Frosty

 "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

Those are the words of Robert Frost, of which there are many. These just happen to be the ones that struck me on this particular morning. 

Probably because the night before I had spent a good long while talking with a very good friend who is in the midst of having to pack up and sell the house in which she and her family have lived for the past thirty years. 

That's a long time. A lifetime if you happen to be either of our sons who happened to be born almost as part of the exercise of their parents becoming grown-ups, real and true. The homes each of us built were on opposite ends of California. We have spent the last three decades making a nest for our brood, a place to settle down. 

An even longer time ago, we were teenagers fumbling through high school together. We had grown up in the same town. Our parents had gone to that same high school together. So many things brought us together that when, after we had both graduated, she decided to move away to the Golden State, it was a challenge to us both to imagine how life could ever be the same. 

And yet, once I settled into the idea of her visits and our connections over the phone lines, it seemed natural. Once had my own love affair that drew me west, we were able to renew our connection. It was at her home that I had my first California Thanksgiving. After dinner, we took a ride in her convertible to the movies. 

In November.

With the top down. 

Once she packed up again to head to the southern end of California, we had another in a series of fond farewells. We made promises to stay in touch. And we did. Our sons became fast friends. Our dogs never fully reconciled their relationship, but it was always nice to have a Canine American to visit on one end of our journey or the other. 

We listened and consoled one another as our parents aged and eventually passed on. We avoided imagining what the next chapter might be. 

Now that chapter has come, and while I sort out my own landing spot in retirement, she and her husband have become victims of an unforgiving economy and the realities of being "of a certain age." 

We are that. Now they are in the midst of downsizing and preparing to move to the other side of the country. Which makes me terribly sad. But I am heartened to know that we will always have a place where we have to let the other in. 

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

 "It's amazing when you stand up here. It's just, like, the love," he told the crowd. "I could say the stupidest things and you clap."

This, my friends, is not the worst thing the convicted felon has said in the weeks leading up to the midterm elections. It would be easy to paint this as desperate, but it seems to be all part of some glorious improvisation that began with a ride down an escalator more than ten years ago. 

Since then he has made a regular habit of taunting not just members of the press, most of them female, but visiting heads of state with whom he felt the need to disagree in front of that same press corps. Even as the legions of applauding MAGAts continues to shrink, he feels emboldened to stay "the stupidest things." He lies about the progress of the war he started and cannot end. He lies about the price of everything and insists that this will all go away after the midterms. He is now asking his red-caps to pretend that he is on the ballot. Because, he will tell you, if you don't then there will be no border and no tax cuts.

And if you don't vote for Republicans, he will be impeached. 

If you don't vote for Republicans, the votes needed to remove him from office might finally be there. 

If you don't vote for Republicans, all that "great work" that the worst "president" of our lifetime or anyone else's might end up in jail. 

That's not so stupid, is it?

I would applaud for that. 

Naturally

 It's artificial. It is a stew made of scrapings from Al Gore's Internet. There is nothing truly "super" about it. Are you ready for the weird part? I've been using something like it for the past twenty-some years to write this blog. 

When I sit down and start to expound on the little things that gnaw at me, or the big things that consume me, I oftentimes turn to the search function of the program most of us know called Google Chrome. For example, if I wanted to know how many gallons were in a ton of diesel fuel, I would do a search for the answer, rather than going to the set of encyclopedias I keep in my office. 

I don't keep encyclopedias in my office. I use Al Gore's Internet. You may remember the Internet. It was a "series of tubes" according to Senator Ted Stevens. When I ask Al Gore's Internet how many gallons in a ton of diesel, the network of computers all tied together in a series of tubes or "a net" gives me a whopping great list of responses, topped off by a summary of those responses labeled "AI Overview." A cursory peek at that paragraph lets me know not only the answer to my question, but keeps me from moving down the list to look for an answer I might have clicked on myself before 2024 when the engineers at Google decided that poring over a list of responses might be too tedious for users. Why bother checking on those thousands of potential links when you could have the answer handed to you on an artificial platter? 

