Agony in Aurora

Hi, I have little to say today.

I feel so sorry about the tragedy unfolded today in Aurora, CO, where a young gunman let loose a volley of death and destruction upon a theater full of hapless people, mostly young people probably, who were there to watch a movie.

I am horrified to hear that the youngest wounded person is a baby of three or four months.  Who would take a baby to a midnight showing of a loud, violent movie? The same persons who would, if they hadn't taken him, leave him home alone in his crib while they reveled in horrifics at the show.

Some young person today said that he saw a family with several young children cowering in the theater.  Why were they out there anyway?  Why would anyone take children to such a film, and in the middle of the night?

Yes, I know--I have gone off on a tangent of the plot as I often do.  But the whole scenario, and we haven't even gotten to the tragedy of the loco shooter, is just too typical of the nut-scape of today's America for me. 

I know that the young man is psychologically unhealthy.  Apparently he was going for a doctorate at a university but had been deflected from his purpose.  I guess we will hear how, if not why, these steps in the grim plot evolved, over the next few weeks.  And then we will forget about it and throw another few boxes of cheese balls to the kids and tell them to shut up and get in the car, we are going to the show.

Something is really wrong with our whole system when forty and fifty year old persons never live at a level over junior high school, in their minds, their aspirations, their ideals.  Grow up, America--but how are you going to do that, when nothing in your life has prepared you for what you have become?
YAZZYBEL

Political Prediction Part Deux

Good day. I have been readin' and studyin' on Absolom!Absolom! by Wm Faulker all day, so my mind is running in apocalyptic circles.  (Book club coming up, you know.)

A friend of mine the other day said she'd sampled my blog but in a nutshell had found it too full of day to day trivialities. Well, sorry, but my life is full of day to day trivialities, and I should blush to say it perhaps, but I like it. 

But sometimes a larger theme looms up, and that is what I am coming to yesterday and today.

Let me begin by saying that I am a Democrat by registration, and by persuasion (my husband persuaded me,lol) . No, I see much of life through the lens of Liberalism and cannot see anyway to look at human kinds of subjects.

However, though I did vote for Barack Obama last time, and cried with emotion when he won (thinking that it meant something in the turbulent history of this nation),  I am profoundly disappointed in his conduct of the office ever since he took over, put in Rahm Emmanuel as busybody in chief, and put in Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geitner to further bring our financial fortunes to their knees.  Obamacare (I dare to say it) has been the crowning blow, and I did hear with my own two ears when Nancy Pelosi say with charming careless ease, "We'll just have to pass it to know what's in it." What fatuousness.

Let's get it straight. I am not against Socialized Medicine, horrible though it may be. I am not against over-taxing the rich.  I am against blowing away the post office and the public schools; I am for improving them and making them work.

But I am not happy with the President.  If he has just been sparing us from the horrible economic axe that is bound to fall, he has done wrong.  We should have been trying to bear it rather than passing it on to our children.  I feel that if there's been a mistake in the books, it's best cleared up as soon as possible.  The President has either colluded with the "Real" Powers that be in our world, or he is an innocent nitwit as the Republicans say. And don't even get me started on the subject of the derned Illegal Aliens.  (That's a Texan speaking.)

Mitt Romney cannot win the office of President.  I  cannot believe he has a snowball's chance in heck of winning.  What do people think they are seeing in him that I'm missing? And believe me, I'm looking. I see a mist, a vapor, a smoke and mirrors that isnt even very entertaining. 

I suggested Jeb Bush because he is, I've been convinced since early spring and the scarecrow parade of GOP candidates occupied our screens, the only person who can pull a Republican presidency out of the void.  I do not like Jeb Bush.  I don't like any Bushes.  I will not vote for him, but lots and lots of others will.  And he will win.

I don't care any more. If he gets in, we will see a fascist government beyond any imagining we've had so far.  The schools and the post office will go down the drain. Rummy and Cheney will be clowns compared to their next counterparts.  But I am so disillusioned as to the quality of (pick one) citizenship, leadership, education, awareness, intelligence, character that we see about us from high to low that I am beginning to think that it might be what our country needs: is asking for, in fact.

I don't want to go to the old folks' concentration camp.  It won't be fair.  But something has to be done with intelligence and zeal pretty soon--or there won't even be old folks' concentration camps or any other kind:  it will be just death and destruction on all sides.  Sounds pretty grim?  That is the way I think when I am not thinking about cooking, books, music, little birds twittering in the trees, and family stuff.

SO, if the Republicans want to win in November, they will proceed ASAP with the idea I expounded on yesterday.  If they do not want to win, they will continue with the status quo and we will know that they really didn't want to make things different, after all.  YAZZYBEL

Political Prediction

Good day.

It's time for me to make the prediction that's been brewing in my cerebrum (if that's where predictions are brewed) ever since early spring.

Here it is.

(Drumroll)

At or slightly before the Tampa GOP Convention, Mitt Romney is going to discover himself unable to run for the presidency as the Republican canditate, whether because he got pushed off by his party, who surely can't like waffling any better than the rest of us, or because he discovers a family or personal emergency that precludes his serving   his country in a public capacity.

To save the day, JEB BUSH is going to step up. He will be nominated, and will accept the nomination.

And, P.S., JEB BUSH will win the election.

YAZZYBEL, Seeress

Lonesome Dove

Good afternoon.

My mother had the great gift of her Scotch-Irish ancestry:  she was a great storyteller, one of a huge long line of loquacious folk who could hold you spellbound while she talked away.

