Bit Coins & James Comey

Bit coins and their ilk. Boy, I must be a Mortimer Snerd dummy when it comes to money. What in hell are bit coins? And I see now that the bit coin frenzy has opened the door to a flood of new scams. Half the calls I get every day are scams of one kind or another, but I haven’t yet gotten any calls about buying this new currency. Probably tomorrow.

          On last Friday’s Late Night with Stephen Colbert we listened to what James Comey had to say about Trump and Comey’s being fired by Trump. The man speaks very well and fielded all of Colbert’s questions with lucid answers. I think I could vote for a ticket with him and Tea Leoni, either one for president and the other as vice president. He compared Trump to a Mob boss, both having this driving need to pull everything and everyone into the sink hole of their egos. “What’s in it for me?” Trump and Corleone ask. “I need your absolute loyalty and admiration. I don’t care what it takes to inflate my image. I don’t care if it hurts other people as long as it gets me what I want.” It’s not about making America Great Again; it’s about making these two great in their own eyes.

Countdown:  Not only are the spatial dimensions of my world shrinking, but the temporal frame is also narrower. Each day is shorter. I sleep ten or eleven hours each night and often nap during the day for an hour or more. Each day involves our morning ritual of juice and pills, coffee, some kind of pastry, and the Arizona Republic from front to back. Or in my case, from Sports section to comics and the daily jumble and the bridge hand to the USA Today section to the Opinions, political cartoon, and letters to the editor. The rest of the morning is spent either reading or writing a blog or writing letters to friends and relatives. Noon happens. We sit and read. Or often Rosalie will spend an hour or two working on several hard sudokus. Three-thirty happens and Rosalie will treat Charlie and Tiger each to half a can of Fancy Feast while I put together two Scotch and waters with, in a tribute to our old cocktail in years past, one large pimento olive, one large blue-cheese filled olive, one garlic chunk, and one cocktail onion. The ritual never varies. Five-thirty happens and we dine on simple fare—soup and sandwich, Marie Callender tv dinners, or leftovers from a night at Outback or Carrabba’s. As we eat, we watch Lester Holt tell us about horrific lava explosions, school shootings, plane crashes, Trump tweets (yes, still horrific), ending with a feel-good story of somebody’s noble act of heroism or generosity. Our evenings are devoted to the television series we’ve taken as our own—NCIS, Bull, Madam Secretary, The Resident, The Voice, Big Bang Theory, Mom, The Good Doctor. We fill in empty spaces with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or the saved nightly diatribes of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon. Ten-thirty happens and we escape to bed, where we wait for another day to break when we will ritualistically wade through another day in waiting for life or death to happen. And each day’s awake time shrinks by seconds or minutes. As the day shortens, all of what I once considered important becomes less and less so. Connections to friends and relatives no longer concerns me. I worry less and less about my children’s and grandchildren’s lives. I can’t even worry about the sorry state of affairs in the nation and the world. The world will survive this president or it won’t. I simply don’t care. And that statement leads me right into the third and most frightening area of shrinkage—attitudinal. The gray clouds of depression fill my sky. I no longer have much of anything to look forward to—no swimming, no movies, no trips to Disneyland or Vegas, no Wild Life Zoo, no CostCo or the mall. I still enjoy our evenings out for dinner, but I fear even those may not be possible much longer. I now look forward to the outcomes of sports on television. Will Tiger get another win? Will the Diamondbacks make it to the post season? How will the Cardinals fare with their two new quarterbacks? Without these or without my blogging and letter writing, I’d be locked inside my house, locked inside my head. I already spend too many of my hours in mental surfing, revisiting past places and people, listening to old songs, playing golf on one of my old courses, playing racquetball against my old opponents. I don’t know how to drive away these gray clouds and I hate it that they keep getting closer and closer.