Neither I nor my two brothers have had children. We had an amazing father whose family was all murdered in the Holocaust & our mother's family was full of amazing thinkers & achievers but only the female children of her brothers bore children. So they & we will all cease to exist before long.
So true. At 87 I probably am the only human who thinks about my dear Mom, Dad, and other departeds who were once so lively. They still live in my heart.
So brief our stay here, and so much joy, pain, good and evil. We writers try to leave tracks in the sands of time.
In vain. Eons on our species may wear God out and he will let us lapse. Our planets consumed. Our voices stilled.
So I rejoice in the now. Tomorrow we may be swept away. Billserle.com
Eckhart Tolle wrote that "Power of Now" book, and he has another one called something like, "One Day Even the Sun Will Die." My wife and I say that to each other sometimes as a morbid joke...
Maybe our "souls" are really divine dirt, not "spirit", so the Earth never forgets us. And when we die, we just go home to where our ancestors are waiting for us.
Earlier this summer we went to visit our daughter, who was doing an internship in Greenville, SC, for a few days. We fell in LOVE with Greenville. Such a cool town. I was surprised at how much I love and feel connected to Greenville. As if it was a person, an old friend. The mountains were beautiful. We drove there from Chicago - through the Smokey Mountains and through the Blue Ridge Mountains. We stopped in Asheville for a few days on our way back. Asheville did not evoke the same feelings as Greenville. There was an underlying energy of unease. Again, I was surprised as I thought I would love being in Asheville. But I feel devastated for the people and the land of Western North Carolina and everyone else in the path of this brutal storm. I hope a sense of normalcy and humanity returns soon for them. Hurricanes and devastation are not easily forgotten.
I wonder if the underlying energy of unease you sensed in Asheville was caused by Republican gerrymandering. I've heard that area has not been quite the same since Republicans redrew the districts giving them the advantage over Democrats.
Thanks for this, Gail. My wife goes to Asheville every year to see her good friend who lives there. This is the time of year she usually goes, and thankfully, she didn't...
Thanks for this, Greg. One of my cousins lives in Weaverville, a small town north of Asheville. I emailed her this morning hoping for some news. Now that I've learned that there probably is no internet nor email, I'm really concerned.
I blurted my brother Jay's name out loud after I read this. He would be 59 now if he hadn't taken his at 27 years of age. Very thoughtful post, Greg. Thank you.
I know my name, face and existence will be forgotten. I do believe that the good we do and the love we give can ripple through time. I hope that the universe will somehow preserve our essence. Much else is transformed, not just dissipated, why not our souls?
I hope so too, but I'm also cool with it not being so.
Re: the face...it's crazy to me that for millions of years there was no images, and then only paintings, or renderings on coins, of people. Now there are children who have been photographed almost nonstop since they were born. The disparity.
On this day my mom was born 100 years ago. She died 31 years ago in her sleep. Mom had 8 children, 5 now deceased. So that leaves my two sisters and me to keep her memory alive. My sisters call me from time to time to ask about a TL in their lives as we grew up. I was the older sister and they depend on me for memories of days gone by. So I do appreciate today’s writing. Thank you 🙏. Love the Melania book that no one asked for! lol show was brilliant and the podcast Friday was primo as the Italians say! Praying for Asheville
Hurricanes and elections. In NC there are 100 counties. In Presidential elections a pattern emerges. About 12% vote heavily blue, the rest are red, many deep red. In one, Buncombe County, sits Asheville. It votes blue, in 2020 Biden 96,515, dipshit 45 62,412, 59.9% to 38.7%, a margin of 34,103. 45 won NC in 2020 by 74,481. If NC is on a knife's edge in 2024, should the good people of Asheville be unable to vote in large numbers the knife just got sharper.
I wonder if it will have any effect on the election, in either direction. Trump threw paper towels. FEMA doing a bang-up job might-could help the Dems maybe. Maybe? Sigh.
Fingers crossed. Dem Gov Cooper has been on top of this before it hit. Asheville proper spared the worst, surrounds where 45 voters live hit hardest. Maybe a silver lining. Have a great week.
I’m from Tampa Bay Area from my childhood. Married moved to Asheville when my husband and I retired. We actually lived in Barnardsville, which is north of Weaverville. I did like it, especially the wonderful restaurants and the art scene and the progressive vibe. I think Greenville would be more conservative, but maybe not. I have been there and it is a lovely city. I am now widowed and have been back in Fla (central inland) for 8 years now and luckily was not a problem with Helene…this time, but it could sure happen. The devastation was surreal up there.
