Bleargh! Burning Down the House

I don't feel well

I've been sick all week. I don't know what I have, but I know what it is doing to me. First I feel like puking and then it comes out the other end. Yay! Sorry to tell you this, but I thought someone might have wondered where I had gone to. Or maybe I just hoped that someone might wonder.

I've been doing a lot of sleeping, and a lot of reading, and I've been practicing guitar a little, only to see clearly that I need to practice a lot more than I currently do. I've been texting a fair amount, too. But I turned off the ringer on my phone. Someone woke me up bright and early with a call that wasn't intended for me this morning. When you're sick and having freaky dreams about a hot female friend who is a personal trainer doing weird sexual things to you, that sort of rude awakening is extra annoying.

Obamanomics

You might have noticed that the U.S. stock market is in free-fall. The Press is saying that this is in response to Europe's economic woes. I noticed that it also corresponds exactly with Obama's very politically motivated assault on Standard and Poor's, which he claims is totally justified even as every single person paying attention is fully aware that it is nothing more than political pay-back and the very sort of thing that a Chicago thug does, but not a President. This man is a criminal, and so is his right-hand man in the DOJ, Eric Holder.

Standard and Poor's gets payback, Chicago-style

Ever since my father died, my mother seems determined to destroy every single thing he built at their house.

First she had his workshop hauled off. My sister and her husband were happy to take it. They have it set up on their land now and are using it. There was nothing wrong with it. It was filled with his weights that he'd had since he was 15, his chemistry equipment, his reloading equipment, his 2 oscilloscopes, a stereo as old as me, a working telephone from the 1940s that hung on the wall in case of emergency, a vice, a drill press, carefully organized toolboxes filled with everything a person might need to do any sort of repair, and more. It was a wonderland in a space the size of a single-car garage, compact and efficient.

Dad's workshop goes down

Later, she had the back porch torn down. Dad had that porch built so that he could set up his porch swing and sit outside every day after work. And he did. He sat out there every single day and he loved it. But mom needed new gutters. So she hired a man and he casually mentioned that it was difficult to work over the porch, so she paid him a great deal of money to just tear it down. Well, there were a great many tools and things that were kept both in Dad's workshop and on the back porch, where they were protected from the weather, things like a riding mower, a push mower, a motorcycle, a wheelbarrow, etc. Suddenly she had a crisis of what to do with all the tools and equipment which now sat out in the rain.

So she just got rid of it all.

Then she complained that she didn't have a lawnmower and didn't have this and didn't have that, because she had gotten rid of it.

So because she got rid of all the lawn equipment, she has to hire a man to come mow her yard each week. None of us could do it for her because she got rid of all the lawn equipment and we aren't equipped to mow our own yards and then borrow some trailer to haul our stuff over to her house every week and mow hers, too. But she knew that when she got rid of the mowers. And she did it anyway.

Next, she paid 2 men to come and tear down the last remaining thing my father built, a small metal toolshed which held the few remaining tools that she had available to her - shovels, rakes, etc. That was just today. Already she is complaining that she'd like to plant a tree where the shed was, but she has no tools with which to dig a hole for the tree and she wondered aloud, as she sat lazily in her chair in the air conditioning, whether she could hire the people who sell the trees to come and plant it for her.

The shovels that were in the shed are on the back porch at this very moment, waiting to rust in the rain until someone hauls them away, as she has already arranged. But the point is, the shovels are still here. She could pick one up and use it to dig a hole for a tree if she truly wanted. She could even ask me to and I would do it. She might even stick one of the shovels in the garage next to her car.

But she won't. She's too busy worrying. Worrying and getting rid of every single element of work available to her. She's worrying now about various small shrubs growing up around the yard in the fence or near the fence. Oh worry, worry, what to do? I mean, if she had a shovel she could just dig them up and there'd be no more worry, right? But she's getting rid of the shovels, just as she got rid of everything else that might enable her to do any work around the yard instead of hiring men to do it for her.

When she was thinking about having the back porch torn down, she worried and worried and made herself sick. She asked every single one of her children and we all said "don't tear it down." But she wanted to. It was the easier way to go, you see, and if there is one thing you can always count on my mother to do, it is whatever is easiest. Sure, it cost a fortune and resulted in more headaches, but that was something she didn't think about, even as we told her to think about it. Just plan one more step ahead and you'll see where this might be a problem. But she wouldn't. She only thought about the worry of how the man installing her new gutters said it would be a pain to work over the roof of the porch. Thus, she concluded, the porch must be torn down to make life easier. She had made up her mind almost instantly upon hearing this stranger mention that it was difficult to work over the roof of the porch. Asking all of us our opinions was just a search for someone to take responsibility for her decision which she had already made.

My mother is a true blue American feminist, you see, and always looking for someone else to be responsible for her choices, as they do.

So anyway, my father's workshop was gone not a month after he died. His beloved back porch was demolished awhile later, leaving my mother complaining about the hot sun beating down upon it. And his toolshed was torn down today, with every tool and instrument that a normal person might need to maintain a house and a yard meticulously eliminated in order that my mother might simply worry over tiny shrubs tangled in the fence, the fence being the next thing she wants to hire someone to tear down. She also worries about whether or not she can continue to afford to hire men to repair and destroy, alternately, the various worries she finds for herself around the house while she sits in her chair sipping coffee and spending her inheritance to eliminate any possibility of work. And she worries that she may run out of money.

Meanwhile, she has been diagnosed with diabetes. The doctor recommends exercise and a lot of it. But she has all but entirely eliminated that. She has her chair and she's comfortable in it. She hires men to exercise for her while she complains that she can't eat whatever she wants to anymore, although she mostly does anyway, due to her condition.

And I watch all of this and I wonder, what the hell makes a person so bound and determined to destroy everything around them, including their own body, leaving their life empty and void of any purpose or meaning?

Truer words than she ever suspected

Then again, we have a president who seems very similar, bound and determined to destroy all that he touches and then punish anyone who observes what he's done. He hasn't created one single thing, except worry and debt and injustice. He blames everyone around him, everyone except the Keynesian Marxist feminists that he has surrounded himself with in the White House and all the many government agencies where he appointed like-minded destroyers to rule and ruin. I guess it's true what they say, anyone can be president.

Of course, no one says that just anyone can be a GOOD president.