Maybe because of my inherent distrust of machines, first introduced to my by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. The HAL 9000 on board the spaceship Discovery was not giving the best answers to astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole. Even though HAL kept saying that he had the utmost enthusiasm for the mission, the computer sends Frank out to fix the AE-35 unit only to ram him with a pod and send him spinning off into space. Then, when Dave goes out attempts to retrieve his fellow astronaut's body, HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors. 

I didn't have to look that stuff up. 

It was in my brain from all those years ago. 

But now I feel as though I need to check myself, to verify those tasty bits of infotainment for you, dear reader. I have to consult the oracle of intelligence because I really need to know that there are two hundred eighty gallons of diesel in a ton, and that the "deal" made by the self-proclaimed very stable genius with Russia provides the United States with three hundred thousand tons of the stuff. That ends up being eighty-four million gallons of diesel. Which seems like a lot. I used old-fashioned AI for that one: a calculator. Then I checked with the oracle once again to discover that the United States uses approximately one hundred thirty million gallons of diesel a day. That means that the deal the convicted felon and Russian asset trying to distract us all from the miserable job he's doing isn't going to cover one day's use of diesel fuel. 

I did that last bit in my head. The former game show host is trying to keep the pod bay door closed. Use your own intelligence. You don't need anything artificial or super. 

It's all natural. 

Shocked And Dismayed

 "I have not seen anything like this in my twenty-eight-plus years," Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah told a local news station. "I'm not sure that the city of Erie has ever seen the loss of life and the devastation that we just witnessed."

Why do we keep saying things like this? This statement comes from a guy who might consider himself a "peace officer" who goes to work each day with a gun strapped to his hip and wears a bulletproof vest as part of his uniform. 

Which is by no means a slight on Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah. I would guess that even the Sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina would expect his deputy to carry more than one bullet in this day and age. 

Meanwhile, back in Erie, the scene described by Chief Lorah was one in which eight people were shot and killed before the idiot with a gun turned it on himself, bringing the grand total to eight. Reports in some quadrants are noting that one of the victims was pregnant, so the math may need to be amended. Additionally, there were children aged one and five years old among the dead. According to reports, all of the victims were related. 

So here's my quandary: SWAT teams were dispatched to the scene after reports of gunfire were made. Authorities said that by the time the heavily armed "peace officers" arrived, all the killing had been done. I wonder what might have happened if an emergency call had gone out to that family for counseling in the days leading up to the shooting? What if unarmed social workers had made their presence felt in the runup to the murders? If a mental health check had been made and the guns in the house had been removed as a precaution?

I'm guessing that's not anything Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah has seen in his twenty-eight plus years. Because we tend to solve our problems with guns. Immigration. Diplomacy. And as an added bonus, we can livestream the firing squad death sentence being carried out after the fact. 

If we do, in fact, hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness then maybe we should check in with the guys who wrote that Second Amendment and see how that squares with the Declaration of Independence. 

I hate to think that Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah might continue to witness mass shootings anywhere int he land of the free and the home of the moving targets. 

Worst Of The Worst

 Federal immigration officers opened fire on a Dominican man whom they were trying to arrest in New York because they believed their lives were in danger. Twenty-eight-year-old Oscar Belgal was shot in the neck last Thursday as he drove his car with a five-year-old boy inside. 

That's their story, including the part where Federal officers "were not aware" that the five-year-old was in the car. Oscar "was aware," according to the story that ICE goons issued, and yet he chose to evade officers, including the now familiar refrain about how officers used vehicles to block him in as he attempted to drive off,  then he accelerated his vehicle toward officers, smashing some of their vehicles. At which point the goons shot Mister Belgal "superficially" in the neck. 

Quick aside: I don't know if you've ever been shot "superficially," but I would expect if feels a lot like being shot profoundly. 

As this armed assault took place in New York City, Head ICE Goon Markwayne "Two First Names" Mullin took chose to remind everyone "Sanctuary politicians, they create an environment for criminal activity to thrive, not for the American citizens to be safe." 

