My Liberal Diary

Day 173, My Liberal Diary
Why in the hell aren't those Texans bitching about FEMA and the Government not being there to help them? They seem to be pulling together as a community in the face of a disaster about as bad as Katrina was and I haven't heard a single complaint? What's wrong with those people? They have dead, they have families that lost their homes and every thing they own and nobody is blaming it on Trump? Where the hell is ANTIFA and BLM? I know all them Texicans ain't white. I suppose they are all racists and rednecks, gun loving christian bible thumping, freedom mongers and we should get our liberal asses down there and protest for them! If we can take on Charlotte, S.C. what's a little muddy water? I realize that molotov cocktails won't be quite as effective, given everything is so damned wet but we can still loot and tears some stuff up...I'll bet the black folks have to wait for the colored helicopters and boats to rescue them and they probably have to wait until after all the rednecks are saved...wait a minute; I just got a call from a cousin in New Orleans. Randy Earl took his jon boat over and rescued several families including a bunch of black folks that were awfully appreciative and glad to see him. They should have been bitching about why it took so damned long but the drive from New Orleans did take a while, especially since a good bit of the highways were under water and it was still raining to beat sixty and had whole gale winds. but when you need help, I suppose color blindness seems to spread. Randy Earl, not a liberal by the way, finally got ran off by the National Guard and told that they didn't need his help or his boat but the sixty or so families he ferried to dry ground didn't seem to be in agreement with them. Randy Earl didn't mind if they brought their dogs, guns, family pictures or even a child's favorite toy. He just wanted to help. Hey National Guard...go fuck yourself. We Southerners take care of our own.

 

FEMA and the National Guard is running them off as fast as they can, don't want a bunch of hard working, caring people out there helping their fellow man. Ass-hats.

 

Actually, They were almost Boat Jacked by a group of thug looters who wanted one of the boats and then shot at, The Cajun Navy has pulled back to regroup.

 

They probably wouldn't want to boat jack Randy Earl, he's sort of glued to a .44 hogleg.

 

Day 174, My Liberal Diary
The past several days, my smart phone has been speaking in German when I type or text. I do not speak German so I really don't have much of a clue what in the hell I was trying to say so I pretty much stayed quiet until I figured out that someone recently called me a nazi because I said something about destroying Confederate monuments was no different than destroying the Jefferson Memorial, he was a slave owner too or destroying a monument to Malcolm X, who was killed by Shite Muslims by the way, because he decided to convert to a more liberal form of Islamic religion but most people still blame it on rednecks because they don't bother to actually read and study history. Anyway, I finally convinced my Android that I am not a Nazi and didn't much care to learn German so it now talks colloquial Southern English again, thank you m'am. To further my thought on another matter, I have decided to determine what my gender is daily, based on how I pee when I get up in the morning to go to work. If I stand up, then I shall choose to be predominantly Male gender and use the appropriate public restrooms if the need should arise. If I sit to pee, then I'll determine if it is a gender confused thing or if maybe my arthritis is acting up or maybe I am just too wobbly to guarantee an acceptable degree of accuracy. If neither of these criteria fit, then I might decide that my pecker must of fallen off during the night due to too much exposure to estrogen from sleeping between the right-wanger and Maggie, my Dobermon, but I cannot guarantee that if I use the Lady's room, that I will not leave the seat up out of habit simply because I have been a male for the past 22,512 days, including those when I might have been a little bit bitchy.

 

