potluck – Little Home In The Valley

Rainy morning, gray September skies, cat comes in all indignant with wet fur along her back. She takes the weather even more personally than I do, uttering little kitty curses (silently, but I can see them in her eyes) when the rain or wind come up and find her in her outdoor hideouts.

She has her schedules, and god forbid external circumstances force her to alter them. She’s a bit like me in that. It’s one of the reasons that when we travel I try to avoid staying in other people’s homes. I appreciate the offers, and I am certainly aware of the economies involved, but I’d rather stay with strangers than friends. That way I can be the oddball slob that is my destiny without exciting comment, at least comment that reaches me.

If I want to hang out in a bathrobe until noon I have no one that I need to answer to but Robin, and she has given up on changing that aspect of my behavior (we all choose which battles to fight, and which to let slide, don’t we?)

Anyway, today we are traveling to Grand Junction for a doctor’s appointment, and tonight I will sleep in my own bed, having followed my idiosyncratic list of things to do. Life is good.

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Acony Bell, by Gillian Welch

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These days we have a three-member Supreme Court and a six-member panel of Disgraced Sycophants. One can hope for change. Congress gave them lifetime appointments, Congress can take them away.

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One of my favorite hot beverages these days is the Mexican mocha. That bit of cayenne in the mix is just the right thing on chilly mornings. Most of our local coffee shops offer it … some have a heavier hand with the pepper than others, but none I’ve sampled so far have exceeded the bounds of propriety. It is almost tasty enough to be sinful, and falls just short of too good for ordinary mortals.

But if one did overdo this good thing, I can perfectly understand why the gods might step in with some colorful punishment as they used to do in the good old Greek mythology days. Perhaps something like being strapped to a huge thistle along a busy road for eternity, where passersby were encouraged to pat your face with a small cayenne-saturated pillow.

Maybe this is too much … dunno … not being Greek and all.

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We went to an Indivisible potluck social gathering on Friday. It was pretty well attended, and the participants went to varying amounts of effort in bringing something to eat and to share. Some showed up with a few muffins from the grocery store, one lady brought a handful of black grapes.

The piéce de resistance was a Tater Tot Casserole, from a recipe published by Senator Amy Klobuchar, presently a candidate for governor of the state of Minnesota.

It was superb. For a native of the Midwest, especially a youthful frequenter of Lutheran Church basement suppers, it was a plateful of blissfully crunchy comfort food.

A bite transports the chewer to another time and place, much as a psychedelic agent might, often one that is populated by friends and relatives who have since traveled to other dimensions. Definitely mood-altering. Dangerously habit-forming.

In Minnesota, consuming too much of this casserole is felt to impair driving abilities, and should one be stopped on the way home from the church supper, they should be prepared to be asked where those stains on the front of their shirt came from and then asked to walk a straight line.

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After typing the entry above, I realized that much of the civilized world might not know what a tater tot is. They are small barrel-shaped chunks of potato scraps that are mixed with flour or cornstarch, then seasoned with salt, onion powder, and other spices. They are then baked or french-fried to make them crispy.

They were invented in 1953 by F. Nephi Grigg and Golden Grigg, the founders of the Ore-Ida potato company, as a clever way to use up leftover potato scraps from french-fry production, instead of throwing them away.

Stuff to be thrown away + ingenuity = greasy delightfulness

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All My Relations, by Ulali

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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

H. L. Mencken

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When I was a lad, a few dinosaurs still roamed the earth and most people lived in caves or slept out in the open. Television, computers, artificial intelligence, and air hadn’t been invented yet. It was that long ago.

We were ignorant but happy, living out our average lifespans of twenty years and then being gobbled by some scaly predator when our running speed had begun to slow.

So the difficulties of old age … almost nobody had ’em. Certainly not in enough numbers to care about. Actually, getting past a ripe old age at twenty drew suspicion that one might be possessed of some evil spirit, so my family of origin was forced to move frequently to avoid unpleasantness at the hands of our neighbors.

But, hey, who doesn’t have problems? Right? At some point we scuttled across the Bering Strait and invented real estate, whereupon we immediately began cutting up the new land into parcels to sell to the next new arrivals.

Today I look back on those growing-up years fondly, and yesterday when members of our present government were voicing the view that all progressives were possessed of evil spirits, I felt right at home. It was like old times.

