There are only 38 days left before Christmas, and the weather tempts me to put up the lights. When the temperature is 60 plus degrees in mid-November, that is the time to decorate the yard with tiny lights, not when the temperature is 10 degrees, and the wind makes it feel like thirty below. But I’m sure I’ll pussy out of the chore and wait for the white stuff to fall and the pond to freeze before venturing out to wrestle with stiff wires and brittle branches. Why don’t I listen to myself? Probably because I have done it the hard way for the past sixty years, and the brain is a glutton for punishment.
NOT MY HOUSE
It is always fun to get sauced while stringing lights. When it is cold, I fortify myself with a bottle of Scotch to keep my innards warm and my joints loose. Why shouldn’t I get lit along with the lights?
One of the main reasons for stringing lights outside is to brighten the neighborhood. It has been dark for so many hours now that it gets depressing. The light serves to cheer us up and keep moving.
The latest project I am working on is being done in Zebra wood. I spent 100 dollars on the wood so far, and now I must buy more to get a better match of wood grains. It’s incredible how one piece of wood can be so out of place in a work of art. It is like painting in red and white stripes; in the center of the board, the red stripes are thinner, and the white stripes are enormous. The stripes are okay by themselves, but when placed into a work composed of uniformly spaced red and white stripes, they become ugly.
Now, I must waste time and money to seek more matching wood. When I picked up that board in the wood store, I told myself it wouldn’t work, but I was desperate to begin the piece and went with it anyway. Then again, when I laid the pattern on the board to start the cut, a gremlin kept shouting in my ear that it was wrong, but I proceeded anyway. Now, I must live with my regrets. This is another instance where I must forget the adversity of the mistake and choose to learn from it instead.
During 2007-2016, my one goal was to bash Obama at every chance. I even published a book of my cartoons and editorial opinions titled “Nightmares from Obama.” When I first listened to Mr. Smooth, I suspected he was a political charlatan. He was definitely a word master. His ability to say many things and make them sound logical and essential was masterful. The one promise he kept declaring during his campaign was that he wanted to transform America. He never, once, told us what he wanted to transform us into.
I am old enough to remember Fidel Castro’s rise to become the Cuban leader. He, too, was famous for his speeches, smooth talk, and promises. Barack emulated Fidel in too many ways. For one thing, Fidel kept his intentions a secret during his campaign. When he finally achieved success, he released his real intent to turn Cuba into a communist state. Obama never came out to declare what he wished the USA to become, but it was clear that he was overly sympathetic to Muslims and Socialists. Even the church he attended was a sign of his leftist leanings.
The internet was loaded with articles about Obama’s Kenyan birthplace, which should have disqualified him from being president, but behind him was an organization that kept those facts away from the public. Before he ran for President, his meteoric rise within the Illinois state government was a tip-off. When he was elected State Senator, the ink was still wet on the ballots when the press asked him if he would run for president. How can someone so obscure rise to the highest position in the land without the backing of many influential people who saw him as their political messiah?
One story that was printed then disappeared almost immediately had Obama visiting the Man’s Country, a gay bathhouse with Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel. His affinity for men is supported by reports from Hawaii, where he was raised and mentored by Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying communist. Obama’s Kenyan father eventually returned to Kenya and was given an elite government job. During his tenure with the Kenyan president, the father promoted the idea that Kenya adopt a plan to redistribute wealth. The Kenyan president was wise enough to reject the plan and demoted the father to a menial position. My point is that many clues were pointing at Obama’s transformation plans. If only the press had the balls to follow up and investigate his past. Instead, they chose to become hypnotized by his slick delivery of words that made him sound educated and presidential.
Obama’s cabinet controlled the narrative. They suppressed the need for the press to investigate by putting government-drafted news articles into their hands. Again, the press, whose job is to seek the truth, slept on the job by taking what was handed to them, thus avoiding the need to work. If ever there was a “fake news” distributor, it was Obama.
The whole reason I am telling all of this is that since Biden has been president, Obama has been invisible, that is, until the last couple of months when he suddenly became a voice again. As Biden sinks in the polls, it has become clear to Obama that his puppet Joe will not be president again. What, then, will Obama do to retain his hold on the testicles of the US Government? Whoever that might be, the new man could quickly shelve Obama and his ideas forever.
Congress, the Supreme Court, and Legislative branches cannot fix our problem. The one thing they can’t do anything about is the bureaucracy. Obama infiltrated the bureaucratic agencies with progressive democrats who gladly continue to over-regulate within their non-elected agencies to bypass the Constitution and make things impossible to control. I also believe the entire Bureaucracy should be disbanded (drain the swamp) to reset the government. Whatever chaos and confusion resulting from this action will be worth the benefit. The Lobby industry will be upset, and the cost of doing business will be reduced and confusing until Congress can legislate out the confusion. A significant benefit of draining the swamp is that it will give Congress something worthwhile to do again. They now pass laws to provide the lobbyists with what they want.
