I'm back

I haven't been here since August, it would seem. I've been preoccupied with work, a new girlfriend, my father's declining health, and a number of other things.

The week before last, I took my first real vacation in years, traveling by train with Janet to visit her family in Pensacola and then to New Orleans before returning home. It was very refreshing, but I could not completely escape some of my cares.

My father is in a nursing home about two miles from here. He has had a series of health crises beginning at the end of June when his neighbors found him lying on the floor, having passed out. While visiting me in August, he fell off a chair and broke his hip, and afterwards in the hospital he had two strokes. Then I found out that he has prostate cancer that has spread to his hips, his legs, his ribs, and possibly also his lungs. He will almost certainly never go home again.

Why is it that whenever I take a passenger on that accursed road to or from Binghamton, he or she turns out to be terminally ill? This Thanksgiving will mark the anniversary of Marion's death, and there will be no family gathering this year.

My friend R. is staying in my spare bedroom while she sorts out her affairs. She and her boyfriend made the mistake of involving their landlord and the police in a disagreement between the two of them, and now they are trying to undo the damage.

Kurt has moved to North Andover to join Loki, several kitty-cats, a parcel of lagomorphs, anatids, and phasianids, and their human companions, L., G., and W., in a house dating back to the time of the Salem witch trials.

Politics

There is not much I can say. A party with a message of hope, which seems to have deeply disappointed a good many of its supporters, is about to be thrashed by a party promoting fear and declaring itself the nation's best protector. In the end, nothing will change.

Marxists used to say that the Democrats are not the party of working Americans but merely a second champion of capital, one playing the role of good cop to the Republicans' bad cop, making for good theater but little progress.

There is no party of working Americans. If there were, we'd see blue-collar Kentuckians and West Virginians lining up with white collar northeastern suburbanites and champions of the rights of every race, gender, and religion, in an unstoppable coalition. That ain't happening.

I continue to insist the media are a large part of the problem. Millions of Denethors staring into palantirs in their living rooms have come away with such distorted views of the world that, while not actually burning their children in their beds, they are robbing them of their future. Like Numenor, America is being led to its own ruin.

Somewhere the spirit of Sauron is smiling.