I needed something to dress up the toc

Usually I have an essay or two, some bit of insightful wisdom, or perhaps one of my brilliant bits of fiction to put in the monthly table of contents. I seem to have come up short this month so I am making do with another editorial. The great merit of editorials is that the quality can be even lower than the rest of the trash. Thank Ghu for the joke file; it’s more reliable than my creative muse.

Eastward Ho

No, “Eastward Ho” is not a reversal of the old advice, “Go West, Young Man”, addressed to a young female entrepeneur seeking a more profitable street corner. It is what yours truly is hoping to do in the next month or so. It has been a couple of years since I have been in the East coast. I hope to spend a month or two visiting old friends and not so old friends. If I do the publication schedule may suffer severely.

One of the reasons for this trip is to meander about a bit looking for places where I might settle down and gather moss in my retirement. Any suggestions along those lines would be welcome. I must remind those enthusiasts who are eager to tell me where to go that I have already been in Texas.

Baseball been very good to me

As I write the baseball season has just fired up. Barry Bonds has jumped out in front in the HR race with a quick five home runs. Sammy Sosa is no slouch either; he already has three home runs. The way I figure it is that Sammy will hit 70 homeruns this year and will come in second again.

There is something almost Grecian about Sosa. He has averaged over 60 home runs per season for the last four seasons. He is the only person to have hit 60 homeruns in three different seasons. At this point it is sort of taken for granted that Sammy will hit 60+ home runs this year. If he does he will be the only player to have hit 50 or more homeruns in five successive seasons and, of course, the only player to have hit 60+ home runs in four different seasons.

And unless something happens to Bonds, Sammy will come in second again. There is something positively mythic about being a perpetual runner up on such a heroic scale. There has been a rotating leadership, first MacGuire and now Bonds, who grabs the brass ring and gets all of the media attention. Sosa? Oh, he’s just that guy who keeps hitting 60 home runs every season; he’s not anybody special.

The depressing nature of politics

Mostly I don’t do politics here. It’s not that I don’t have political opinions; I do. Mostly I’m fairly quiet about them. The thing is that something very ugly happens to people’s heads when they take politics seriously. They say and think the most atrocious things about people on the “other” side. They don’t see anything wrong with their vehement bigotries. It is hard to hold real conversations with people who take their politics seriously – at any moment they can slip off into rantland.

On having a neighbour

The house, the family house where I currently reside, is one mile south of town. It occupies a two acre sliver out of a quarter (a quarter is a quarter of a square mile, aka 160 acres.) My mother, in her less than infinite wisdom, left the rest of the quarter to my cousins on my father’s side. They have sold their windfall to a local who is moving a house onto the land. It seems that I shall have a neighbour. I’m not sure that I approve of this. It is one thing to have neighbours in the city – they live next door and you can ignore them. But having neighbours in the country is a different matter altogether. It’s getting crowded in these parts; I guess I will have to move west.