Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

 After yesterday's big storms, it has cleared out and gotten pretty cool hereabouts. Beautiful weather, though. I've said it before about New Orleans, but Fall in Northeast Mississippi is when it shines, as well. What Daddy would call "football playing weather".



 Did the Therapist thing today. She's of the opinion that since I'm writing, going to the gym and working the election, I am on a positive upswing, at least. I don't know. I still have these mood swings where I get either angry or just flat-out black in the soul, and I can't figure out where it comes from. One of my Better Angels used to tell me I had what she called "that anger inside you, just a rage" and that my earlier run with therapy helped smooth that out. I guess it makes sense with this current struggle it's come back, but I don't remember having the anger before I moved back home.

 Of course, now I have the time and energy to be pissed off for no good reason. The last couple years in New Orleans, I'm sure I've mentioned, I was either working or too tired to think straight, and for the most part stayed too down to care one way or another. If nothing else, I definitely have time to ponder the state of things these days.

 Regardless, the Therapist's idea on the anger and black moods is that they're symptoms of the chemical imbalances in my brain, the situation that spawns the depression and anxiety in the first place. Now, the Psych Doc has prescribed a couple of things that are supposed to help that, but I'm not so sure they're doing any good.

 In any event, let's not dwell. The Sleep did a number on me today and here at 8 p.m. I'm still a bit groggy and dead on my feat. Hopefully the visit with the Pulmonary RN will do something to clear that up. It was pretty fierce. I slept a decent amount last night and used the machine, but felt almost drunk when I was trying to get around this morning. Weird feeling, a feeling I really can't put my finger on. Almost like being woken up just as you hit that heavy sleep in the cycle. Again, though, let's not dwell.

 Like I said yesterday, I've been listening to a lot of harp blues lately, particularly Paul Butterfield. Now, I've had the first album for going on 20 years but I never really cared for him. About the time I bought the CD I had gotten to the point where I really didn't care to hear white dudes try to sing the blues. Call it what you want, but with rare exception, I could tell the difference and white dudes always sounded a little... well, unnecessary.

 Put it like this: like anyone born after 1970, I got into Western Swing via Asleep At The Wheel, and while I still appreciate them (and prefer their version of "Hot Rod Lincoln"), I can buy and do own collections of songs by Bob Wills And The Texas Playboys. When you've got the originals, covers just seem like pale copies, especially with white cats playing the blues.

 Of course, that all being said, the cat blew a seriously mean harp. I didn't know this at the time, but before switching to harmonica, he had been trained on classical flute. I learned that the other day and something just clicked, so with the help of Apple Music, I've been going through his catalog, right on up through his Better Days outfit. It's been revelatory, actually; once past that first record, the band started mixing in soul, jazz and even raga into their musical stew, with a strong blues base centered around Butterfield's harp. Vocally, he grew into it and by the time the poor bastard made too much of a mess to make music anymore, the band was doing some very cool stuff.

 Unfortunately, he suffered from something called peritonitis, an inflammation of the intestines that can get pretty painful. Along the way he developed an addiction to heroin to try to deal with the pain and, well, that's just never a good thing. Plus, the death of his friend and original partner, guitarist Mike Bloomfield, did him no good and he died of an overdose in 1987 at the age of 44. The blues will kill you, man, but it goes to show it always helps to dig as deep as you can into someone's music if they've got that long and rich a career. You'll get something out of it.

Ah, me. We're getting kind of maudlin, kids. Let's look at the News, for it has been a goofy day. In his regular morning painful dump-slash-Twitter whine, the Blind Idiot God compared this Impeachment inquiry to a "lynching", and the clean world collectively slapped its forehead. While more than a couple Republicans gave him the stink-eye over this, ever-faithful lapdog Lindsay Graham said that, yes indeed, this was a lynching and I'll leave the irony of a senator from South Carolina for you to suss out. Last thing I saw was some spokes-troll was trying to claim Trump didn't mean anything "racial" about it, he just misspoke. He does that a lot.

 Now, look. I live in Mississippi and spent quite a while living in Georgia. Lynchings happened and they were horrible. There are people still alive who took part in lynching usually black men without any sort of trial or even hint of justice, just raw brutality and human evil. To equate that to a perfectly Constitutional inquiry is, well... I've never made any secret that I think Trump is a stone-cold racist. Not in the cross-burning, hood-wearing type, but he definitely thinks black people are inferior to him by simple dint of birth. He may think that of everyone, but that doesn't make it any less racist. This is just another example of that inherent racist aspect to his personality.

 Of course, it will be glossed over as soon as the dopey sonofabitch says something else stupid, which should be in the next day or so. As for now, Impeachment continues to look very, very bad for him, and the Twitter scuttlebutt is hinting that the GOP may try to toss him aside for a less toxic candidate come 2020. If they do, they can hang it up.

 I read recently that well over half of the faithful truly would support him if he shot someone on 5th Avenue and they will be highly pissed if the party abandons their Blind Idiot God. There's more howling about a "civil war" if Trump is impeached. I wonder if anyone has considered what might happen if the GOP cut their losses with this fool. Something to watch.

 Okay. Let's wrap this up. The World Series started tonight and since the Mets aren't in it, no one in this house gives a damn one way or another. The Nationals versus the Astros, and at 9 p.m. it's 5-2 Washington in the bottom of the fifth. I haven't watched much of the Astros this year - this is a National League household - but I wouldn't put any money on the Nats.

  Your mileage (or universe) may vary, of course.

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are moderated, & may be discarded & ignored if so chose. Cry more & die, man.