Dumping

I don't know why I am using this image.  Just to get rid of it, I guess.  It's been hanging around like a bad penny.  I don't have anything to say about doughnuts.  Or anything else for that matter.  

I can always turn to Trump, though.  Or the State of the Union in general. Or the weather.  My conservative friend HATES Al Gore.  He says he is P.T. Barnum at his best.  I've asked him on several occasions to name two things Gore got wrong about climate change.  

"I'm not in the mood to take a test right now!"

He's losing his mind over the primary results in NYC.  He hates Bernie Sanders and AOC more than he hates Gore.  He thinks democratic socialists will ruin the country.  

"Yea.  We wouldn't want to end up like Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, etc.  They consistently rank as the happiest places on earth.  We don't even come close to them in education, health care, longevity.  But we sure as hell are ahead of Somalia, so there's that!"

I understand his abhorrence of the hoi-polloi.  I do.  The difference is he wants to suppress it and I want to erase it.  With all the money the one percenters have, we could eradicate a whole bunch of it.  Better living conditions, better schools. . . .  I come from a bad place and know the exact formula for creating the hoi-polloi.  You can't fix it all, of course, but you sure can reduce poverty and ignorance, and if you don't have presidents like Trump, maybe violence, too.  

Here.  Let me dump another photo that's been hanging around.  Good to get them off my back.  It was a photowalk day, hot and drizzling, and the world looked used and worn and I was there to record it.  It's sort of like taking photos in your own home.  You see it differently, see all the things you've become blind to, the scuff mark on the baseboard, the worn chair. . . whatever.  Who was it that said, "First you make the environment, then the environment makes you"?  

Or "ou habites-tu?"  A more profound question than it seems.  I've spent my adult life building my environments.  A friend of my tenant came to the house the other day to fetch something.  When she walked in, she said, "Oh, wow. . . nice house."  People tell me it looks like a writers house, but I don't think it made me a writer.  Maybe a little bit better, though.  

Now I live in my mother's environment, and it is shaping me.  Backwards.  I'm even speaking hillbilly again.  My whole countenance has changed, I think.  But. . . it ain't as bad as my childhood home.  I mean the first one didn't have indoor bathrooms.  The next one did, but decor was not a priority.  Not spending money was.  This is the fanciest house my mother has ever lived in.  She's way ahead of the rest of her relatives. 

That's the top of my head this morning.  My mother woke me from a deep sleep in the middle of the night yelling that the maid was coming.  I never got back to sleep.  I'm not happy with my mother today.  But I must get on with things, so. . . .

I love this sound.  It is what Gillian Welch and David Rawlings brought to contemporary alt.country/bluegrass/hillbilly music.