Tuesday, December 20, 2011

'tis what kind of a season?

I'm almost looking forward to the political campaigns swinging into high gear. It's the prospect of the onslaught of abrasive nonstop TV ads which brainless glued-to-the-tube morons like me have inflicted on us. It's hard to imagine that I can actually be looking forward to Michele Bachmann spots. You know; the ones in which she contemptuously spits out the mantra of the evils of Obama-care in her very best Minnesota church-basement, nasal whine. I probably should have my head examined.

But I swear that the onslaught of abrasive nonstop Christmas season TV ads from the auto industry has got me on the verge of dreaming of more face time with the likes of the Congresswoman. When you think about it though, the car ads and the Bachmann ads are really cut from just about the same cloth. I doubt that anyone who's bothering to read this needs any additional convincing that she's a truly heinous political boor. Stupid, smug, smarmy, sacrosanct, small-minded, self-important...I could go on. And that's just a few adjectives out of the S section of the dictionary. She is truly the ugly American in ways that Marlon Brando couldn't have come close to bringing to the big screen back in the day.

But the car ads that are making my stomach lurch every morning and have me knocking shit off the kitchen counters in my haste to grab the remote are every bit as ugly and embarrassingly American. Who on God's green earth would seriously be moved to go out and drop something in excess of a middle class annual income on a new holiday Lexus or BMW? Jeez, ya got me. Oh, wait...I know! It's the same heinous boors who are funding Michele Bachmann's run up the flagpole and the same boors who are doing their damnedest to keep anyone with a middle class annual income a permanent part of the lower middle class.

The ideal that these ads paint of a warped, demented, Mercedes-driven American elite is pure fuel for the Occupy crowd. And enough to gag most anyone even a tiny smidge to the left of the GOP boors, louts and oafs who strut their stuff on Capitol Hill these days. Like I said, it's enough to make me wish for grating attack ads from the campaign trail. In those media-bites, you can at least see the actual faces of the ugly Americans instead of the repulsively sanitized models we see in the holiday ads. And this is all the more bitter as the last of the St. Paul Ford Plant workers ponder their futures from the barstools at Tiffany's.

Maybe I'm just feeling a little jaded from too many hours of chasing down used textbooks and checking on an unending supply of just-invented ISBN's attached to textbooks which I will never in a million years chase down as used copies. Maybe I'm jealous that the velvet-collared overcoat crowd can afford new Infinitis (or so we're led to believe) while I can't even afford the cover charge to get onto a dealer's showroom floor to smudge the wax job on one of those damned things.

It must be a seasonal affective thing. I'm even getting tired of hearing Burl Ives's take on Holly Jolly Christmas and Bruce Springsteen's on Santa Claus is Comin'. How un-American is that?

Happy Holidays to all. Count your blessings.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

thanks have been given

There's always plenty to give thanks for here on Laurel Avenue, even during the seasons when giving thanks isn't officially recognized with paid days off work. There's usually enough to eat and drink around here and the two new cats give us plenty of laughs. I'm sure that I give Miz Susan plenty of laughs, too, even if some of those are the rueful what-in-the-hell-was-I-thinking sort.

We've moved in and out of the 4-day Thanksgiving season (6 or 7 days if you count the pre-frenzy housekeeping and food-shopping work that the season demands) and we may have slid irretrievably into winter. I suspect this because I just spent a couple of hours shoveling sidewalks and sweeping off cars. I cleaned off 3-4" of the 1-2" which we'd been told to expect from the latest Gulf moisture-sucking low pressure system meets northern cold front event. I ignored that first little blast we had a couple of weeks ago which turned every street in St. Paul into a multi-car pileup just waiting to happen. I didn't bust out the shovels back then; by rights, all of that first snow should have melted off, what with temps getting up into the 40's. But the weather people keep muttering about sun angles and cloud cover and other weather jargon. All this technical talk just seems like lame excuse-making but it might explain why there was still snow on the ground (and our sidewalk) when it snowed again yesterday.

I even cleared off the back deck which is usually Susan's responsibility. That falls to her because I don't really give a good goddamn about clearing off the back deck. It's not like it's warm enough to have dinner out there for awhile, is it? But she seems to think that it makes sense to keep a path clear to get the trash out to the alley. I thought we did just fine last year when we had to drive our garbage up the block and then down the alley because we had like four feet of snow in the back yard. But she's like that and besides she's got certain entertainments out on the deck which require access. Like confirming that rabbits are nasty and messy in all sorts of ways and that we should figure out how to get rid of all of them. If anyone needs rabbits, c'mon over. I don't have any ideas on how to cull the herd legally but I'll take notes if anyone else does.

I guess I'll know it's winter for good when the commutes to and from Brooklyn Park and EnHenn start nudging the hour-plus marker on the dashboard clock. Can't hardly wait. I'm still dabbling with the idea of checking motel rates out there in the NW suburbs. This could come in handy for the nights when the roads are impassable to the point that anyone with enough smarts will wonder if they don't really have to drive home to St. Paul. Let's see: $2.50 in gas in the Toyota vs. $40 for a room at the Motel 6 plus $15 for the big-ass pizza which would cover dinner and breakfast expenses. Not to mention a twelver of MGD. Probably not such a good idea.

At any rate, the back deck is definitely cleared off to the point where I can grill a steak out there. Last winter, the grill got iced over sometime in January and, even if every once in a while I could clear a path to it, it was mostly out of commission for a couple of months. Grilled steak every so often seems like something else to give thanks for.

I also feel like I owe gratitude to someone or something for our lively political scene. My favorite local Republican bigshot, Tony Sutton, just recently announced that he he's quitting his job as state GOP chair and planning to spend more time with his family. That's a nice sentiment though I haven't heard how the family feels about that. Every time I suggest to Miz Susan that I quit my job so as to spend more time with her, she reminds me that I've already tried that and that she thinks that she's still caught up on one-on-one time with me. I will miss Tony though. His conspiracy theorizing after every lost election was always thought-provoking. He'll be missed but, thankfully, Michele Bachmann doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon; her family's possibly made it clear how they feel about her spending more time with them. Just this morning, she was on the GOP-TV Network, oops...I meant the Fox News Network, and she was still promising us that she's going to hold that nasty little Barack Obama accountable for his policies and principles, as if he has any. I love that kind of talk. And I love the thought of her as our President. I'm sort of wondering how she's going to parlay the solid 3% of support she's got (and that's among the party faithful, some of whom can still recognize a nutball when they see one) into a set of keys of her very own to the White House. I know that might make me sound like something of a naysayer. But I am counting on the "suspension" of the Cain campaign to send a surge of energy and money and prospective voters her way. If only Rick Santorum doesn't grab all that swag up first. Hmmmm, Bachmann-Santorum, Santorum-Bachmann. So many candidates and only one spot on the ballot; how's a right-thinking Republican going to make up his or her mind? I guess that, sometimes, there can be too much (or too many) of a good thing. Maybe this is a bounty that we don't have to be all that thankful for.

You know where to find us. Drop us a line about the things you're thankful for.