Odd, I don’t know where I "feel" is home. For me, I think it’s more of the earth in general. I like ancestry and my long forgotten relatives were all over the US and of course Europe. We are all one in a very deep sense of the word and have one home and it’s earth.
Thanks for this, Mary. I agree about the earth, but there are certain places that resonate. When I went to Prague in 1998, I felt oddly at home there. One day I'll go visit all the ancestral places in Europe, hopefully, and see if anything takes.
"To watch the winter sun on midwinter eve, connects me with my ancestors, who watched the same sun as they waited for the return of light and longer days." C. Norton
Wonderful essay & not much grabs me these days. Mountain people from birth are indeed captives of the angry Old Testament gods & Trump is like their patron demon. Giuseppe Ungaretti obviously escaped over & over from his stifling, walled-off hotel environ into his artistic freedom that gave voice to humanity's hopes & ultimate pathos but his embrace of fascism was inevitable in light of his inner desolation. Horrific natural disasters are as close as North Americans get to the refugee experience but the isolation & insularity of rural life can be like life on a desert island without knowing that ships exist. Ungaretti's poem & his ultimate surrender to fascism together remind me of the writer Richard Brautigan's benighted life, so frequently lit by temporary escapes into world-encircling satoris but always doomed, and his epic The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster:
Thanks, Richard. That's an interesting point about the refugee experience. When I feel down, I always try to remember that my ancestors came here from Italy and Eastern Europe and lived like that, so that I don't have to. It is a blessing. And I hope the Patron Demon of the Mountains doesn't take it all away...
I can remember a time, not more than a few years ago, when your Sunday pieces would either go completely over my head or hit me square in the jaw. The past year or so, every single one has smacked me upside the head! I don't know if that's me or you, Greg, but I appreciate it. I look forward to the Sunday columns more than any other during the week. I know you're going to start in one place and come out in quite another. It's really excellent writing!
I have one brother who has completed a bad marriage a few years ago, and just recently, his ex-spouse died, so even the alimony payments have stopped. They produced no children. The children she had before the marriage were never really nephews of mine, nor stepchildren of my brother. He's FINALLY in a good relationship, but he's also 60, and his girlfriend is a year or two older or younger, I can't remember, but either way, they will not be producing children. I have never been married and have no children. That makes my brother and I the end of the family name. My mom turns 92 in a few days, and my dad has been gone since 1997. All of that to say that I expect I'll be forgotten and have my second death within a few decades of my actual death. I don't even have plans for burial someplace where some gravestone might remember me for longer. My instructions to whomever may be left behind are, "NO godamned WAKE, just burn me, scatter me, and do it as cheaply as possible." Don't get me started on the fucking funeral industry! My mom preplanned and prepaid her funeral over 20 years ago, and by now, they WILL be losing money on it. Good!
Hurricanes have been used as metaphors for decades, mostly by tele-evangelists to raise money for themselves. The last I heard, hurricanes posing as the wrath of God was because the United States was so accepting of the gays, especially the storms that head north, like Sandy. According to my GeoChron with live radar and weather, there are currently four others around the globe, two along southeast Asia, one that doesn't know what it wants to be in the mid-Atlantic (Tropical Storm Joyce), and one more that seems to have started in the mid-Atlantic and is now headed NORTHEAST toward Iceland (Hurricane Isaac). This has been a very strange hurricane season, with most that affect the US starting in the Gulf of Mexico. Back before climate change really let itself be known, there used to be DAYS of warning for a hurricane because they would start off the coast of Africa and move west toward the United States. That seems to have changed, and I'm no scientist or meteorologist, but that seems less like the wrath of God, and more like the Earth is confused AF due to climate change. But, yes, as long as you can carry a snowball onto the House floor, climate change isn't real.
So, although I can feel empathy for the devastation of Asheville and Appalachia, how many more of these "weather events" do we have to have for people to start taking climate change seriously? After every mass shooting, Republicans tell us it's not the time to be talking about "gun control," yet when something like this happens, there are suddenly pleas to FEMA and the federal government for help from states that otherwise act like the federal government is out to get them and impose their WILL on them. Then, BECAUSE it's been so normalized, the media moves on as soon as the carnage of the storm does. I can still remember, although barely because I was about 10 years old, a devastating tornado that happened northwest of Chicago in the Belvedere area in 1967. The tornado AND its aftermath were front-page news for days on end. The loss of life, the recovery, the clean-up, and even later, the rebuilding. We don't have that anymore because this kind of thing has become so "common."