On a visit to her in the late part of life, before she became ill with cancer, she delighted me once, saying,  "Linda,"  (she said that with a beautiful Texas music that held me in my tracks)  "Come over here and bring up a chair and I'll tell you a story."  What pleasure.

That story as with most of her later life recountings was pure gossip, but she invested her tellings with imaginary detail that convinced any listener...until you realize that she was repeating a conversation between husband and wife that took place a mile from her house at two o'clock in the morning,   "And then he said, and then she said back.....," well, she had a gift.

She also had a gift for larger prophecy that came to her from an irrefutable source deep inside her.  She had not had the education nor the experience to know  the great implications of world affairs, but she did.  In the midst of World War II, she was able to say with great conviction that the big enemy of the United States in the "future" would be China, not Japan.  She said that China and Russia together would create great peril for the United States. Who's to say she was wrong, here in 2012?

She looked upon the relationship  between Mexico and the USA with a jaundiced eye, and had no faith in any of it. She's the person who told me that when the Treaty of Guadalupe was signed, determining the boundary between the two countries, the Mexicans wanted it to be the Nueces River, not the Rio Bravo del Norte otherwise known as the Rio Grande.  She said, as Mexicans began pushing into southern Texas thirty years ago, that they would not be happy until they had taken over that huge land between the two nations and made it Mexico  Who can say she was wrong?  Of course, it's turned out that they could not be happy until they took over the whole United States, but that was so preposterous that nobody could have thought the way things have evolved.

I have been watching, belatedly, the TV series Lonesome Dove, from stories of Larry McMurtry.  It makes me homesick.  I too feel far from home sometimes.  I am a Lonesome Dove for wild, terrible Texas, sometimes.  Real lonesome for it. YAZZYBEL

Why Won't They Use the Guest Towels? Why?

I have a bathroom with two classes of towels in it: MY towels and GUEST towels.  These two classes of towels are not to be confused, in my mind, even though they must share a small bathroom.

I have a lot of really purty little real linen guest towels.  They are so lovely.  For a while I thought that people didn't use them because they were so pretty and perfect that people didn't want to spoil their looks. 

WRONG!  I have switched, lo these two or three years, so a beautiful package of printed paper hand towels.  They are a beautiful peach color and have an antique print on them of a lovely plant with reddish flowers and plenty of green leaves and twining stems.  NICE.  So why won't guests use them?  I know you don't, gals, because I check every time.

You see, women DO wash their hands after using the bathroom.  And they do dry them as best they can, for I have observed this in countless public restrooms on countless automobile trips.  Usually, now, it's a ghastly blower, but often it is a paper towel and I know they are used because they are sometimes ankle deep on the floor. (This is the American Southwest, after all.)

So what do people in my bathroom use if they won't use my pretty, cheap (Walmart)  disposable and therefore e-coli-free paper towels?  They use MY towels.  They must surreptitiously dry those damp fingertips on my personal towel; they creep back and find a corner that they think must be clean enough for them to use, and they use it.

All I ask is this: WHY?  I am here to make a public announcement: Friends, I can afford a package of Walmart pretty fingertip guest towels more often than every two years!  Please help me to use up my guest towels!  Please!!!

YAZZYBEL the GROUCHY

















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What a Piece of Work is a Little Child!

Good morning.

We had guests yesterday, friends of my son Benjamin who's here visiting us from Concord. His friends drove down from Orange County and brought their little girl aged three and a half.

What a lovely little creature is she!  We last saw her when she was a baby and now she is very much an autonymous person with her own opinions and tastes.  She was dressed in an outfit of her own choosing, a really cute flowered sundress, with tasteful additions of  Hello Kitty headband, necklace and shoes.

Since I love Hello Kitty I could only admire her choices.  And look on in amazement at her beauty, energy, talent, and administrative ability as she ran the afternoon's activities. She was just wonderful. YAZZYBEL

Benjamin Came! Brother in Law No. 4 Left!!

Ben came last weekend and he got a lot of things done for us.  It's terrible to have to count a visit by a son as simply productive on the physical plane.  But it was nice, heart-wise, as well.  It was good to see him and have him here.

He climbed ladders and  put in light bulbs. Some were in the house but the big thing is that he bought and installed a lighting system outside the back door to scare away the burglars.  He also scoured the house for my missing car keys and my missing credit card. No success there. Something else was also missing--oh yes, checks.  I ran out of checks.  The checks were ordered but still have not come. The credit card was replaced but I have not remembered to tell my creditors, lol. Better get to it.  And the car keys are lost lost lost and will be replaced at a cost we don't want to entertain.  You know, they have all those electronic things on them.

Ben left on Tuesday, the 3rd, to return to his Concord home.  On the 4th, we received the news that my brother in law no. 2 had passed away in Texas....This is big news in my family because he is the first person of our generation to go on to the big rancho in the sky.  Only he went to the big golf course in the sky, no doubt.

I received a message the next day (in that state between sleep and wakefulness) from him, saying that he was still around, going over the details of his life and leaving a message for his wife about how much he appreciated her as he went day by day through the days of their life together.  They had sixty three years-worth of days together and she cooked up a storm on all of them until the last two months when he was in a nursing home.  He lived the life of a king (because she is a queen) and he is now marveling at the daily life she made for him.

He plans to be present at his memorial this Thursday, but is moving away as the days go by. He was a remarkable person and will always be remembered by hundreds of people who knew him. All the sisters and their families will be there but me and no. 4 and I still think she may show up at the last minute...she lives far away, too. YAZZYBEL