Dealing with the Devil

03Feb10

I feel better.

I have decided to post-pone filing for bankruptcy. I called the IRS, and all my creditors personally today, and am working out payment plans. In fact, I probably just cut my IRS bill in half, because they hadn’t applied a deduction that I qualified for. (Funny how they overlook those things.)

It will not be easy, and if I don’t get hired here in two weeks (along with an expected 10-20% raise), it may not be possible to keep this going — but I want to try one more time before I give up.

It’s funny, but the thought of filing bankruptcy did not ease my mind the way the lawyer said it would. It made me sick. I haven’t been sleeping well, and my appetite swings from non-existent to can’t-stop.

I wonder if I’ll sleep well tonight.

Filed under: Faith, The Big Question   |  9 Comments

People always think something’s all true

28Jan10

I first read The Catcher in the Rye during a Greyhound bus trip to East Texas. It had this cover. I was visiting friends, but didn’t have a driver’s license, so I must have been about Holden Caufield’s age. It wasn’t for a class assignment or anything. I just didn’t know what to do with myself.

I had moved to the Big City to go to a fancy private school, which I hated, and was going back to visit people I cared about.

Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has – I’m not kidding.

I enjoyed the Big City mall, because we didn’t have those in East Texas, though I got bored and would pretend to be a foreigner so I could ask cute girls for directions.

I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.

The Catcher in the Rye was the first book I read where I wish I knew the author. I don’t remember liking a book before then, just getting through them, even though I knew 50 pages in that I wasn’t interested.

What really knocks me out is a book, when you’re all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

Later, when I developed some writing skills, I wish I’d written it, as all writers do.

Goodbye, JD. If I become a famous writer, which will never happen, I will follow your example and tell the world to go to hell. Well, not all of the world. But most of it.

No, I’m lying. I’d do the book tour. I’d like the attention, for a while.

See, I’m still a liar.

Filed under: The Big Question   |  4 Comments

Glove Slap!

26Jan10

"PTSD isn't covered under my health plan, son!"

I thought this was interesting:

Politics, in one respect, has really changed over the last two decades. Both parties, but especially the Republicans, now have highly efficient ways to get their talking points out to the rank-and-file, without confusing things by also informing them of the larger context. That’s really different than things were in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

Back then, politically attentive people would watch the network news and the local news and look at the occasional newspaper, and maybe Time or Newsweek, and on top of that they would also be exposed to party talking points. Now, to a great extent, people’s only exposure to the news may consist of the party’s talking points (again, especially on the Republican side). So the old job of finding out how well those talking points are resonating by hearing whether ordinary folks use them to talk about politics is no longer a useful task. Increasingly, the only language to which people — once again, especially Republicans — are exposed is those talking points. For a Rush/Beck listener, there isn’t another language available to discuss the health care bill.

Jonathan Bernstein’s blog

I think this is insightful, but incomplete. He nicely summarized what I saw my parents doing in the 70s — what I thought was enough to be an informed person. But he’s overlooking the left, which is given the party-aligned, Reader’s Digest version of things by John Stewart/Keith Olbermann and crew (admit it or not, some people really do get their political news from Comedy Central).

Rush and Beck make their livings by scaring people; Stewart and Olbermann (and Huffington and Kos), by mocking people. It should be no surprise that the right tends to be angry, and the left tends to be smug. I’m not saying entertainers lead political movements, but it’s not passive, either; there’s some kind of symbiotic thing going on.

Maybe this is the speech the President needs to make:

“Look, we need some kind of health care reform. We need to give people better options than ‘go bankrupt or die.’ I’ll back off on a national plan. You guys come up with some state-based plan, and I’ll sign it, and we’ll move on. I promise you, I’m not trying to turn the country Socialist. I just want people to have some kind of health care. Today, about 45 million Americans aren’t covered, and that number has been growing steadily since 2000. We can’t ignore it for another decade.”

Or, maybe I should run. I’d like to think a centrist would have a decent shot in 2012… but history implies we’d rather keep the pendulum swingin’, and if Obama is a response to Bush, I can only imagine who the response to Obama would be… George C. Scott’s Patton?

That would be kind of awesome, because going from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Patton would verify to the rest of the world that we are, indeed, crazy.

I know what the campaign theme song should be.

p.s. The link is safe. It will download an mp3 from my personal online storage space.

Filed under: Humor, Politics   |  Leave a Comment