Day 175, My Liberal Diary
It is Saturday and I do not have to drive 80 miles at five in the morning, work ten hours, then drive back home, at least not for the next three days so I decided to play with the puppies. I found a pair of running shoes that I had not worn in a few years but they are almost new and very comfortable except they have one minor problem; the soles have hardened and now they tend to slide like you are walking on cornmeal scattered on a waxed dance floor. I sort of enjoy this sliding on our Mexican tile floors and my puppies certainly enjoy the playing but the right-wanger is having an issue with them. She says the sound they make is driving her crazy. If I walk across the floor, she begs me to take them off or put on another pair of shoes. She says they sound like raking your finger nails on a chalk-board, something that I do not believe that young people have ever been exposed to because blackboards and chalk are no longer essential teaching aids at public schools. I now have to stand on an 6'x10' rung all day or go outside. She offered to cook me biscuits and sausage gravy and bring them to me on my rug, if I don't move. I asked if she would bring me my chair and laptop so I could write but she saw where this was going and is now mad at me so I tip-toed over to my chair to write but every once in a while, will shuffle one foot of the other and get a piercing glare of dissent. I really don't want to change my shoes, at least not until I get my morning chores completed. There is another leak inside one of the bathroom walls, the plumbing in my house has reached the life-span limit of the gray plastic water pipes they installed through conduits inside the concrete slab they built this monstrosity on and every few weeks now, another pipe will spring a leak and ruin a wall or two before she has the heart to tell me that I am going to have to spend my day off from work fixing another leak. She said she would rather listen to the leak than to listen to my shoes on the tile floor.
I sort of understand how the sound of something can irritate you. There are many sounds that annoy me. I can't stand the sound of water dripping inside a wall. A tick in an engine will drive me absolutely crazy wondering what is causing it, could be anything from a nail in a tire to a connecting rod about to break. I spend a lot of time listening to my divers breath on the comm-box while they are working underwater, For some reason, the sound of their breathing is amplified very loudly through the radio but it is an essential tool to monitor their well-being while they work in those dark and dangerous conditions. I can tell if they are working too hard and might accumulate too much carbon dioxide inside their helmet causing them to black out and will tell them to slow down and vent their helmet with fresh air to prevent this from happening. I can tell by their breathing, if they are in a strain or too cold or hot or fatigued. I can tell if they are frightened or just had a close call. This is an essential means of directing their work so they can complete their assigned task and return safely to the surface in one piece so they can do it all agin the next time. Yesterday, I spent ten hours listening to my divers breath while they dredged mud from a river water intake at an industrial plant. There is little need for spoken communications unless they need a tool or the dredge shut down for a minute to clear some debris, when doing such a mindless task, if nothing goes wrong. That is my job, to see that nothing goes wrong and I got a pretty good track record at doing that job after having spent a good portion of the past five decades on the dumb end of that umbilical. I sit there listening to the breathing, listening to the sound of the air compressor that supplies their air, listening for the low air pressure alarm that would tell me if something was wrong with their life-support system so I can switch them to a redundant air source and order them to safely abort their dive and recover them to safely to the surface. When everything goes right, there is only hour after hour of rhythmic breathing and a cacophony of other sounds that all have to blend correctly to monitor their health and well-being. I amuse myself by playing mental games while tending them. Yesterday, I used my smart-phone video to film close-ups of love bugs and various other insects crawling around the dive control room floor. I have learned much from this. I now know not only the sequence of movement that a six legged animal uses to walk forward, backwards and side ways, but that it is different from one bug to the next even of the same species. Love-bugs, those annoying things that get splattered all over you car on the highway and are almost impossible to wash off, can still fly while connected end to end in the manner that gives them the name "Love-bugs". I ask my wife, the right-wanger, if she knew which one drove while in flight and she said it was the male because men always think they know where they're going and that was why so many of them get squashed on your car, I am sure there is some slight sarcasm in that comment but actually, I have not determined which is the male and which is the female but I can tell you that either or rather both do the driving. They'll fly in the direction away from any stimulus that prompts them to take wing and go that way until the leader gets tired then the other one will fly stronger and they'll go that direction. I also know the coordinated sequence of movements required from twelve legs, rather than six, when they crawl to avoid being stepped on and it is not as precise as a ballet so a lot of them get flattened by a shoe even if the shoe annoys my wife.

 

Day 176, My Liberal Diary
Today is Labor Day and I got plenty of Labor to do, if anybody is up for it. Snake Haven is growing like a rain forest and needs beaten into submission, I found another 2000 pieces of 5.56 brass that needs cut down and sized into .300 AAC Blackout, they are in the case tumbler out in my reloading building. I seem to have misplaced the shell holders for my hand-priming tool so I ordered another but no doubt will find the two other sets on the same day my new ones arrive. I need to write a report on the diving project we are working on for a chemical plant in McIntosh, Alabama and I should build a new helmet mount for our underwater video camera. I recorded a new song last night, I wrote and arranged the music but the lyrics were from a poem written by a friend. The lyrics expressed a melancholy that I am very familiar with. It's hurricane season now and Music in the Mountains date has been moved to the same weekend that I am playing the Mississippi Songwriter's Festival in Ocean Springs. I am disappointed that I will miss my friends and a week of fresh trout and music around the fire but I had committed to the Songwriter's thing before I was notified of the change in the dates of the Mountains Festival. I have not taken a motorcycle trip since April because of all the rain and was looking forward to taking a week or two just to put some highway under my ass and smell food cooking on a campfire. Still am awaiting arrival of my entitlements but have almost come to believe they have been sent to another address because all I seem to get from the government are threatening letters from the IRS and bills for medical services that my new and improved Obama-Care modified health insurance no longer pays.