Republicans have made me such a cynical person; I truly don't know WHAT I should be feeling. They seem to want EVERYTHING to be political or some cultural fight, so it's difficult not to do that personally. On the one hand they tell us that gays or drag queens cause things like hurricanes, but when it's them, suddenly it's an Act of God on a bunch of innocent God-fearing people who need help. I suppose that attitude makes me an asshole, and I have to accept that -- it's probably what I'll be remembered for! Maybe my second death won't come as quickly as I thought as I leave behind Resistance posts, and caustic remarks all over the web.
Well, I for one won't forget you anytime soon, Steve.
Watching football yesterday, I saw an ad, put out by the trump campaign, that tried to demonize Kamala by showing her with drag queens, and then equating THAT with trans people and also migrants. It is infuriating. I hope there is a hell so he can burn it in.
Re: the tornado...I wonder if the death of local journalism, or at least its assimilation into a corporate venture capitalist Borg, is part of it. There aren't the resources there that there used to be.
I read a book yesterday that I bought at the book fair, called The Treason of the Intellectuals, about how this is the age of the "intellectual organization of political hatreds." He wrote this in 1928, predicted WW2, and things are even worse now.
Finally, I'm glad you are liking the more recent Sunday Pages. Some weeks I have an idea in mind, and some mornings I have no real clue how they will turn out until I sit down. This was one of the latter.
I finished "The Man Who Hated Women," and then went back to "Lucky Loser," how Trump squandered the EMPIRE his father left for him to manage. I'm up to "The Apprentice" years, but I have two take-aways from this book so far. Fred Trump was not the monster we have always thought him to be. Yes, he taught Donald that the world is ONLY made up of winners (killers) and losers, and he did toss aside Freddy, his first-born son, when he didn't want to work for Fred, in favor of the "rough beast." But, on the other hand, he was a man who almost anyone who described him said, "his word was his bond." He was an actual businessman who played the system like any businessman would have tried, including avoiding, as much as possible, gift taxes and estate taxes when he started moving his money to his children. He was certainly NO Donald Trump.
The other take-away is that this is the only book I've ever read, where every time I close it, I think, or actually say out loud, "What a fucking asshole." Donald Trump has been DONALD TRUMP since the mid-70s, and I STILL don't understand how he got into the White House in the first place.
Before the debate on Sept 10th, the only debate highlight I remembered was when someone was running, I guess in 1988, against Dan Quayle, in a VP debate -- too lazy to look it up -- and he said to something Quayle said, something like, "I worked with Jack Kennedy, and you are no Jack Kennedy." NOW, the debate moment we're all going to remember is, "They're eating the dawgs!" Ugh, how did we get HERE?
Steve, I feel EXACTLY the same way about funerals! I keep saying just reduce me to ashes and throw the ashes to the wind. Let them land where they may. Everyone keeps saying “but where do you want the ashes if you’re not going to be buried in a casket?” It’s so interesting to me that they don’t understand that those ashes, and this body, are not “me” so I don’t care about some pomp and parade for the shell I leave behind! P.S. My dad passed away the same year yours did.
Great thoughtful post
Banksy, "They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing, and a second time when somebody says your name for the last time."
I also saw this attributed to Ernest Hemingway when I googled. And it’s so true.
Me being a childless cat and dog lady, I figure when my one niece, I’m in contact with, is gone and her two children are gone…I’ll be gone for good.
Neither I nor my two brothers have had children. We had an amazing father whose family was all murdered in the Holocaust & our mother's family was full of amazing thinkers & achievers but only the female children of her brothers bore children. So they & we will all cease to exist before long.
Of all of the horrible things about the Holocaust, its recency is what most astounds me. It's so profoundly sad.
Banksy and Hemingway. Hmm. And probably someone thousands of years ago said much the same.
I should add that there is nothing negative about this. In Buddhism, the pinnacle of enlightenment is extinction, the blowing out of the candle.
So true. At 87 I probably am the only human who thinks about my dear Mom, Dad, and other departeds who were once so lively. They still live in my heart.
So brief our stay here, and so much joy, pain, good and evil. We writers try to leave tracks in the sands of time.
In vain. Eons on our species may wear God out and he will let us lapse. Our planets consumed. Our voices stilled.
