon enough our innocent Brenda started to plug certain companies while dishing out her southern charm. A favorite of hers is White Lily Flour, which she constantly touts as THE ONLY FLOUR TO USE in her biscuits, pies and dumplings, and whenever flour is called for. She often wears an apron with the White Lily Flour logo on it. Occasionally she plugs someone else too, like the maker of specialty syrups whose name escapes me since who eats syrup?

Today Brenda announced that her Facebook page has hit 2 million followers! Excited about that, and wanting to share that good news with her dedicated followers, she is giving away a prize to one lucky person. All you have to do to enter her "contest" is to follow her Facebook page, follow White Lily Flour on Facebook, and also follow her son-in-law's Facebook page about shepherding, like that's what you care about, and you might win a White Lily Flour apron! (They cost about $20 bucks, available online.)

Instead, I unfollowed Cooking With Brenda Gantt on Facebook. Oh, and I use Hannaford's All-Purpose Flour. It works fine.

Potato Head Questions

Okay, I get the whole gender thing where little girls thought they couldn't grow up to be a CEO of a large corporation or President of the United States and all of that. But I'm confused about this: What was wrong with Mr. Potato Head? Did that name make little girls think they could not grow up to be a Potato Head? Is that a dream of many little girls, or even one? Why did the toy manufacturer decide to drop the Mr. and go with just Potato Head? What other reason could there be?

Is it Too Late for Me and Tommy Lee Jones?

Four years ago I finished writing a semi-autobiographical novel based on a true story. It relates what transpired within my own family after a life-changing accident and has characters based on my husband, his twin brother, my sister-in-law, my son, my niece and two nephews and myself. It's funny, slightly lewd, containing a lot of stretched truth and a lot of what really happened. I posted it in its entirety on this very blog in 2017, under the title "It's Fiction." 

Not one of my family members has read it yet, saying "it's too hard to read online." That's the subject of my next book, tentatively titled "Trapped With the Wrong People."

Cancelled and Proud

This blog has been cancelled. I can tell that from the readership stats. And it's no wonder: I think for myself and never parrot the party line, regardless of the party. I'm not a team player and never have been. Pulling out the ultimate cliche, I follow the beat of a different drum, and that beat is drumming in my head all the time, drowning out the chatter of the masses. But the final straw was that I made it clear I do not hate Donald and Melania Trump. That is a sin beyond all others for reasons I cannot comprehend. 

Drawing from a Dr. Suess book

 In fact, I'm proud to be cancelled since I join many others who are beacons of light. (If this keeps happening, pretty soon there will be a Cancelled Pride Day.) Cancel culture knows no bounds. Whoever dares to think something unique, not in keeping with the unspoken yet totally understood boundaries of the People In Power, is crushed like a bug. How dare they disagree with the norm?

Dr. Suess is the latest former icon now condemned as a racist shithead. His books are being removed from elementary schools. The man is suddenly no good, despite the fact that in 2015 President Obama said in a speech to White House interns, "Pretty much all the stuff you need to know is in Dr. Suess." So what's the problem? 

Seems he worked as an illustrator many years before he became famous, drawing what is now considered to be racist advertisements for a mosquito repellent. Never mind that he had to make a living and at the time the ads were not considered racist; they are now and HE SUCKS. Besides, he drew Chinese people with slanted eyes! Yes, they do actually have slanted eyes, but nice people don't talk about things like that.

 Sort of like not calling people "fat" but large, heavy, or big-boned, as if that makes it okay. (See photo.)

Trump Trumps Golden Globes

I call my dentist "the God of Dentistry." He is simply the best in his field. I have concluded this after experiencing the skills of many others over seven decades. If and when he retires I will simply not use my teeth anymore. Our lawn guy is also great, much better than the last one who did a bad job mowing and a worse job plowing in winter. The one we have now is a perfectionist who knows everything about landscaping. Trimming this and pruning that, even chopping down dying trees, he has improved our property 100%.

I could sing the praises of many others: my dental hygienist, my CrossFit trainer and the guy at the fish market all excel at what they do. None of them is famous, just doing their jobs without citations for excellence. Yet actors and actresses, directors, costumers and even makeup people, who really, when you think about it add little value to society besides distracting us from problems we would otherwise be busy solving, get all gussied up countless times each year to receive accolades for their work. 

The Oscars, the Tonys, the Golden Globes, The Emmys, The People's Choice Awards, the Obies and others too numerous to list here, perpetuate the glorification of the entertainment industry. This is done shamelessly, as if every single actor and actress has found the cure for cancer. 

Last night a typical awards show heralded the winners of Golden Globes, cousin to the Oscars that includes TV performances. Channel surfing, I passed by it several times and caught glimpses of smiling presenters in black sequined attire presenting awards to similarly dressed recipients who gave speeches I didn't hear. 

Earlier in the evening I did catch most of Donald Trump speaking to the choir at CPAC. He looked better than ever, rested and a bit thinner, his hair less orange and more realistic. He was funny and seemed relaxed as he trashed Joe Biden and a host of turncoat Republicans. It was fun to see an actual human being talking about politics in everyday language, something missing from the current administration. God help us all if he stays in the political arena, but I found his particular brand of egotism easier to take than the effusive back-slapping among the Hollywood elite over at the Golden Globes.