The Monday Rumbles

Heckuva week there, wouldn’t you agree? We lost a Queen, gained a precious new jewel for the crown of Presidential Orwellian-isms – “Truth isn’t Truth” – and sought some vague form of sanity in ordinarily mundane things like sports and other go-to tranquilizers for the modern age.

We chilled, thanks for asking, and lost ourselves in writing stuff beyond these pages while trying not to yell at the television again. And, given to deep thoughts, we pondered the essence of “what is,” remembering that all that ultimately “depends upon what your definition of is… is.” (Thanks, Bill).

Obviously outclassed by those with better minds than ours we opted to stick with our own little corner of the universe, juking past “alternative facts” we encountered along the way and noting that even the animals seemed to be angry with us this week – a pet python taking a chunk out of its owner in San Ramon; Hooligoats and cows claiming their fair share of the road in Moraga and Concord; a hawk – possibly an owl – dropping a still-writhing gopher snake into the guacamole at a classy backyard party in Walnut Creek.

Being fans of the underdog we find ourselves rooting often for the hoofed and winged among us. They don’t win all that often as we hunt them, skin them, and push deeper into their habitat, gawping with typical slack-jawed human amazement when they come back to swim in our pools or sleep under the porches we built on land they once ranged freely.

We are reminded of a line from the movie Cold Mountain, uttered by Renee Zellweger’s irrepressible Ruby Thewes as the Civil War raged around her and she searched for the reasons behind the ongoing national madness:

“Every piece of this is man’s bullshit. They call this war “a cloud over the land” but they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say “Shit, it’s rainin’!”

In the end, we think, we have only ourselves to blame. We appear to be breaking more than we fix and, for now at least, we give no indication of changing our ways anytime soon.

This can be hard to take for born optimists. We have to work hard to keep on top of the daily influx of eye-raising antics by people we’ve elected to lead us and those just trying to make their way through their lives without getting rained on much.

Sometimes, it seems it would just be easier to drink the Kool Aid with much of the rest of our nation, to line up, tilt our heads back and accept the “What You’re Seeing… Is Not What’s Happening” Control-Speak of leaders/con men allowed to get away with too much for far too long.

And then, shaking off the advancing tendrils of the Body Snatching Pod People before we fall asleep and they gain control of us forever, we come to our senses and say “no, no way.”

It’s time to fight. It’s time to come in from the rain. It remains to be seen if we do.

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