Sidetracked Charley

Hold You Head Above the Crowd For anyone paying attention the last few weeks have been very, very, very stressful. And that is the goal of the other party. Makes us afraid, make us angry, make us give up. Surrender is not an option. Because if we go that route the Christian Right will get the Doomsday they have been planning for. Rapture for them, the righteous white, they believe. And doomsday for liberals. But you don't have to focus on the monsters without zippers. At least not all the time.Though an effort to stay totally away from news makes me anxious. So I ration my exposure. And then the rest of the day I watch reruns of comfort TV, garden, paint, take photographs, and tend to my dog guests. In the days leading up to Nixon's resignation I quit all news and quit all activism and the Republican party and Washington, DC. I hid out in the mountains of New Mexico without a TV. If friends had not called me to alert me of his announcement I would have missed it. There...

Apologies to Monet And I find myself asking what that is all about. Us humans seem to want to mark time. Measure it off in neat little blocks like weeks and months, days and hours. None of them make a lot of sense. Seven days in a week/why not 5? And we know they have the number of days in a month all screwed up. Sometimes our formula for keeping time has been so out of step with the rotations of the earth and paths of the planets that there have had to be corrections. Rioting in the streets once because the populace thought 10 days had been stolen from them. And yet we suddenly seem so very sure of not merely our measurement of time but the civilizations that came before that we are sure the world is ending on December 21st of this year per the Mayans that did not even have a December. Let alone the year 2012 CE. CE stands for Common Era incidentally and replaces AD which I always said as After Death when it meant Years of our Lord. But he was not everyone's Lord so the CE ...