 

Day 177, My Liberal Diary
Today was a very long day spent listening the the amplified exhalations of my divers through the com box. Usually, I only have to listen to one diver at a time but today, I had two in the water dredging and one was using a pump that kept stopping and had a dead battery. When I finally completed the day's tasks and drove an hour and a half back home, I immediately saw why I do his. My puppies greeted me at the door and kept pushing my wife away so it was difficult to get a hug. My family just makes me feel so welcome when I come home, dinner cooking, a glass of my favorite bourbon poured and waiting by my chair as soon as I get back from walking my pups. And a surprise today! There was a fed-ex box waiting for me. I wondered what it could have been then I saw it was from a dear friend in Missouri, Bettye Kemp. Bettye is the surviving mate of my oldest and dearest friend, George Kunkle. George passed away from cancer a few months ago. I opened the box and Bettye had send me George's black hat he always wore when he played music. George played with everybody at one time or another. Joe Walsh would visit and hang out with him, he had an old Gibson acoustic that Elvis Presley had given him, he played with Jerry Lee, he co-wrote Neil Diamonds biggest hit, Sweet Caroline. We always played music together whenever we could. George and Bettye would drive down to Florida and we'd spend weeks plugging away. When I was hosting a concert series at the Blue Bird Cafe in Jacksonville, Florida years ago, George came to visit and I had him open for Guy Clark. He still told that story right up the last time I saw him almost exactly a year ago at a festival in Blanchard Springs, Arkansas that we have played for the past 28 years. It won't be the same without George and Bettye there, it is scheduled a week earlier than usual this year and I have another engagement in Ocean Springs for the Mississippi Songwriter's Festival and will not be able to attend but they will dedicate this year's festival to George, they will play Sweet Carloine. I will wear his hat when I play in Mississippi on the 15th and 16th. Bettye, that was sweet of you, it brought tears to Ms Jimi and a smile to me.

 

Day 178, My Liberal Diary
I have not had a good last couple of days. I lost my key ring with all my work keys on it yesterday and couldn't get into the yard or my office this morning at 5:00 to retrieve some items I needed on a diving survey we are conducting at an industrial complex. Then we couldn't find a measuring gauge that I built out of steel plates to measure the elevation differential on a concrete water intake approach slab and everyone recalled me bringing it out to the boat last Friday, but I guess it just grew web feet and swam away with the gators and catfish. Since I couldn't get into my office, I drove on towards McIntosh and got a call from two of my crew when I was almost there, asking if I was going to come by the office and give them a ride to the project. I explained that these calls are supposed to take place before I leave the house, not after I am almost to the job and they stayed mad at me all day,. I had a ton of things to do when I got off the boat this evening, parts to pick up that a supplier left outside their doorway for me and a number of items at Harbor Freight so it was about dark-thirty when I got home to the wonderful smell of pot roast and my puppies and wife waiting at the door to greet me with hugs and kisses and things started to look up. I wanted to gather the trash from home and my crazy mother in law's house to take to the dumpster because I had trash from the boat in my truck and needed to get rid of it before the raccoons decorated snake haven with it. Jimi said I should just sit and rest a bit first, have a sip of whiskey, take a shower, then worry about the trash. She is so sweet, but a glimmer of suspicion began gnawing at me, then I saw the note. She had written a note and left it on my dinner plate that said "Do not go into the laundry room."
I asked what that was about? And she said, just relax and have a drink, let me fix your dinner....of course, I went into the laundry room only to find the floor was covered in soaking wet towels, clothing, and water was leaking through a wall and into my recording studio. I had dinner, it was delicious. Then I carried the raccoon bait to the dump and gathered the tools I needed to destroy yet another wall in my house. This is the seventh leak inside walls that we have had in the past six months and this is really starting to become a problem. Naturally the ceiling molding splintered while being removed. The stucco on the ceiling is now a flat surface where the wall paneling scraped it as I removed a section to access the culprit leak only to find this time, instead of a broken pipe sort of accessible, but rather a bubbling conduit complete with sand, sort of like a miniature artesian spring, bubbling up from beneath the concrete slab my house is built upon. It is apparent that the entire plumbing system in my house will have to be replaced immediately, as will several walls that I have destroyed trying to keep from drowning while sleep-walking. I can't take the time off from the project I am working on to deal with plumbers, insurance people, and Jim Cantore, who seems to be on every channel on television and my wife is glued to him and reruns of hurricane damage from every major storm since cameras were invented. On the plus side, I got my keys replaced so now, at least, I can retreat to my office and watch something on my computer not related to hurricanes and take a shower while we use buckets of water to flush the toilets until I get time to deal with it.

