Vespro, City, Urban Development, Compost and Raised Garden Bed

Is it ironic that the main life skill Mitt drew from his early missionary days was the almost lost art of how to iron a white shirt?
Now that impeccably ironed shirt is running for office with Mitt as the stuffing within. Wonderfully, the shirt in all its magnificent blandness is so much more eloquent than its inhabitant.

Believe me when I said that if you live in a house designed by Marcel Beurer you can at least pull the drapes, I was not surprised  that all nuance was lost on the wooden Indian in the room.

And I must confess that I  was surprised many years later that I was  a stand in for the wooden Indian himself. I was supposed to wilt or perhaps hang  myself from the nearest chandelier for my lapse in  recognizing my part in the rigamarole.  But more to the point, I recognized well the animus of the wag whom critical acclaim has bypassed.

And then how to explain  that somebody — a reader of this blog— said exactly what he meant instead of what he  had only  meant to say thereby breaking the link. As the Irishman said humor–irony’s little brother–is no laughing matter.

I will be forever dunned when I hear the phrase , Dead Man Walking,  I fear,  for I chaffered pleasantly, ” but he is still breathing.”

I learned  my  lesson though. Never damn an ironist with faint praise.

…Newts, Mitts, Ricks, Herms. All words which would fit after the phrase:  “I am sorry to have to tell you, but you have a nasty case of the………  The symptoms?  Over confidence, superciliousness, lack of empathy and an ability to deny history, science, reality and to reverse direction on a dime.

As I watched Mitt confronted on the tube by his own history of reversals in what should have been the friendly setting of GOPTV, I had to clench in sympathy to the rictus smile of the ambushed oligarch. I didn’t sign up for this! No one talks to me like this in my board room – I’m running for President gosh darn it. Why don’t people just like me, I know I do.

Despair is too high a price for my surprise that our man was extruding licorice instead of plastic on our extruder after hours.  Intended as a sideline for Sees Candy,  a mix up in delivery carried with it  the seeds of damnation. Three tones of  licorice (not recycled, but biodegradable) ended up in thousands  of tree wells in Santa Ana.

Somehow our man got tangled, spun like a top, in strands of licorice, in a too tight  cummerbund and lay immobilized on the floor.   This sort thing is better done  in India where it takes two servants to get the thing on.   For my light entertainments I always travel with long folds of extra commerbund and moskito netting.

One of the hazards of compassion, is that one can cleave to the notion of  corruption and pity without a trace of sentiment.  If you were a convert, you could to. One thing is certain, after pouring myself a glass of pink gin-or is it bitters?

Tomorrow the mortician will be a a shilling or two richer.

Truckers , a lot of people don’t know this, but truckers sort of run on their own time clock.  They might make the delivery maybe not.

So I confronted our trucker, a burly guy,  and asked why it took five days to deliver a pallet load of product from L.A. to San Diego. He eyed my warily, and smashed his cigar into the ashtray.

“Have you ever read Thomas Mann? ”

“No , I don’t think I have.”

“Well, in  The Magic Mountain he gets into Time and Tedium quite deeply, its not really well understood.” It is only over the short haul,–say National City to Oceanside—that a crowded highway seems short.” I lost a sense of  time reading it on my lunch hour. Ever think of that?

“Nope.

“Well, he said. You ought to read the book. What is true of  time , is also true of space. When my truck is empty, it seems smaller than  a full one. ”

Then I  said: ” I think I get the drift.  Monotony is elastic and stretches the passing moment while pleasure makes time fly. Time isn’t going anyplace. Which reminds me, forget about the delivery, its lunch time.

St. Paul reminds us how evil perpetuates itself until the whole Creation groans and travails.  You may remember this.

So when tribulations  remain unflagging,  its a good idea to brush away those daytime blues with a little comic relief. And so this thought provided me with an opportunity. I strolled up to the venetian  blinds and fiddled with them pointlessly to get everybody’s attention.  I then dropped back into my swivel chair, and with a sort of animal ease, sat down to look at a petrified  forest of  blank faces.

I mentally tried to give the air of negligent ease–and paused to draw a piece of  fabric from  my  trousers to get their full attention. It was time for a little levity.

” Seems that there  are Irishmen and Irishmen, Germans and Germans, Italians and Italians, Japanese and Japanese.”

“But there are only Swedes”

You could hear a pin drop.

We have all heard the phrase politics makes strange bedfellows   but how do you explain Fate crashing into reality without a fine how do you do.

My young friend John and I were talking about John Yoo and his torture memos ,and he got all worked up  to such an extent he decided to take a hot tub at the Claremont Resort in Berkeley. He needed to unwind and relax. Let those cares steam away.

We all forget that Fate, like a summer storm, can make  unpredictable encores. Hugo Grotius, the father of International law, a Hollander, was sentenced for treason but his wife was clever enough to smuggle him out of  jail in a chest of drawers and here we have–now wait a second- a very elegant outcome,………. ending his days as the Swedish ambassador to the court of France.

But how do we explain my friend John.  From what Kingdom must he now endure exile, choked off in his youth , to find that the one companion in the hot tub, was none other than Professor Yoo?