Columns 2008

When did we lose our concept of privacy?

I used to wonder where my intensely adverse reaction to cell phones originated. I always feel queasy when asked to handle one. Then the light went on one day as I sat in a restaurant with a friend. His cell phone rang. He interrupted our conversation to check who was calling. His face lit up and he announced it was a mutual friend. He answered the call.

I sat there wondering if I was the only person in situations like this that feel as though they are there to fill the time until something better comes along.  I remember one

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Bush new approval rating

Well, out decider in chief is down to a 28% approval rating. I’d like to find that 28% and ask them, WHAT THE HELL COULD YOU POSSIBLY BE THINKING!!!!!!??????????  But then I switch to decaf and I feel better.

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It’s happening again

It’s my own fault. I told myself not to play the Jimmy Buffet cd. But who could resist now that I have a cd player in my car. And so I go to bed at night, wake up at 3 AM to go pee and get up in the morning with the same incessant phrase playing again and again in my head….”I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes. A big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer.  Which way do I steer for my cheeseburger in paradise.” And over and over and over. Until

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This is when you know you’re really irrelevant

You know you’re really irrelevant when you throw a birthday dinner for the pope at the White House and he can’t find the time to attend, even though he’s in town.

Are you listening, George? You have now become totally irrelevant. You have become so irrelevant that some polls list you below Brittany Spears in world influence.  Man, that’s gotta sting! You can’t beat out a psychotic, aging pop diva whose main claim to fame in recent years has been that she married the most useless man on the fact of this earth. Ouch!

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Hmmmmmm

My sister and brother are at the Outer Banks in North Carolina trying to stay warm in sixty degree weather. I am in Anchorage waiting for the snow predicted for Monday and wondering how I could have been so stupid as to take off my studded snow tires before May.  Yet I wouldn’t change places with them for anything. Because the other day I took a walk in the gently falling spring snow while listening to the birds complaining like hell about the havoc the snow was wreaking on their nest building plans and the buds on the trees visibly

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My friends continue to age

Today Leslie turns sixty. I’d feel a whole lot more like gloating over that were it not for the fact that she still looks better than most women half her age…and certainly better than me. I’ll save my gloating until she actually looks her age. No matter how long I have to wait!

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Columns 2008

Pot is not the enemy

Every once in a while, I am forced to face the fact that the war on drugs is an abject failure, yet lack of a spine in way too many politicians has made a rational, national discussion of this issue practically impossible.  Which is just pathetically sad because the billions of dollars and thousands of lives lost to this hopeless war could have been much better spent in treating people with a problem, to say nothing of how much we’d save if we emptied our jails of people whose only crime was pot.

This issue comes to the forefront again

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I go to the gas station…

I fill my tank…I avert my gaze from the price per gallon sign…I drive away depressed.

Thank god oil company executives have their annual income safely stashed. I would hate to think of them having to worry about this the way us common folk do.

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Rumsfeld…Ashcroft

Have they been taken back up by the mother ship? Or are they hiding their heads in shame at the fraud and deceit they perpetrated on America? Or do I just follow the wrong news and that’s why they seem to have disappeared from sight?  Then again, where is Condi Rice?  Hmmm…never mind. I’d just as soon we didn’t find her either. Knowing the whereabouts of George Bush is all the pain I can stand today.

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