 

Day 179, My Liberal Diary
We have hurricane refugees and no running water. It seems that a plumber is supposed to come by tomorrow at some point to look at the repairs that are needed and give us an estimate, sometime after he finishes picking out his new corvette. Did I mention that while I was discussing my new living room floor fountain to my my boss, he said I was not having a good time with water, my barge had sank overnight at my office. This is going to be a very expensive week but hope springs eternal and I am determined not to complain, I have seen things go much worse quickly and just when you thought you had reached the bottom of the fall and realized it was only tree tops slowing you down a little before you hit the sharp rocks and bounced into the hog pen.
My wife, the right-wanger, says that I am a "good man". Say tells me this often and I cannot begging to express the satisfaction that gives me. I try to be a good man. It is a written objective, one that I consciously strive towards. It is my one goal in life, to be a better man. I am not always a peaceful man, not am I always tactful, being painfully direct with everyone but I do try to be kind and helpful. I make a concerted effort of being part of the solution rather that contributing to the problem and I will not pass the blame for my mistakes to others. I am very protective of my friends and family and my puppies. I suppose that maybe I am a bit of a gun nut ( I prefer "member of the gun culture") but I have never shot anyone or anything that I did not have a justifiable reason to shoot, although this could be amended shortly if I don't get this damned plumbing thing fixed. I am one of those people that truly believe that the glass is half full rather than half empty, though sometimes I am aware that what it's fume of may well have exited the anus of a male bovine.
September always seem to be the month that i have issues with. I got stranded in a foreign country for several months one September, I spent several others salvaging boats, barges, ships, and corpses from plane crashes and hurricanes. I have ridden three September hurricanes out on a boat and almost lost my life each time. I got bitten by a venomous reptile one September, got stabbed through the foot by a stingray in September, I have been robbed twice in September. September is still too hot to be called Fall and Summer is officially ended with Labor Day. I don't get paid holidays at work so Labor Day is just another cause to fall even further behind on paying bills. I do not buy anything on credit. I pay cash or barter but still have a mortgage, fuel, food, household supplies , taxes, cable, cell and landlines, internet, cable,and electricity to pay each month in addition to the ere increasing costs of health care insurance, co-pays, pharmaceuticals, dog food and vet bills, and guitar strings. I do not own a new automobile, just 20 year old van to haul my music equipment around in and two motorcycles. Oh and a yacht; I do have a 48' ketch but it hasn't been in the water for several years now because I can't afford to keep it floating. I think we should eliminate September altogether and just make October twice as long. I love October, halloween, first cool nights, fires in the patio pit while friends help me drink my whiskey and eat shrimps. October should have 62 days and just skip September. We can forget about the false flag attack on the World Trade center so we could declare war on Liberty with the "Patriot" Act. Maybe we can skip April too. I love the Spring but down here in Mobile, February is Spring and we can just go right from March to May and skip those awful and annoying taxes.

 

