Sting and Marsalis are on Pandora.

Ricky, the neighbor who called my yard a bitch, approached the fence and gave me some mustard and turnip greens. He saved me last week as I took down the old deck on the back of the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club by offering a full-size crowbar instead of my smaller nail puller. I like this guy.

I finally finished bagging leaves, today. Give me a break; I held down a job and bagged two yards. We’re talking around 200 39 gal bags. If I have to rake, I bag at 12 mins, otherwise it’s 10, like today.

I had two glorious January days last week and another today, save for the wind. The website is quiet this time of year, so I go in, ship and go home. Thursday, I put down 40 paving stones where the deck stood.

I’ve been making good service of my ’91 Toyota truck with 200K on it. The fun machine top leaks, so I tarp it when it rains. We’ve talked it over, considered our options and decided to fix up the VW Cabrio at 110K rather than replace it. It truly is so much fun and the mechanics love working on it.

I’m drunk on Natty Greene’s Red Nose and several Duggan’s Dew. There’s another pot of black beans in the slow cooker, replete with onion, pepper, garlic and country ham. Been hanging with the Wife and the cats on weekends, binging on Shameless. It’s emotionally abusive.

Sting – Songs for Japan on Pandora

After playing guitar for forty years, I surrendered my four finger style for the Travis three finger method in order to play Landslide, which I hear at least twice a day. It is fucking me up.

I tell you what else is fucking me up: the pornographic insanity of Saturday’s Womens March juxtoposed to yesterday as Trump’s first day in office. Both were significant in defining not just the new status quo, but the optimally divergent vectors of the parties involved.

But that’s not right either. Saturday indicated a journey into vulgarity presaging deep and perhaps permanent mass psychosis, as the very idea of the Cheetoh Sajak was sufficient, like a perfect political nuke, to induce the otherwise perfectly reasonable idea of wearing vaginas around children.  It is as though Billy Bush exhumed some ancient fertility rite.

Paradoxically, Trump hit the ground running yesterday, like the billionaire mogul he is, by doing pretty much what he promised. The admonition to HHS regarding the forbearance of ACA penalties is indicative of political genius, if not actual compassion where fascism was expected by those on the left in the psych ward.

Yes, I’m hydrating.  No more libations.

OK, hopium is nice for the kids, but we know better. From the proprietors of Naked Capitalism:

The Dems and the press seem intent on continually intensifying fear and hatred of Trump and his Rust Belt supporters. Lambert and I find it hard to see a logical endpoint of this effort to delegitimize not merely the person of the President, but his voters and their States, other than civil war (they “will rule or ruin in all events”). And this makes no sense, strategically, given that the Democrats are heavily concentrated in cities that do not make up a contiguous land area and are not even remotely capable of supporting themselves physically, and that most of the people in this country who carry guns as part of their job voted Republican. Yet were these protests to jell into something effective, it’s hard to see any other end game.

These people run what is considered one of the top 10 economics blogs.

From the featured commenter:

A question for us to think about: When, since the time of Lincoln, slavery, and the Civil War, has America been as fundamentally divided as it is now, today, 2017? When have the basic stories that we tell ourselves and that we have assimilated into our habits of head and heart, been more deeply and irreconcilably opposed? Where and what is the dialectical resolution between coastal cosmopolitans chasing a “good life” understood as an ever expanding, protected, and affirmed “market” for individual choice and self- inventing “lifestyles”, and the flyover country provincials living in communities devastated by the corrosive solvency of aggressive finance capital on the make, weakened by disappearing communities, impotent traditions, mocked religion, broken families, and constant anxiety about providing the daily bread? And when have the imaginations of those so opposed been less able to conceive workable solutions that embrace both sides? Are there solutions that are able to embrace both sides?

Well, it’s not like we’re fighting Muslims.  And apparently not Russians.  The enormous gas bag that I am deflated yesterday morning when I heard Mattis ordered US and Russian forces to combine in an assault on ISIS.  Indeed, it’s been euphoric, as my most fervent hopes since the Ukrainian Maidan coup in April, 2014 were validated.

US and NATO forces continue to converge on the Russian border and its Balkan Oblast, Kaliningrad, but Russophiles have every reason to hope Trump and Mattis deescalate.  My hope is that Islamophobia prevails, as it should in Syria.  After all, US forces wouldn’t be bombing their own assets, surely.

It is perverse to consider the neocon notion that Russia threatens Yurp when it is obviously the central bankers.  Add the result of the ZioNazis breaking Syria and Libya and a refugee can do the math.  No, these warmongering assholes are being called out.  Nobody seems to hang from the ICC gallows anymore, but these fuckers are prime candidates.

I chased teabaggers for three years with some success, before going after the neocons after the Ukraine coup in 2014.  Raising consciousness by battling false narratives was the right place to be and I’m proud to have taken a part in defending the blameless Putin and Russia.  It has quite naturally led to support of Trump and contention with new authoritarians on the Left.

The Trump insurgency has relegated Christofascists to the margins with a concentration on capitalism and its necessary elements.  Libtards enjoyed power from buttressing society with nurturing health and education.  They were patrons of art and music, museums and parks.  Their acquiescence to neoliberalism and neoconservatism has created hubris borne of cognitive dissonance triggered by the orange unthinkable.  Consequently, Saturday was proof that the Left has suffered an emotional breakdown.

And the worst medicine will be for Trump to succeed.

This is why I read the comments:

What is happening now is completely different. It is a death-match between Enlightenment-rooted, classical-liberal principles like “equality before the law,” and another organizing principle of government: that of “privilege,” (literally personal laws), which is the ideological foundation of feudalism. Privilege organizes a society so that, individual rights depend, legally, on the groups that people belong to. It accords primacy to specific contracts regulating the rights and burdens of those groups. It inevitably arises when government arrogates all authority for social welfare to itself: not only security, but also all the social and ideological functions that classically devolved upon private bodies, such as charity, nutrition, education, and management even of the most traditionally intimate functions, such as procreative rights, or choice of intoxicants.