Safe? Well, it seems like having plainclothes idiots with guns firing seven times into a vehicle on city streets does not seem to meet that distinction. I would categorize such an action as "unsafe."

No matter. The politician alluded to in "Two First Names" Mullin's statement was, most likely, New York City's mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mayor Mamdani's comments ran somewhat contradictory to the Goons of ICE: “There is no justification for what we have seen today." He also said the federal officers who surrounded the vehicle wore construction vests and masks, making it difficult to identify them as immigration officers.

This makes some sense, since in recent months New York City has been making an all-out effort to rid their streets not of dangerous immigrants, but potholes. The five-year-old in the car witnessing his father being shot by construction workers may flavor his perception of men wearing orange vests. Or the trauma suffered by the child may simply be slopped onto the shelf ICE likes to refer to as "collateral damage." 

You have the right to remain silent. In this case, I suggest we all go in a different direction. 

Gone

 Somewhere out there, baseball is being played. 

The major league playoffs are in, if you'll pardon the expression, full swing. 

I could care less.

A large and somewhat immovable chunk of this apathy can be traced from the hometown Oakland Athletics moving to (checks notes) a pasture somewhere near Sacramento. Another big piece of this mildly held disdain stems from the lack of having a team which I would root for when I was growing up. Colorado was without a major league franchise until 1993, the year after I moved to California. At that point, I was dropped into a decided wealth of baseball. I was just a BART ride away from the Oakland A's or a slightly longer BART ride and a couple transfers to various other public transit options to watch the San Francisco Giants play.

Seeing as how I had a slot open in my vicarious sports thrill menu, I latched onto the scrappy Athletics, winner of four World Series and tenants of one of the least attractive concrete bunkers in which any major sport was played. We made our way out to the ballpark on a number of occasions over the course of any given summer, with a keen eye toward which home games provided the best giveaways. This is how I collected a number of bobbleheads that now exist in basement boxes, waiting to be unearthed in those future days when we need to see what grandpa was up to all those years ago.

As a fan, I got to take the ride on the Moneyball express, those halcyon days that eventually starred Brad Pitt, and Oakland went on a twenty game tear back in 2002 winning twenty games straight. A modern day record that stood for fifteen years until it was bested by, of all teams, the Cleveland Guardians. For a couple of decades, I had a team. 

Then they moved away. Ostensibly to Las Vegas, but first a stop in that pasture outside of Sacramento. They never did win a World Series while we were together in Oakland. 

Now I hear that the playoffs are taking place again. Without Oakland. Without the Athletics. 

Without me. 

The Whole Shebang

 Homecoming. A time for celebration. A time for reflection. A time for senseless killing. 

Authorities in South Carolina are still looking for a suspect who shot and killed nineteen-year-old Jaliyah Butler. Eighteen-year-old Matthew Daniel McCoy was arrested and charged with Pointing and Presenting a Firearm at a Person, and Carrying a Weapon on School Property last year, but the other eleven people who were arrested for possession firearms on campus during the shooting did not net the killer. 

Fast forward a year, shifting focus a couple hundred miles to the south, we find two dead and thirty-five injured when gunfire erupted early this past Sunday morning over a four block radius of a neighborhood block party. A party celebrating the Dooly High School win in their big Homecoming Win. They beat the team from Wilcox County.

So there was a big party. 

Two twenty-year old men were killed. The injured ranged in age from fourteen to fifty-one. An incident like this might suggest that the twenty-somethings were the "targets" of all that gunfire, and the thirty-five others covering that wide range of age were collateral damage. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Celebrating homecoming. 

A time for reflection.

A time for senseless killing. 

“I’ve been doing this for forty-two years,” Dooly County Sheriff Craig Peavy told reporters. “I’ve had a lot of cases I’ve been on, a lot of bad situations, and I think by far this is the one that has caught me off guard.”

It could be that Sheriff Peavy's experience has not taken him far from his home, since Georgia has experienced one hundred fifty-five mass shootings since 2020, and guns continue to be the leading cause of death among children. 

The investigation, along with the mourning, continues.