Day 179, My Liberal Diary
I spent most of today completing an underwater survey of a river-water intake structure at a Chemical plant North of Mobile on the Tombigbee River. We were aboard our 100' Graham boat, the Jimmy G. In addition to the my three man diving crew, I had the vessel captain, first mate and deckhand, a middle-aged black man named York. York is my friend and I sort of watch after him as best I can to keep people from putting all the crappy tasks on his shoulders, not because he's black but because he is a hard woker, very friendly and easy going, has a functional IQ but is basically illiterate and so country that he has never ridden in a taxi, flown in an airplane of any type, and has a very limited vocabulary, functional more or less but very limited. York rode with me back to Mobile today, he will rejoin the vessel tomorrow at noon and the mate will relieve the captain for a day and that's more or less the way we rotate vessel crews on inland projects while the vessel remains on the project site each night. I am always happy when York rides with me because he is so gullible and good natured about it when I finally explain how I was pulling his leg. We once convinced him the Jimmy G was haunted, while we were offshore repairing a damaged oil platform for several weeks. It was near hHalloween so I caught the crew boat into shore one evening and purchased some supplies and caught the morning boat back out to the platform. While in Golden Meadows, LA, I picked up a fog machine and a really scary looking booger-mask with eyes the glowed red in the dark and had a cowl covering the head. Late that evening around 03:00, I turned the fogger on and almost immediately, it became so foggy you could barley move around; it also set off all the fire alarms aboard the vessel and got the dozen or so oil-patch trash that were asleep in the focsle quickly out of bed and rushing to the posted station bill to see where they were to muster for a fire at sea. The damage control crew began searching the vessel for any sign of fire or smoke but after they determined that it couldn't be smoke, in fact it sort of smelled like something between a wet Lillac and one of those stainless steel things that smokers are always puffing on because their wife/girlfriend/family gives them a ton of shit about real cigarettes. With a straight face and the Captain, who was in on the prank standing bedside me, I said" I think I saw something like this on Ghost Busters...." The silence loomed ominously then York says," I saw That..I saw that..." and he looked a lot like one of my favorite characters from old 40s Charlie Chan movies, Birmingham Brown.
The air conditioning soon cleared the Jimmy of fog and everyone returned to their rack with the Captain and myself having the late watch until morning. A few days later, the seas went to shit and we decided to put to port for a few days to wait it out. The trip in was late at night and it was raining pretty steadily. York was on deck watch with the Captain up in the wheelhouse and it was a pretty rough boat ride, dark as a well with sheet rain and very limited radar so York was watching for platforms and other vessels while the Captain tried to keep on course through the narrow channel out to Ship Shoal 45 Block. The oil patch boys were a little green around the gills and I knew it was only a moment before one of them regurgitated the shrimp creole we'd had for dinner and started a chain-reaction among them that would render the galley and focsle unpleasant to be in, so I got my Booger-mask, think it was sort a grim-reaper one, and a poncho and went out on the Texas deck and stood beside the starboard window on the leeward side wearing the mask to keep the rain off my face. It worked pretty good and beat the heck out facing another four hours in the chop, smelling regurgitated shrimps, bell peppers, onions, and celery and the awful sound of overly large roughnecks violently retching drowning out the sounds of John Travolta saving America from some military rednecks trying to steal a nuclear bomb on DVD. I saw a flash of light to the Southeast of us and knocked on the pilot's window to make sure he was aware of it but he couldn't see me so I switched the red LED lights on that were in the mask I was wearing and York very quickly and quietly ran down the companionway stairs and decided to spend the rest of the evening with the vomit-brigade.
Today, York had a very nice red gym-bag with Prote'ge' embroidered on the side. I asked him what that said? "It say Pro Teg Gee, I think it's French or something.."
"Damn, york...Do you have any idea what a Pro teg gee is?" I asked him and he said he didn't have a clue, thought it was French or German or something but his daughter had given it to him. I told him that I would be very careful not to let any of the fishermen see that bag, maybe he ought to turn it the other direction so nobody would see it. He turned the bag around and sort of blushed, he's pretty dark skinned so that's a difficult one to describe accurately but a blush, none the less. "You don't like little boys, do you York?" I asked him.
"No, I don't be one of those kind of mens."
"I sure wouldn't let one of rednecks see you carrying that..." We had a ways to walk up the hillside to where my truck was parked. "You better let me carry that...I got a gun with me," I told him.
When we got in the rear seat of my truck after placing his bag in the rear with other's packs, I told him that if he reached around the seat, I would shoot him. We drove a few miles with him sitting very quietly before I explained what the word meant and he laughed and learned a new word and I'll bet he'll use it soon in conversation. In the mean time, I'll continue trying to give him a hand carrying part of the load that he always feels compelled to carry for everyone else, along with his own stuff.

