Am I the only one to whom it has occurred that we have better evidence of global warming, which the Bush Administration denies exists, than we had/have of WMD in Iraq, of which the Bush Administration was certain?

Mexico to decriminalize pot, cocaine and heroin – Yahoo! News

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/oukoe_uk_mexico_drugs

I’m taking down the blog for a while and won’t be making any entries for several days if not longer.

It isn’t the webmaster’s fault.

If you are that fascinated with my life, give me a call or see me on the Paseo during the lovely warm evenings.

Love ya bunches!

ttfn

Privacy Shattered Sharon says I should call my blog “The Louche Life”.

From Encarta:

I wonder if Privacy Shattered Sharon would like me to start adding adjectives and adverbs to a few of the things I know about HER life?   Hmmmmmm???

speaking of my louche life, such as it is, (and certainly this blog is disreputable, whether that’s accurate about my life or not), I exceed the boundaries of good taste and decency in the comments to the entry below.  Y’all ARE invited to talk back and read the comments, when you’ve got a mind.

I can tell from my blog and journal entries that I’m shutting down emotionally.

My money is in my head and everything I’ve ever learned about living life enjoyably is dead to me.

The maw of the man cave beckons me.

This baby has been overstimulated by relatives chucking it under the chin and I’m going to be cranky and cry just before I fall asleep.

We think we grow up and get sophisticated, but eat, shit and sleep has a powerful pull on us and some of the ways we act as babies just gets repeated in a slightly different fashion as we grow larger.

Reminds me of what good ole Claude Anderson used to say about there not being much evolution in humankind the past 150,000 years or so.  “They” are so primitive and savage and “We” are so cosmopolitan and civilized.  Hmmm.  Think I may want to call bullshit on that one.

I’m about the same on this one.  I don’t particularly claim myself to be all that darn grown up, but, even if you were grown up, just how grown up is grown up?  Don’t grownups do a lot of very childish things?  And some child-like things as well? 

Think about how a baby acts.  When you eat a big meal and want to immediately go to sleep — and do — how is that any different than an infant?

And, then there’s that whole mammal thing.

Yeah, I know, humans are at the very apex of the pyramid of life on earth.  Dominant species.  Special.  Self aware of the angel within us.

But this is spring and we all feel a little like rutting and we’re restless with the change in the seasons and the earth under our feet and the plants that are blooming and putting out leaves and the animals and insects and birds that are mating and eating and nesting all around us.

Just how far out of the jungle do we really think we are?

For me, cloudy days depress the rose bush in my DNA and I have to go ride out by Lake Hefner to satisfy the frog in me and when the ugly 68 year old overweight waitress bends over the next table, my chimpanzee still has a galvanic response.

What part of me is human?  The part that makes me feel guilty and stupid and worthless because I’m broke.  The insane part.

How cool is that?

We love you, redhead.  We even love your sharp tongue.  Have a great one, feliz anos and all that.

Can’t wait til we get to the spanking part.

Everyone who writes gets some rejection slips.  Here are some children’s stories I wrote that were rejected by Golden Books Publishers. 

1.  You Are Different And That’s Bad.

2.  The Boy Who Died From Eating All His Vegetables

3.  Dad’s New Wife Robert

4.  Kathy Was So Bad Her Mom Stopped Loving Her

5.  Curious George and the High Voltage Fence

6.  All Cats Go to Hell

7.  The Little Sissy Who Snitched

8.  Some Kittens Can Fly

9.  That’s It, I’m Putting You Up for Adoption

10.  The Magic World Inside the Abandoned Fridge

11.  Strangers Have the Best Candy

12.  You Were an Accident

13.  Things Rich Kids Have, But You Never Will

14.  Pop! Goes the Hamster and Other Microwave Games

15.  The Man in the Moon is Actually Satan

16.  Your Nightmares are REAL

17.  Places Where Mommy and Daddy Hide Neat Things

18.  Why Can’t Mr. Fork and Mrs. Electric Outlet Be Friends?

And, the one I can’t understand for the life of me WHY WHY WHY they rejected:

19.  Daddy Drinks Because You Cry

I’m not discouraged.  I’m working on the next one:

A Skyrocket for Baby Sister’s HooHah

Sinatra is in the back yard, batting around a pine cone.