So I rejoice in the now. Tomorrow we may be swept away. Billserle.com
Well said. If only such wisdom filled my being 50 years ago when in my 20s
Youth is wasted on the young!
This is good advice, Bill.
Eckhart Tolle wrote that "Power of Now" book, and he has another one called something like, "One Day Even the Sun Will Die." My wife and I say that to each other sometimes as a morbid joke...
Thought provoking and beautifully written piece Greg. Thank you.
Thank you, Helen!
Maybe our "souls" are really divine dirt, not "spirit", so the Earth never forgets us. And when we die, we just go home to where our ancestors are waiting for us.
I like that idea, Rick. Dust to dust. "Heaven to the raindrop is entering the lake."
Earlier this summer we went to visit our daughter, who was doing an internship in Greenville, SC, for a few days. We fell in LOVE with Greenville. Such a cool town. I was surprised at how much I love and feel connected to Greenville. As if it was a person, an old friend. The mountains were beautiful. We drove there from Chicago - through the Smokey Mountains and through the Blue Ridge Mountains. We stopped in Asheville for a few days on our way back. Asheville did not evoke the same feelings as Greenville. There was an underlying energy of unease. Again, I was surprised as I thought I would love being in Asheville. But I feel devastated for the people and the land of Western North Carolina and everyone else in the path of this brutal storm. I hope a sense of normalcy and humanity returns soon for them. Hurricanes and devastation are not easily forgotten.
I wonder if the underlying energy of unease you sensed in Asheville was caused by Republican gerrymandering. I've heard that area has not been quite the same since Republicans redrew the districts giving them the advantage over Democrats.
The GOP ruins everything it touches.
Swear to God I said the same thing just days ago.
Thanks for this, Gail. My wife goes to Asheville every year to see her good friend who lives there. This is the time of year she usually goes, and thankfully, she didn't...
Thanks for this, Greg. One of my cousins lives in Weaverville, a small town north of Asheville. I emailed her this morning hoping for some news. Now that I've learned that there probably is no internet nor email, I'm really concerned.
Thanks, Kris. Hopefully she is ok.
We just connected yesterday. She’s relatively OK but no water, electrical, services. I think she has a good community around her in Weaverville.
I blurted my brother Jay's name out loud after I read this. He would be 59 now if he hadn't taken his at 27 years of age. Very thoughtful post, Greg. Thank you.
I'm sorry to hear this, Tracy. Thank you for sharing.
It’s ok, thank you for reminding me to honor him.
I know my name, face and existence will be forgotten. I do believe that the good we do and the love we give can ripple through time. I hope that the universe will somehow preserve our essence. Much else is transformed, not just dissipated, why not our souls?
I hope so too, but I'm also cool with it not being so.
Re: the face...it's crazy to me that for millions of years there was no images, and then only paintings, or renderings on coins, of people. Now there are children who have been photographed almost nonstop since they were born. The disparity.
On this day my mom was born 100 years ago. She died 31 years ago in her sleep. Mom had 8 children, 5 now deceased. So that leaves my two sisters and me to keep her memory alive. My sisters call me from time to time to ask about a TL in their lives as we grew up. I was the older sister and they depend on me for memories of days gone by. So I do appreciate today’s writing. Thank you 🙏. Love the Melania book that no one asked for! lol show was brilliant and the podcast Friday was primo as the Italians say! Praying for Asheville
Happy birthday to your mother, Christine! Thanks for watching and listening. LOL the Melania thing is just so crazy...
Thanks Greg, I look forward to evey Sunday piece.
Hurricanes and elections. In NC there are 100 counties. In Presidential elections a pattern emerges. About 12% vote heavily blue, the rest are red, many deep red. In one, Buncombe County, sits Asheville. It votes blue, in 2020 Biden 96,515, dipshit 45 62,412, 59.9% to 38.7%, a margin of 34,103. 45 won NC in 2020 by 74,481. If NC is on a knife's edge in 2024, should the good people of Asheville be unable to vote in large numbers the knife just got sharper.
A demoralizing Sunday thought.
The gods helping MAGA?
For some he is the Chosen!
WHICH gods? ; )
Thanks, Old Man.
I wonder if it will have any effect on the election, in either direction. Trump threw paper towels. FEMA doing a bang-up job might-could help the Dems maybe. Maybe? Sigh.
Fingers crossed. Dem Gov Cooper has been on top of this before it hit. Asheville proper spared the worst, surrounds where 45 voters live hit hardest. Maybe a silver lining. Have a great week.