 

Day 180, My Liberal Diary
I understand that as a liberal, I am exempted from racism but I confess to having some residual Conservative thoughts once in a while that might be worthy of a tiny bit of white guilt. I did march with my black brothers and sisters in the 60s and 70s to stand up for equality but still wonder about some of the nomenclature I grew up with that might be offensive. For example, having worked around tugs, ships and barges all my life, the expression African-American head just doesn't flow off the tongue fast enough when docking a vessel and you want to tell the deck hand to catch a line post-haste on a protruding steel bollard and most of them do not know what a Kevel or Bollard is but they all know what a nigger-head is. Jury Rigging is an entirely different thing than the redneck nomenclature for making something hold together a while longer with bailing wire and duct-tape and is illegal to boot. but cultured black-American Engineering is not nearly as offensive as nigger-rigging. And I propose that the expression used for the party after receipt of tax-refunds hence-forth be know as Redneck-rich, simply because rednecks are much harder to offend than blacks or liberals and will usually simply say "Whut'd you mean by that?"
They were grilling some steaks and corn on the Jimmy G this week end and some birds stole the sizzling hot meat right off the grill! I asked what kind of birds they were and the first mate said he wasn't sure, they were just some kind of black-bird and I thought to myself, It figures. That terrible storm destroying the lives and possessions of millions of people in Florida and right there on the live TV, right behind the weatherman standing in the wind and rain, are hordes of folks breaking out store windows and carting off arm-loads of shoes, others were inside an Academy Sporting Goods Store loading up looted guns and being surrounded by Swat teams and every damned one of them were black. Come on brothers and sisters, you got to stop this stupid shit or least be more sneaky about it, if you want to get rid of racism instead of feeding it. I don't want to be a racist. I want to be a liberal! I want to believe that we are all the same, I do not want to believe that 90 percent of the looting and robbing is committed by blacks but damn it, you aren't helping one freaking bit by stealing shit right there in broad day-light on National television! I support shooting looters on sight because I have worked most of my adult life trying to help people that barely survived a disaster recover what few belongings they had left. I live and work with black people that feel exactly the same way and would shoot you on sight.
I am pretty sure that Easter is not any time soon, but while the topic was on birds, I mentioned that my wife, the right-wanger, was afraid of chickens. This began after receiving some baby chickens dyed pink and blue for Easter, when she was a small child, and they grew up to be really aggressive roosters that would attack and peck them until eventually they miraculously disappeared one evening just before a family dinner of chicken and dumplings. I remember when our children went to Sunday School one Easter and came home asking questions about the story of Christ, the crucifixion and resurrection and what did that have to do with baby chickens and bunny rabbits. I told them that after three days being locked up in a cavernous tomb with a huge rock blocking the exit, he must have been really hungry so that is why we give chickens and rabbits to kids for Easter. Bubba, one of my divers, told a story about when he was kid and got six painted baby chickens and a bunny rabbit for Easter. The following morning, he went to check on them in their box and all six of the baby chickens were dead, the tops of their heads chewed off and the bunny's mouth covered with blood. This sounded like something from a Monty Python video but apparently rabbits do not get along with chickens and they do like to chew on stuff. I will never again even consider giving a child a bunny or a chicken for Easter unless is already cooked.

 

Day 181, My Liberal Diary
My wife, the right-wanger, and myself have been together for pretty close to 30 years and still take walks on Sundays just to hold hands and enjoy life. We have lived a great adventure, traveling all over this rock rescuing marine casualties, making friends in lands where we couldn't even speak the language. Our son travelled with us a lot too, working as a crane operator and sometimes as a diver or a tug captain. I raised him on the water and he grew up with my divers dropping him into the swimming pool in their helmets before he was even big enough to lift one to his head by himself and I had hime driving one of our tugs and barges by the time he was tall enough to see out the wheelhouse. We lost our son a few years ago in a most tragic event that I suspect was murder. My wife's health has failed and we are no longer able to travel in my work. We still spend quality time together. She often sits, playing video poker on her iPad while I write my songs and music, listening and sometimes, making comments. A few weeks ago, she said to me "Precious?", She's the only one that calls me Precious, "Precious, you have written some beautiful songs but you haven't ever written a love song? Why is that?" Well, I didn't really know how to answer that one, so I wrote this song and when I carried her chocolate milk to her bed around two in the morning, I also had my guitar and I played it for her and she smiled so sweetly with tears in her eyes and told me that was why she called me "Precious".
I'm playing tomorrow night at the Perfecto Cigar Shop in Ocean Springs, Mississippi as part of the annual Mississippi Songwriter's Festival and this is one song that I definitely will share. God Bless.
I'm All In | "Mississippi River Crooks" Darrell Wallace

 