There is $412,000 worth of cat toys (more or less) inside, but he likes the pinecones.

He seems to have developed a probability wave GPS system of placing the pinecones where I will step on them.  How he knows EXACTLY where the tender arch of my foot will be when I step out of bed or the bathroom is, I think, a testament to the superior intelligence of the feline.  I don’t believe any human power could compute such a thing.

Once, a long time ago, I was sure my children had developed a system for knowing where to place jacks and marbles just where my heel would hit as I came down stairs, but I’ve since forgiven them and put those paranoid fantasies away.  Almost.

Had I given it enough thought, I might have predicted that Sinatra would prefer a pine cone to the balls, feathers and “mice” I have inside.

When my children were just toddlers and just before, the most successful toy either of them were ever given were a sauce pan holding three cubes of ice and a wooden spoon.  Both of them could sit in their diapers and nothing else on the kitchen’s linoleum floor and play happily for EVER.  They stirred the ice, they tasted the ice and they banged on the pan with the spoon. 

Much more elaborate toys never engaged them as well.  Expensive mobiles above their cribs on up to bicycles and videogames, at each age, it seems to me now looking back, the more simple the toy, the better they liked it.  Some of that is my fault.  For example, my son was given at Christmas one year an elaborate toy that “shot” items through a tube system that used vacuum and forced air.  I really booted that one as a Dad by not using it as a teachable moment, but by taking all the fun out of it by trying to control perfection.  It was a replay of my own father’s behavior when I was given an electric model train one Christmas, and that makes my shortcoming all the more bitter.

My parenting aside, the more simple the toy, the better my kids seemed to like it.  An example I often hear is about children who get a ton of Christmas presents and end up playing with the boxes.  I certainly saw some of that in my own kids.

Now, I’m seeing it in Sinatra.

And, I’m wondering …

You know, I wonder if the toys we buy our cats, dogs and children aren’t toys we’re really buying for ourselves.  I wonder if all the computerized learning devices we’re giving kids now — as good as they may be — might not be more about parents and their angst and preferences than it is about play and being a child. 

For certain, the toys we buy our pets are all about anthropromorphizing our substitute children and we delight in buying the presents we think we’d like if we were the cat we fantasize we’d be.

My cat is perfectly happy chasing leaves and pouncing on houseflies and bringing pine cones from outside and putting them under my bed until I go to sleep and then carefully placing them right where my damn foot will hit the carpet when I wake up.  How does the little bastard know I’ll get up on the right or left side of the bed?   Uhm…Oh, well.

And I also wonder if we don’t kind of do the same thing as adults to ourselves.  I wonder if we would actually have more fun and play if we got ourselves the boxes instead of the videogame/plasmascreen/ipod/thingamabob. 

When was the last time you jumped rope for the fun of it or got on the swings and ran to the slide?

Are you playing with the right toys?

http://www.glumbert.com/media/easter.html

A guy get’s on an airplane seated next to a cute blonde.

He immediately turns to her and makes his move. “You know, I’ve heard 
that flights will go quicker if you strike up a conversation with 
your fellow passenger. So let’s talk.”

The blonde had just opened a book but she closes it and says “What 
would you like to discuss?”

He says “How about nuclear power?”

“OK” says the blonde. “That could be an interesting topic. But let me 
ask you a question first. A horse, a cow, and a deer all eat the same 
stuff…..grass. Yet the deer excretes little pellets, the cow turns 
out a flat patty, and the horse produces muffins of dried poop. Why 
do you suppose that is?”

The guy is dumbfounded. Finally he replies, “I haven’t the slightest 
idea.”

“So tell me,” says the blonde, “How is it that you feel qualified to 
discuss nuclear power when you don’t know shit?”