I’m from Tampa Bay Area from my childhood. Married moved to Asheville when my husband and I retired. We actually lived in Barnardsville, which is north of Weaverville. I did like it, especially the wonderful restaurants and the art scene and the progressive vibe. I think Greenville would be more conservative, but maybe not. I have been there and it is a lovely city. I am now widowed and have been back in Fla (central inland) for 8 years now and luckily was not a problem with Helene…this time, but it could sure happen. The devastation was surreal up there.
Odd, I don’t know where I "feel" is home. For me, I think it’s more of the earth in general. I like ancestry and my long forgotten relatives were all over the US and of course Europe. We are all one in a very deep sense of the word and have one home and it’s earth.
Thanks for this, Mary. I agree about the earth, but there are certain places that resonate. When I went to Prague in 1998, I felt oddly at home there. One day I'll go visit all the ancestral places in Europe, hopefully, and see if anything takes.
I do feel more aligned with Europe as it is so surreal here and like this was always here..this ignorance and extremism…waiting to be unleashed
"To watch the winter sun on midwinter eve, connects me with my ancestors, who watched the same sun as they waited for the return of light and longer days." C. Norton
Beautiful!
"How can the Dead be truly Dead when they still live in the souls of those left behind." Carson McCullers
Oh, that's lovely.
In 96 I spent a day in Asheville on my Walk Across America.
Was Good but I spent 10 days in Bryson City.
Loved it.
I Still correspond with Artist Elizabeth Ellison.
Walked on. Got to DC on Earth Day.
WEATHER: Humans are an accidental blink in the atmospheres of the infinite universes.
You walked across America? Wow. I can't even imagine doing that.
Wonderful essay & not much grabs me these days. Mountain people from birth are indeed captives of the angry Old Testament gods & Trump is like their patron demon. Giuseppe Ungaretti obviously escaped over & over from his stifling, walled-off hotel environ into his artistic freedom that gave voice to humanity's hopes & ultimate pathos but his embrace of fascism was inevitable in light of his inner desolation. Horrific natural disasters are as close as North Americans get to the refugee experience but the isolation & insularity of rural life can be like life on a desert island without knowing that ships exist. Ungaretti's poem & his ultimate surrender to fascism together remind me of the writer Richard Brautigan's benighted life, so frequently lit by temporary escapes into world-encircling satoris but always doomed, and his epic The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster:
When you take your pill
it’s like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside of you.
Keep writing & giving us what you do so well.
Thanks, Richard. That's an interesting point about the refugee experience. When I feel down, I always try to remember that my ancestors came here from Italy and Eastern Europe and lived like that, so that I don't have to. It is a blessing. And I hope the Patron Demon of the Mountains doesn't take it all away...
I can remember a time, not more than a few years ago, when your Sunday pieces would either go completely over my head or hit me square in the jaw. The past year or so, every single one has smacked me upside the head! I don't know if that's me or you, Greg, but I appreciate it. I look forward to the Sunday columns more than any other during the week. I know you're going to start in one place and come out in quite another. It's really excellent writing!
I have one brother who has completed a bad marriage a few years ago, and just recently, his ex-spouse died, so even the alimony payments have stopped. They produced no children. The children she had before the marriage were never really nephews of mine, nor stepchildren of my brother. He's FINALLY in a good relationship, but he's also 60, and his girlfriend is a year or two older or younger, I can't remember, but either way, they will not be producing children. I have never been married and have no children. That makes my brother and I the end of the family name. My mom turns 92 in a few days, and my dad has been gone since 1997. All of that to say that I expect I'll be forgotten and have my second death within a few decades of my actual death. I don't even have plans for burial someplace where some gravestone might remember me for longer. My instructions to whomever may be left behind are, "NO godamned WAKE, just burn me, scatter me, and do it as cheaply as possible." Don't get me started on the fucking funeral industry! My mom preplanned and prepaid her funeral over 20 years ago, and by now, they WILL be losing money on it. Good!