Day 182, My Liberal Diary
Eidetic memory has been both a blessing and a curse my entire life. I am a prodigious reader and have traveled extensively in foreign lands. I have burned my hand on a stove because the meaning of the word "hot" from my mother's mouth had no meaning until I reached my tiny little baby fingers up to the stove top and touched that pretty red ring but have never forgotten it and do not require a pneumonic device to recall. Man is separated from animals by our ability to develop and utilize tools, hence the use of protective cloth or tongs to pick up hot objects, most other animals either do not have the capacity to develop tools or they are just smart enough to leave shit alone if it will cause them harm. My memories tend to be triggered by the feelings or emotions that I felt when I experienced them. Smell is another thing that triggers my memory and recently, my sense of smell has gotten so strong that it actually triggers images in my mind's eye. I have been experiencing brief unexplained periods of vertigo or dizziness and some really bad headaches, so much so that I went to get an MRI and apparently I have a benign growth inside my skull that might be causing this along with some loss of short-term memory. I have been noticing this short-term memory loss for the past few years and noting that it seems to be getting more prevalent. My tool for addressing miss-placed objects has been to always purchase multiple items and leave them in spots that I frequent when they are needed. My wife says that I have an obsession with boxes and I sort of do, I suppose. I buy boxes that seem appropriate for things that I use so that if I need something, I just open it's box and there it is, although sometimes I do forget why I needed it in the first place. I write songs and stories to remind me of things that I do not wish to forget. That is why so many of my songs are about emotions or experiences that I learned something from and I do not necessarily care if anyone else gets it or not, it reminds me. I laugh at the thought of meeting so many new people each day because I seldom can recall names, sometimes even those of people that are very close to me. I laugh at spell-check on my computer because it finds so many words that I have written backwards. I might go days without writing in my Liberal Diary, not because I haven't anything to write, but because I just forget to sit down and put it to pen. The advantage of loosing one's memory is that I constantly get to rethink, re-evaluate so many things that I might initially have just taken for granted and the one thing that I have learned and will never forget is that chance is a word that someone thought up as a bullshit excuse for events they just didn't think through.
My family rented a haunted house on Cedar Street in Jackson, Tennessee one winter while we were building a new home near Beech Bluff. There was a crazy woman and her husband that lived across the street. She would sometimes sit on our porch swing at three in the morning, having a conversation with a deceased woman that had live in our house years before. Children are cruel, so we would sometimes sneak to her house and watch her walking around in her house-coat, wringing her hands, mumbling to herself. Her husband had retired from the Postal Service and apparently still pretended each day, to go to work so his wife would not know that he was no longer employed. He would leave their house, dressed as a postman, carrying a leather postal satchel and leaving empty envelopes in mailboxes that he would retrieve that afternoon for use the next day. Some of my friends that lived near there will recall the "Crazy Lady". It was a particularly cold winter night when we were awakened by the smell of smoke and looked outside to see the crazy woman standing naked in the snow while her house burned. We called the fire department and my mother carried a wool over-coat out and put it around the poor woman and gave her socks and a pair of rubber boots to keep her feet from freezing. The woman squatted in the snow and peed while the fire-fighters extinguished the flames. Their house was gutted but they moved back in, nailing sheets over the burned out windows. They were still living there in that burned shell when my family moved into our new home. When I smell smoke from burning plastic, I now recall that evening and the shame I feel from laughing at that poor couple that had so little.

 

Day 183, My Liberal Diary
There is a rumor going around the outside edge of the gun culture, that reloading ammunition saves you money but this is just not true and has never been true. It used to let you shoot more for the about the same costs, but because of the increased costs of components, is no longer true either. When Obama was President, there was a tremendous shortage of ammunition on the store shelves. You couldn't find a box of .22s to give your grandson with the rifle you bought him for Christmas. You could buy guns everywhere, there was no shortage of them but ammunition was just not available anywhere and a gun without ammunition is just an unwieldy blunt object and not nearly as effective as a hardware store hammer, which by the way, is used in a much greater number than firearms as a choice for murdering someone. I didn't make this up, the FBI has statistics on the implements used to cause death with malice and hammers and other blunt objects out-number guns by about three to one. I reload and in fact, have a dedicated building where I spend hours and days making ammunition for the firearms that I own from components that used to be reasonably priced but recently, I began reloading a new caliber called .300 AAC Blackout. It requires .30 diameter bullets and my search for them on-line sort of says it all. I can buy loaded live ammunition cheaper than just the bullets, add my time and the costs of powder, brass cases, primers, resizing dies, recapping pins, case tumbling media, case lube, reloading manuals, and the costs right away outrun the price of factory ammunition. Why would someone do this if it isn't to save money?
I reload because of the satisfaction that I get in knowing that no matter what the government does to remove ammunition from the shelves, I can and do roll my own. I have even made brass cases with my miniature lathes, cast the lead bullets from lead tire weights, made the propellant from charcoal, potassium nitrate, red gum, and sulfur, reloaded spent primers by flattening the indentation with a nail then repacking with ground match heads, and fired them from a firearm that I made mostly out of pieces that I bought at the local hardware store. My point it that it is impossible to put the Genie back into the bottle. There is no way to disarm the most violent and malicious creature that walks the earth without erasing the technology that gave us this ability. You can buy 3-D printers that will literally print the components necessary to assemble firearms in your home and can purchase one for less than the costs of a quality firearm and make as many as you want. The problems with guns have never been about the guns, it has always been about the miscreants that use them to rob, intimidate, and murder. There are printers that print laws against these things too but apparently are no more effective than trying to ban guns has been.

