"It's Not What I Want!"

It's like Tombstone, Virgil Earp shouting outside the OK Corral. At least I got onto the blog after 48 hours of cursing and keyboard trickery.

What an ordeal trying to get back on this blog! “User account does not exist.” “Invalid password.” “Not an existing Blogger™ domain”. I jumped through hoops and had to create three e-mail accounts that I don’t use just to correct a single letter’s typing error on my sign-in user name, and that was when the Google monster was taking this fine service over, as they’re taking over the rest of the Internet that Bill Gates doesn’t already own. Hey, kids here’s a warning from Uncle Possum that doesn’t include the caveat to stay away from “My Space” or other predators’ happy hunting grounds: I’m old enough to remember the original Monopoly™ board game, back in the day when we played with the awkward paper money, the little green houses, red motels, and those cool metal board characters. Highly interactive, as we say these days. The game was fun—still is—and ol’ Possum was good at it. Here comes your warning, short and sweet: when one of these moronic, arrogant corporations finally whips everyone and establishes a monopoly over our beloved Internet, you ain’t going to like it! Think about those $4+ at the pumps, the e-mail and texting you take for granted, your ISP, and those groovy I-tunes. There is a connection, believe me. When some mindless, out-sourced corporation without a posted online telephone number has total dominance of what we consider “free speech” domains, a lot of voices are going to fall silent. I’m scared of Google™, so just go back to the top of this paragraph, read what kept popping up for 48 hours on HAL-9000, and think about it.

I’m what my employers called a “synthesist”. I look at things from odd angles, and approach them from what has become the cliché “outside the envelope”. I too often speak cryptically, thinking people will instantly grasp and understand what I’m babbling about. I ramble on, they get bored, and fall asleep. (I attribute this strange “gift” to excessive drug and alcohol abuse when I was a totally reckless young fool. Quantities of LSD were involved, and I promise you no matter what Timothy Leary said, it isn’t the best path to spiritual enlightenment. Don’t mess with the hard-wiring in your skull, be calm and patient, and a lot of mystical and wonderful stuff may come your way.) Strangely, none of that psychedelic business ever interfered with the secret item in my résumé. Going a bit circumspect, I hit a wild pig in Yemen on the run at 800+ meters offhand—no support on the rifle—from my wheelchair. I fired across a military target range, which got me sent home, but: the MREs were terrible, and the pig roast was fantastic!

This is not the kind of thing you tell people in The States if you’re looking for a job. The skill came naturally; some of its applications still keep me up at night.

This was not at all what I had perceived for a holiday post. The politics have driven me mad and put the boredom meter into the red. I’ll have a few words on that, but not until about November. The crime and savagery on the streets have my jaw popping and the teeth clenching; thank God my kids are adults, and they accepted their birthday gifts of Sig Sauer 9mm P-232 purse pistols, and got some range time.

I meant to tell—or retell—a shaggy dog story. Back in the 1970s, I had an Alsatian [German Shepherd] who went for a drive in my 1958 Chevy pickup. I was watching a hilarious episode of one of my favorite series, “Word’s Dumbest”, on TRU TV, and they had a guy on surveillance camera with a dog who was smarter than he was. I thought it might be a cute thing to re-tell, but the Google™ monster has been whipping me like the proverbial red-headed stepchild. When they begin truly silencing voices for their own agenda, I will be one of the first to go.

I’ll flog the dog story into readable form, and hopefully have it up here in the next few days. The technical glitches were apparently “corrupt cookies”; minor housekeeping in this ancient, wheezing machine seems to have solved the problem.

For the lady from Australia, if you’re still checking in here, that last post was a sarcastic joke. The southern USA is overfilled with people who think—if we can call it that—seriously in that direction. I don’t care to start slap-and-cuss fights on the rare occasions I get out, and since my boredom meter redlines so swiftly, I just start grinning and yapping about how we all fell off the UFO.

The only Caucasian I know of—look it up—is Joseph Stalin, and he wasn’t a very nice guy. The rest of us are put here by God, and most of us have a purpose.