No Alarm

[degringolade]

Early Dynastic Period (3150 – 2686 BC) / Ancient Egypt/ Women Preparing Food, Tomb of Djari

I didn't have an alarm today.  That is turned off until Wednesday.  This is a good thing. 

Gonna head up to Kingston today, Might stop in Centralia and/or Olympia to pick up a stamp or two for my McMenamin's passport and nibble some lunch.  Maybe the Spar is still serving the "Hangtown Fry" which will bring me screeching back to the early nineties for my reminisces. 

Driving will suck as always, I will wait until around 09:00 to get on the road so that I can avoid the bulk of the idiots here in the Rose City.

Last time I spent time thinking before I sat down to write.  I think that doing such in a bar where people serve you dark brown alcohol, while it does let you work around problems in the plotline, makes for a serious lack of ambition when you get home to sit down and at the laptop and type words into a word processor. 

But all might turn out well anyway.  On the drive today is several hours of boredom and thinking.  I will try to use that as a tool to throw together the dialog and the motivations.  Hopefully I will do better this time than I have done in the past. 

Screed:

"The barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

Hilaire Belloc

Now, there are those out among you who feel that I am directing this last quote at fuckwad.  Well, in truth, you may well be partially correct.  Trump fits the description to a "T".  But unfortunately, these kind of folks are in charge of the asylum thoughout.  Now granted, there are some pretty honorable, pretty decent folks out there in office, but they are thin on the ground.

I am kinda thinking that the change that has been brewing in my lifetime is coming to a head.  Now, Joseph walked away with five ounces of silver because I though that 2015 would be the date.  I didn't mind at all being wrong, but I do miss those eagles. 

There is a lot of talk out there about making the change to suit the majority.  But I really think that such a thing isn't possible.  For the past twenty years we have been an evenly divided polity.  At the same time, whichever side wins an election with a "majority" feels that they have a "mandate" to shove whatever current fashion appeals to a small majority of the electorate down the throats of a large minority of the electorate. 

This is how you end up with the ruthless barbarians we have had to suffer though since 1980.