 

Day 184, My Liberal Diary
Obsolescence is designed into products being manufactured and marketed today. This practice began somewhere in the late 1970s and has gotten progressively worse over time. It began with a tanked economy based on everyone having to have one of every thing and when everybody got one of everything, then the factories had to shut down because nobody needed their stuff any more. A bunch of engineers got together and figured out how to make stuff that would break and need to be replaced every few years, just to keep the economy going. The factories still made more stuff than they could sell so it had to be made to wear out even faster and now virtually product sold in America is total junk, disposable or will be replaced with a new and improved version in four months.
The technology in medicine has developed to the point where people's lives can be extended for decades but this is only available for a select few because pharmaceutical companies would go out of business if they sold cures for the disease rather than treatment for the symptoms. Poverty and urban violence could be greatly reduced but we have created a prison industry that has to have inmates to keep the thousands of people employed guarding them, making tooth-brushes for the inmates to make shanks from, toilet paper to start fires during riots, bars of soap to drop in the shower, and supplemental income for the folks that smuggle drugs and cellphones to the prisoners, therefore, we need poverty and urban violence to escalate strictly for the bottom line.
Productivity on the job has to be slowed down to keep from out-running the market. A typical construction project now spends as much time filling out forms designed by "Safety Engineers" based on insurance company's actuarial tables and written by some pencil-dick paper pusher that has never owned a callus or blister as they do driving nails. Tort lawyers and lobbyists have brought this about and that's why you have to piss in a cup every few months to cook french fries at McDonalds.
The real shame of this is that there will be nothing worth leaving to your grand children as a legacy or heirloom except broken ipads and lawnmowers that wore out last year.

 

Day 185, My Liberal Diary
I have been concerned recently with absentmindedness and some short-term memory loss. I have also been bothered with headaches that pain-relievers seem to have no effect on and occasional dizziness and nausea that tends to be very bothersome.My wife, the right-wanger, insisted that I visit our physician so I did and she ordered a MRI which was a total pain in the ass. Enough time had passed without hearing anything about the results of the MRI, that I had pretty well just assumed that my headaches were caused primarily by Republicans and, at least according to them, dizziness and short-term memory loss are appropriate for a Liberal, so I stopped worrying about it.
I am developing ways to cope with memory loss. I write things down but I can't seem to remember where I left my note-pad. I bought extra keys for everything and labeled them and placed them in places where I would first look if I loose my keys. I can't hear my cellphone anyway, so I'll not worry about loosing that device much, although it did spend a few days in my reloading building last week. I put my daily vitamins and medications into one of those things that are marked for each day. My guitar case is now full of pieces of paper with lyrics to songs that I have written and I have started recording everything I play. If my friends would start wearing those gas-station type shirts with their names on them, it would help a lot but I certainly understand that they do tend to be less than fashionable for the most part, so please don't be offended if I introduce you as my friend but forget to tell them your name.
Most of you know that I have been pretty deaf for several years now, but that shouldn't impede a true Liberal, we don't listen to anyone anyway. My eye-sight is getting worse but I can still dream in vivid color and my sense of smell is very acute. I have made my living working beneath dark water all my life so I have a highly developed space perception and my sense of touch is far superior to any of my remaining senses, so if I touch the wrong thing, don't get your knickers in a knot, I'm just trying to be sure of what it is.
And for those of you that see through this shit, I'll know more about this thing growing in my head next week after my visit with the neurologist and in case I forget, thank you for caring.