“What a difference a day makes….twenty four little hours
Brought the sun and the flowers where there used to be rain.
Another one bites the dust. The embarrassed annum 2017, sad cradle of The Trump Era and all it portends, has donned its worn galoshes and furry earmuffs and headed out the door to Has-been Land, where bad years can don the cloak of anonymity and live out the rest of their existences in peace. 1919 lives there, as does 1941 and 1963, relieved that noone talks about the Black Sox scandal, the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination any more. But think of the positive changes which arose from those miseries. Baseball appointed respected federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis their first commissioner and gave him virtually unchecked powers over the sport. The United States fell into the war against the Axis powers and helped save the world. The city fathers in Dallas decided it would be a nice idea to change the parade route. It’s all good.
The tide may be slowly turning for 2017, as well. The Mueller commission finally received its consignment of voodoo dolls last week (things are slow in weary Haiti these days) and are honing their sharp needles as we write. A Democratic candidate actually won a senatorial race this month in Alabama for the first time in 700 years. And South Florida Resistance troopers have amassed 200,000 water balloons in an abandoned warehouse in Opa Locka to be delivered by a fleet of drones to the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve celebration next week. Not all the balloons will be limited to water.
The mortification of having an unhousebroken chimpanzee in the White House has, if nothing else, galvanized a large swath of the nation into a formidable rebel force prepared to make its presence known at ballot boxes and town hall meetings throughout the land, with the possible exception of Kansas. There is ongoing mobilization in many cities to take to the streets immediately if the Mueller probe is dynamited. Another gigantic March On Washington is planned for January 20 and Carolyn Holmes is already packing her pussy hat. The beat inexorably goes on and each day support for the tangerine doughboy slips a little more. Hear that? They’re warming up the getaway planes at Riviera Beach International Airport and dusting off the Exile Hut in Guatemala. Melania---listen: it’s still not too late to go back to Novo Mesto.
Thomas Wolfe was wrong, Melania. You CAN go home again.
The Wall
They didn’t start building Trump’s wall in 2017, so that’s good. Recent statistics have shown far fewer party-crashing Mexicans sneaking into the country and a lot more leaving thanks to the new GOP good-neighbor policy, so maybe we don’t need a wall after all. The Wall would cost a staggering $70 billion to erect and $150 million a year to maintain. The American Society of Engineers tells us the total cost of infrastructure repair (highways and bridges) in the entire U.S. would only be $2.7 trillion. Hey, 70 Big Beans is a pretty good start. Can we begin with rural Gainesville? Some of the potholes there are so big you need an elevator to get out. Which reminds us of a story:
Down the road at The Iron Skillet restaurant, a long-distance trucker was commiserating with his brethren over a sad divorce result in which his wife got everything. One of the other semi drivers had experienced a similar disaster. “Around here,” he spit out, “it’s open season on lawyers.”
Pulling out of the parking lot, the long-distance trucker had an idea. He deliberately drove his truck into a giant pothole. The truck fell onto its side and crashed into a telephone pole, instantly surrounded by attorneys in polyester suits, who stuffed business cards into his broken windshield. The trucker whipped out his pistol and began shooting lawyers as fast as he could. In no time, the police screeched into the parking lot.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Edgar?” one of the cops wanted to know as he slapped the cuffs on the driver. “You can’t get away with that kind of thing!”
“But Carl,” the driver protested, “I thought it was open season on lawyers.”
“Well, sure it is,” said the policeman. “But damn, Edgar---you can’t BAIT them!”
The Year In Review
Politics aside, 2017 was a decent year for the bulk of humanity. Kim Jong-un still didn’t blow up the world, unwilling to give up his lifetime dream of a point-guard job with the Utah Jazz. Frenchman Robert Marchand, 105, wheeled his way into the record books by cycling 22.52 kilometers (13.99 miles) in one hour on a track near Paris. Despite a few malingerers, most people in The Villages---a three-county Republican enclave in Florida---did not get arrested for sex acts in public. After all, the jail is limited to 90-plus roomers and the place was already filled up with several arrestees nabbed in a SWAT golf-cart chop-shop raid on June 26th, an ex-con who threatened to give arresting police HIV, and an 80-year-old scammer in jail for ripping off potential lessees. Our friend Jack Gordon is nonetheless thinking of moving there because there are too many Democrats in Laguna Beach. LB police report no golf-cart chop-shop arrests there since….well….ever.
The Winter Of Our Discontent
It was cold in 2017. BIG cold, record-setting cold, chilly enough to freeze your nose hairs and make hockey viable on Lake Michigan. So naturally, this was the year our otherwise sane relatives, Stuart and Mary Ellison, decided to move from lovely Chattanooga to frosty Ann Arbor. The latter, of course, is one of those places which always appears on the various Top Ten Places To Live lists, polls which are always tallied up in sunny July.
