Character Matters

This part of the blog was written on Saturday night, November 7 2020, on the day the election was decided:

This afternoon, just as I pulled out of the parking lot at my apartment, I saw a double rainbow, crossing the sky beneath a break in the clouds. In Los Angeles, and especially the Valley, Summer ended today. It literally went from t-shirt weather to very chilly overnight. Thursday was 95 degrees, yesterday around 80, today 55, with rainclouds on the horizon. So there was the rainbow, with another, fainter one inside it.

All I could say was "wow", because............well, because today. :)

We've known it was coming since Wednesday night, but today it became official, and the weight of one man's hate filled psyche fell away from us. Some pundits have proposed that Trump will remain a "kingmaker" in the Republican party, and that he might even try for a comeback in 2024, to avenge his "rigged" defeat and stand tall before his cult members.

I say "haha" to all of that. Trump is toast. It feels as if he's already gone, and while he might end up with a tv or radio show if he avoids prison (or when he gets out), he'll never be back as a candidate again. I mean, are you kidding me? He just got creamed. But enough about him. Did you see Joe Biden's speech? He knocked it out of the park. It's pretty amazing that a guy who grew up with a stutter can do as well as he did. But more than that, he's a man who lost his wife and daughter in a car accident, and then one of his adult sons to brain cancer. Biden himself had brain surgery in 1988 to repair an aneurysm that could have killed him. He's run for President twice before and never made it out of the primary. So if ever there was a man who lives by the motto "never give up", it's Joe Biden.

Again, as I said yesterday I'm not here to stump for him, though I do find myself liking him more and more already. I know he's a career politician, and we're supposed to hate all those guys, right? "They're all crooks" is the saying. Corporate America runs the show, and it doesn't matter who is President. But I don't believe that, because the tone of politics is just as important as the policies that are set by any given administration. Also, I must add a quick aside, once again, in favor of the center over the Far Left and Right. We get things done in this country in increments, by cooperating. But beyond the job of administrating,  our leaders - and even our artists, sports heroes or simply your boss in the workplace - set the tone for the culture they preside over. Just as John F. Kennedy set a tone of class, intelligence and high expectations, what he espoused was reflected in our culture. His image was "Camelot". He said we would go to the Moon, and we did. The other side of the coin was Trump, who spewed hate, lies, arrogance and stupidity, and during his time in office it was those qualities that were reflected in our culture. So yes, while Corporate America and Wall Street may dictate the economics in this country, and pull puppet strings to an extent on Presidents from either party, it nevertheless does matter who is President. Politicians may be a tainted bunch, but they are not all crooks, any more than the general population are all crooks. So I'm gonna trust Joe and I think he'll do a damn good job. ////

And this part of the blog was written tonight, Sunday November 8th, 2020 :

If you saw my Facebook yesterday, you saw my post that Grimsley delivered flowers to Joni Mitchell on her birthday. Pretty cool, right? Especially on the day Trump was defeated. Well today, Grim texted me to say that he was about to leave on another delivery, this time to the house of Alex Trebek. The flowers were for his wife. Grim had blown his mind a few months ago, because he had delivered to Alex himself at the same house. It may have been in July on Alex's birthday, I can't remember for sure. But Grim could barely believe it at the time, and he texted me that day right after it happened. He said Alex came to the door himself to get the flowers. And now today, Grim was delivering to his wife. R.I.P. not only to the greatest game show host of all time, but also to a man whose picture should be in the dictionary next to the words "class" and "gentleman".

Life is unique and strange, and you never know what's going to happen, even when it seems like every day is the same. Me, I've gotta get back to writing my FOIA requests at some point, because if I don't I'll be kicking myself one day. I'm not saying that they'll do any good, but you never know. It's just that I'm now 60, and I don't wanna be 80 one day and say to myself, "you didn't try hard enough". I used to try very hard, in the late 90s, but I got ignored, or called names. One person shouted me down and hung up on me. But the truth is the truth, and as the saying goes, "The Truth Will Out". You can walk away from the truth, you can ignore the truth, you can deny the truth, you can bury the truth, and most often if you do those things it is because you are aware of the truth and frightened of it. I'm the only one who is not frightened of 1989. The truth, over the course of history, has a way of rising to the surface, and one day it will do so in this case, which I am certain is the biggest secret in America. It is without a doubt the most highly classified secret in the CIA's records.

That's why I haven't tried as hard as I should have, though I did make a request in 2017, and then wrote a detailed letter of what happened in response to their denial, which came in the form of a Glomar.

Now that the political crisis is over, I wanna get back to reading books and watching movies and hiking on my days off, but I say all of the above because we see, in 2020, that life can get unpredictable. You never know what can happen. Neil Peart died when the year started, then last month we lost EVH. Today we lost Alex Trebek. I speak on my own behalf because no one has ever spoken a single word about what happened in 1989, and the fact is that many people who know me know something about it. A handful know much more, and of course the hierarchy of the CIA knows exactly what happened. Bill Clinton knows. I'd much rather be writing about movies, books, music, and benign things, but I'd like to let those folks know - the ones who know but have never said a word on my behalf - that I'm still here, and I will never give up.

What we see with Donald Trump is that it's not your ambitions in life that matter, or what you've achieved from a material standpoint, it's what kind of person you were. /////

And that's really all I know.

See you in the morning.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)