Here is what I want:
Banish Obama to Kenya, where he can become King and rule his people.
Disband every Bureaucracy, and begin with a clean sheet of paper.
Put Joe Biden to pasture at one of our best and most comfortable Federal Prisons.
Limit spending on National Campaigns for President, Senate, and Congress to Fifty million dollars. That gives candidates one million dollars per state to spend on campaigning.
Forbid stipends from outside interests to any government member while in office. They get paid enough for what little they do.
A set of national guidelines for elections. The States can pass election laws if they meet the federal guidelines. Define voter eligibility
Winners of National elections must be announced within 24 hours of the vote.
Charge any country that we support with armaments for the stuff we send them
Support only our staunchest allies with military help.
Rewrite our immigration laws:
a. Open all borders to allow free passage in or out / OR
b. Reset immigration laws to make them simple and manageable with a limit on the number of people that can enter based on what can be assimilated into the population and the economy.
Settle national abortion based on what is morally correct. Define the moment of conception as the instant the sperm makes it into the egg.
Add Capitalism as the only system the economy will operate under
Prohibit Socialized medicine within the Constitution.
Many friends ask me to write something for them and preface the request with “You like to write.” My Lions Club will assign writing duties to me even when I am reluctant to do them. These requests have given me the idea that I may be a writer. When I analyzed my life and my interests, I learned this about myself: even in high school, I liked to write stories. In college, I hated classes about English authors (Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats), but I loved classes that required writing essays.
Ten Best English Authors
When I transferred from Saint Joseph’s College in Indiana to the University of Illinois, I had to prove English grammar and punctuation proficiency by writing a qualifying essay. The subject matter was to be chosen by me. In my classes at St. Joe, the Prof suggested we list things that interested us and then pick a topic to write about. He also indicated that you can shift to something else once you begin writing about the topic. I use this technique often. The same professor encouraged me to continue writing by selecting my essays to read before the class. Talk about an ego boost; he knew how to supercharge mine.
I got into the University of Illinois without having to take remedial English. Because I transferred to advance my career in engineering, I had few opportunities to write creative pieces, but I worked overtime writing lab reports. After a successful career in Engineering, I chose to start this blog. Writing became creative again, but my writing sounded like lab reports.
After retiring from the engineering world, one of my goals was to write my biography. I began by making a list of memories. SIngular recollections of things that happened to me, people I met, or projects I worked on. The next step was to write about one of the topics from my list by hand in a composition notebook. I filled three notebooks with stuff and realized what a tremendous job it was to transcribe all those cursive words into a word processor. I hired my former secretary, who could read my handwriting, to do the job. She was a very dynamic and talented lady. I had to warn her not to change what I wrote. I suspected she would rewrite everything to make it readable and sensible. She did exactly as asked. Later, when I began to edit the document, I realized what a mistake I made by not allowing her to correct my shitty writing. That is when I researched AI programs and bought one to help me become a better writer.
Biography-Jun-e-or
Using the AI editing program, I could write a readable biography. After completion, I stopped using the tool because I thought my writing had improved. When I began writing my book recently, I realized I needed help again, and now I know for sure that I am not a natural-born writer like I thought I was. I don’t have enough years left on this earth to learn to write as well as I do in my mind, but I will die trying.
This is another one of those days when I don’t have a clue as to what to write. As I finished that sentence, my Grammarly program highlighted it. That is a strong hint that the AI has found a problem with the way it is phrased. I began using the program when I became serious about completing my book “Space Rod.” It definitely has a different voice than I do. My style is no longer prevalent in many of the posts because I opted to go with the AI robot’s version. As an example, in the first sentence, I wrote, “This is another one of those days when I don’t have a clue as to what to write.” The robot suggests that I say, This is another one of those days when I don’t know what to write. Supposedly, the AI version makes the sentence more understandable and transparent as to what I said. There are times when I like the way I speak and want to keep my own phraseology because it defines me. The last sentence has been highlighted and I choose to dismiss the AI suggestion. It makes me sound like a PhD English Grammar Major, and I am not. In fact, I am so far away from an English Major I sound like a foreigner.
Anyway, if you want to learn how to write clearly, I recommend you use this program or something like it. I accept the changes it recommends about 95% of the time. When I write, my fingers fly on the keys, but the output is scrambled, but I get my ideas down. The program allows me to return and correct the two-finger typing gibberish to be readable and, more importantly, understandable. The one thing I really love about the robot is that he/she/it knows how to use a comma. Clearly, I don’t. Also, AI dislikes using extra adjectives and pronouns to embellish my thoughts. As an example, in the sentence above, I wrote, “I really love,” and the robot wants me to strike the word “really.” Honestly, the robot does not have a soul. Why else does it choose to be so judgmental about my use of adjectives? It is a good thing the program doesn’t speak. I’d would be answering in expletives.