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Mr. Tambourine Man, by Odetta

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Tale #1: One day when I was working at doctoring in South Dakota, my nurse handed me the charts of the next two patients who had come in for well-child examinations. They were from somewhere in the part of Nebraska that still hadn’t been named. Interesting was the fact that they had received no immunizations.

When I learned that the names of the two little girls were Quasar and Zanzibar, I paused with my hand on the doorknob of the room. At that point I knew that the chance I would change anyone’s mind and the vaccinations would begin that day was small … minuscule … and that proved to be the case. The kids were delightful, their mother polite and pleasant but adamant in not wanting to discuss issues of preventive medicine. I never saw them again.

Tale #2: There was a chiropractor who was fairly well-to-do, a complete charlatan, and rarely kept a wife for more than three or four years. When wife number four came along, it took almost no time at all for there to be two infants coming to our clinic. I was chosen as the family pediatrician and thus ran into the husband’s policy of NO IMMUNIZATIONS.

The children’s mother was from a New England state, and always had a sort of sorely stressed air about her. For she’d realized that her spouse was a fool who tired of his wives rather quickly, and that her old friends and family were thousands of miles away. After several years of marriage she made up her mind to take leave of the old prat, and this time it was she that filed for divorce.

During the drawn-out legal proceedings, she did something interesting. Bringing the kids in for routine exams, she had both of them immunized and brought right up-to-date, without telling their father. It was not quite the right motive and more than a little spiteful, but I obliged her in her important work of disobedience.

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This Is Definitely A Rogue’s Gallery

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Before daylight this morning as I was composing more of the trash that I affectionately call my writing, I noticed the motion-sensitive spotlights in front of my neighbor’s house light up. An instant later a vulpine silhouette crossed the beam running from stage right to stage left. The fox was out, on a chilly night.

The Fox, by Bill Staines

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Here’s part of a longer piece and all I can say is that I am glad she isn’t angry with me. At least I hope she’s not.

Of course, this isn’t really about what we need to do — we’re already doing it. It’s about what the mainstream media, and anyone still cowering in silence, needs to do. Because silence isn’t neutral — it’s surrender. It hands the microphone to a bully and pretends that’s balance. And I need to be clear — this isn’t just about him. It’s about the crowd that roars for him too. The ones who leap to their feet when he says he hates half the country. The ones who fist-pump when he spits bile and take it as permission to be their worst selves. They need to know we see them too. They need to know this isn’t patriotism — it’s corrosion. It isn’t strength — it’s rot. Every cheer is a confession of their own emptiness. Every laugh is proof of how small they’ve let themselves become. And we aren’t pretending it’s normal. We’re calling it what it is: indecency on parade, depravity dressed up as politics. And the minute we stop saying that out loud, the minute we start shrugging and moving on, is the minute they win.

JOJOfROMJERZ AND THE SIREN

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Our chapter of Indivisible got together Monday evening for a potluck supper. What savage revolutionaries we are! It was a small group, but we only see one another at events that are scheduled, and rarely get to talk about anything but the serious business of showing how democracy works to an unpleasant group of people who aren’t one bit interested – our national government..

All in all it was an enjoyable time. We even got to play a new card game whose name I have already forgotten and that’s okay because I sucked at it. The next meetings will all be in preparation for the second No Kings nationwide protest. It will happen on October 18. The last one back in June set records and showed how deep the distrust of the Cluck regime went. Since then they have done so many more bad things we anticipate a larger turnout.

A couple of days ago I was talking with one of my children on the phone, answering the perennial question: How are you doing? In answering I was to realize how much of my time is spent working on things political. I found myself wondering: Hey, you’re an impossibly old dude, what would you be doing now if you didn’t have a large bunch of fascists to deal with? And the answer is … probably nothing as interesting or compelling. So I guess I have Cluck and the gang to thank for providing a seemingly endless source of provocations to think about. Otherwise I might be just noodling in my rocking chair and wondering if it’s time for afternoon tea yet.

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I will close this post with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. I almost hesitate to put it here, because if I really think deeply about it, perhaps there would be nothing in this space to read.

Speak only if it improves upon the silence.

Gandhi

Namaste, brothers and sisters.

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Pastures of Plenty, by Odetta

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Tag: potluck

Fine Dining

Who You Calling Evil?