The reason for this departure from sanity is a simple one: the Ellison’s daughter, Ashleigh Schaub, brought forth a son, Luke (and no, his middle name is not “Warm”) earlier in the year and newly-minted grandmothers have an irresistable urge to hover over these brilliant miracles. There is no explaining grandmothers, most of them perfectly normal folks before The Change. Careful women who would not traverse an abandoned crosswalk until the “walk” icon appeared will now dive headlong into a burning building to rescue a grandbaby. It’s remindful of Clark Kent entering a telephone booth and emerging as Superman. These new grandmothers are endowed with special powers, just like superheroes, and they’re not afraid to use them. Think Attila The Hun is tough? Attila would be crying like a baby after grandma put an Atomic Leglock on him for snorting cocaine too close to a preschool. Ornery as they may be, however, they are pussycats where the kiddies are concerned. “What? Our granddaughter Rosalind burned down a nursing home with 85 sickly grannies inside? Well, girls will be girls.”
But we’re talking cold here, not grandmothers. And as cold as Ann Arbor may be, it is the French Riviera in August compared to unlucky Erie, Pennsylvania, which is freezing 365 days a year. I have seen snow there in June. The little girls in Erie have to shovel out the playground each Spring to do the Maypole Dance. They usually get 100 inches of snow a year---this year, they got 102 in December. Snow is one thing, then there is the temperature. They have parades in the streets there when it struggles up to Zero. This year, the prize-winning float was entered by the National Society of Global Warming Deniers. Every cloud has a silver lining….to somebody.
Life in Erie, Pa.---just another day in Paradise.
Cataract Ranch
When you’re 76, it’s a miracle to get through the year without some sort of medical procedure. This year, it was cataract surgery for Bill, whose irresponsible procrastination had allowed his cataracts to become as large as dinner plates at the Fat Boy’s Bar-B-Q restaurant. Blue colors had turned a dull purple, large halos surrounded oncoming headlights and the sun bouncing off large green turnpike signs made them unreadable. “I’ll get it done when you say it’s time,” Bill told his new optometrist. “It was time yesterday,” the optometrist said.
Now, Bill is not one to get in a rush over these things. He has to do his research. After all, someone is cutting into your actual eyeball, right? Seems like there’s a lot of room for bad things to happen. Who to trust? After a long survey, the overwhelming response was to see one Dr. Seaborne Hunt III, a stern man of serious demeanor, “completely devoid of any semblance of bedside manner,” one advisor related. That was fine with Bill, who was not in the market for a real jokester when it came to eye surgery.
The recommenders, of course, were right. Seaborne Hunt would never be confused with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Bill didn’t care. The first surgery went well but the eye took weeks and gallons of eye drops to bounce back. When it did, it was almost perfect. The second one recovered in a couple of days. He opted to pay for the better lenses unavailable from Medicare and to donate another $600 to get rid of his astigmatisms. It was worth it. Today, his vision is 20-20 and he wears glasses only for their transitional qualities.
(OH, NO!—It’s the dreaded Advice Department!). Post-surgery, Bill has run across and conversed with several cararact-surgery survivors who were led to believe the job was a snap, anybody could do it. The majority of them were happy with their results, but several were not. Most of these abstained from doing any sort of due diligence on their surgeons, accepting someone convenient or pushed by an optometrist/friend. For all they knew, the guy doing the work learned his trade by reading Cataract Surgery For Dummies. IT’S YOUR EYES, FOLKS! You only get two. Do whatever you can to keep them around. The alternative is a permanent Foggy Day In London Town. Any questions, call Bill. He can see clearly now, the rain has gone. There are no popsicles in his way.
Summary
Otherwise, it was a typical year. Massacres in Las Vegas and Texas, bullets flying in Chicago, opioids taking over the universe, monster hurricanes battering woebegone islands. Then we had the Me Too Movement, which was fine as long as Republican politicians, Hollywood movie producers and captains of industry were getting their just desserts for horrendous crimes against women, not so good when our old pal Al Franken was drawn into the morass. Alas, live by the sword, die by the sword. But, as the nuns used to say, there are mortal sins and there are venial sins. For the former, you go to hell if you’re not careful. These would include inflicting hootchy-kootchy business on people over whom one has authority. Venial sins might include butt-squeezing among equals. Even Father Gallivan would only give you two Our Fathers and two Hail Marys for that. I am not a butt-squeezer myself, except where it involves Siobhan, but neither am I a chastiser of butt-squeezers. It seems the squeezee could always run off to the other side of the room and scream “Eeek!” putting the matter to rest. If she had a champion, he could stomp up and swat the offender with his glove, dictating a duel, perhaps lemon-meringue pies at ten paces.
All this business makes us retire to our mancaves to consider our possible historical offenses. What about that day little Willie dunked Sara Mae’s braids in his inkwell? Where does a bereft and confused society go from here? And could it be, by golly, that after all these years we have another job for Kenesaw Mountain Landis?
That’s all, folks….