Hurricanes have been used as metaphors for decades, mostly by tele-evangelists to raise money for themselves. The last I heard, hurricanes posing as the wrath of God was because the United States was so accepting of the gays, especially the storms that head north, like Sandy. According to my GeoChron with live radar and weather, there are currently four others around the globe, two along southeast Asia, one that doesn't know what it wants to be in the mid-Atlantic (Tropical Storm Joyce), and one more that seems to have started in the mid-Atlantic and is now headed NORTHEAST toward Iceland (Hurricane Isaac). This has been a very strange hurricane season, with most that affect the US starting in the Gulf of Mexico. Back before climate change really let itself be known, there used to be DAYS of warning for a hurricane because they would start off the coast of Africa and move west toward the United States. That seems to have changed, and I'm no scientist or meteorologist, but that seems less like the wrath of God, and more like the Earth is confused AF due to climate change. But, yes, as long as you can carry a snowball onto the House floor, climate change isn't real.
So, although I can feel empathy for the devastation of Asheville and Appalachia, how many more of these "weather events" do we have to have for people to start taking climate change seriously? After every mass shooting, Republicans tell us it's not the time to be talking about "gun control," yet when something like this happens, there are suddenly pleas to FEMA and the federal government for help from states that otherwise act like the federal government is out to get them and impose their WILL on them. Then, BECAUSE it's been so normalized, the media moves on as soon as the carnage of the storm does. I can still remember, although barely because I was about 10 years old, a devastating tornado that happened northwest of Chicago in the Belvedere area in 1967. The tornado AND its aftermath were front-page news for days on end. The loss of life, the recovery, the clean-up, and even later, the rebuilding. We don't have that anymore because this kind of thing has become so "common."
Republicans have made me such a cynical person; I truly don't know WHAT I should be feeling. They seem to want EVERYTHING to be political or some cultural fight, so it's difficult not to do that personally. On the one hand they tell us that gays or drag queens cause things like hurricanes, but when it's them, suddenly it's an Act of God on a bunch of innocent God-fearing people who need help. I suppose that attitude makes me an asshole, and I have to accept that -- it's probably what I'll be remembered for! Maybe my second death won't come as quickly as I thought as I leave behind Resistance posts, and caustic remarks all over the web.
Well, I for one won't forget you anytime soon, Steve.
Watching football yesterday, I saw an ad, put out by the trump campaign, that tried to demonize Kamala by showing her with drag queens, and then equating THAT with trans people and also migrants. It is infuriating. I hope there is a hell so he can burn it in.
Re: the tornado...I wonder if the death of local journalism, or at least its assimilation into a corporate venture capitalist Borg, is part of it. There aren't the resources there that there used to be.
I read a book yesterday that I bought at the book fair, called The Treason of the Intellectuals, about how this is the age of the "intellectual organization of political hatreds." He wrote this in 1928, predicted WW2, and things are even worse now.
Finally, I'm glad you are liking the more recent Sunday Pages. Some weeks I have an idea in mind, and some mornings I have no real clue how they will turn out until I sit down. This was one of the latter.
Gods, I DO go on!! LOL
I finished "The Man Who Hated Women," and then went back to "Lucky Loser," how Trump squandered the EMPIRE his father left for him to manage. I'm up to "The Apprentice" years, but I have two take-aways from this book so far. Fred Trump was not the monster we have always thought him to be. Yes, he taught Donald that the world is ONLY made up of winners (killers) and losers, and he did toss aside Freddy, his first-born son, when he didn't want to work for Fred, in favor of the "rough beast." But, on the other hand, he was a man who almost anyone who described him said, "his word was his bond." He was an actual businessman who played the system like any businessman would have tried, including avoiding, as much as possible, gift taxes and estate taxes when he started moving his money to his children. He was certainly NO Donald Trump.
The other take-away is that this is the only book I've ever read, where every time I close it, I think, or actually say out loud, "What a fucking asshole." Donald Trump has been DONALD TRUMP since the mid-70s, and I STILL don't understand how he got into the White House in the first place.
Before the debate on Sept 10th, the only debate highlight I remembered was when someone was running, I guess in 1988, against Dan Quayle, in a VP debate -- too lazy to look it up -- and he said to something Quayle said, something like, "I worked with Jack Kennedy, and you are no Jack Kennedy." NOW, the debate moment we're all going to remember is, "They're eating the dawgs!" Ugh, how did we get HERE?
Steve, I feel EXACTLY the same way about funerals! I keep saying just reduce me to ashes and throw the ashes to the wind. Let them land where they may. Everyone keeps saying “but where do you want the ashes if you’re not going to be buried in a casket?” It’s so interesting to me that they don’t understand that those ashes, and this body, are not “me” so I don’t care about some pomp and parade for the shell I leave behind! P.S. My dad passed away the same year yours did.