Little Lies

Everyone lies. I think it is in our deepest, innermost program to be deceptive. People have been lying to survive since perhaps the first two humans interacted. We learn to lie as children to avoid punishment , first from our parents and then from our teachers in school. Society seems to abhor lying on the one hand and to practice it on the other. Attorneys make a living with lies, and all too often criminals are released through the legal system by skilled lawyers that make lies believable to juries. O J Simpson ended up in prison, not for double murder ,but of threats in a Las Vegas Hotel.Johnny Cochran and his team tore Marcia Clark and the California legal system to ribbons. Judge Lance Ito coiuld only sit back and watch tax payers money go down the drain. The legal system and the jury said the prosecutors were lying and OJ was telling the truth. Even a first grade schoolteacher would have been more effective than the prosecutors in in exposing OJ. Then we have Mr. Bill Clinton. Who doesn't remember his indignant proclamation of "I did not have sex with that woman". Which woman ?Jennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, or Monica? I guess its in what is the definition of Sex. If they had known to ask about a cigar maybe he would have remembered. Later coming clean. Mr. Clinton could easily win re-election if hecould run again . At least half of our country would vote for him , lies and all. Politicians seem to get a free pass for lying. Entire campaigns are based upon lies. Our own Mitch McConnell and his opponent Allison Grimes were constantly being called on the carpet in their campaign for telling falsehoods , or maybe just stretching the truth a little. Our legal system is so tuned into lying that the Constitution gave us the 5th amendment to avoid having to tell the truth.Boy I wish I had had the 5th to use in grade and high school, or even now in my marriage. Unlike Justice, Sandy is not blind and she doesn't recognize the 5th. She also does not have to read me my Miranda Rights or have probable cause . I think she could resort to waterboarding if necessary. I don't know how Clinton gets a get out of jail card and I can't. In Africa The Bladerunner killed his girlfriend and came out with 5 years for Manslaughter 2. They say he'll be out in 10 months. Again we have lies coming out ahead of justice. As for Bill Cosby, there seems to be a lot of lying going on by someone . Is it the 25 women that say they were molested or is it Mr. Huxtable? Maybe time will tell. Sometimes a lie is necessary for the common good. What man has not been asked"Do these pants make me look too big?" And what man has not  lied and said"No you look great". I do know of a young colleague who told his wife she had to lay off the doughnuts because her ass was getting too big for her sweat pants. What a mental lapse! He will replay that remark for the rest of his marriage if I know anything about women.Then we have such a thing as "Kind Lies". whereby we tell partners and friends falsehoods for nice reasons, even love. Christine McVie sang "Tell me Lies, Sweet little Lies". I love for a woman to tell me sweet lies, always have and always will. I look like a street person on the 51st Street subway stop and Sandy tells me I look nice. I definitely see Nick Nolte's mugshot every morning as I glance in the mirror, and she tells me I look nice. Tell me lies, sweet little lies . I hope she does it for love, but I suspect she does it out of habit, and even worse, out of pity. I'm starting to get depressed as I think about this.Tomorrow night it is scheduled by the weathermen to drop to 0 degrees or lower here in Central Kentucky and I just dread the cold.I guess I will just have to take Nick's Mugshot and wash it up a little and head down South to Knoxville to a jobsite. Going 85 down I-75 does have somewhat of a potential risk to lie as we are all susceptible of running afoul of the traffic monitors and their radar. Like Slick Willy I have no reservations of evading the truth when he or she asks how fast I thought I was going. It seems contradictory to survival to admit to speeding to an officer of the law. Like Christine i'm going to tell that officer "Sweet Little Lies". Like Roger Daltrey said, "If its good enough for Pavarotti its good enogh for me!"

Defining Moments

There are times in our lives that somehow become embedded within our brains and stay in our thoughts as memories. These memories are either pleasant or they can be very negative in their content. They are often lying just beneath our thoughts in our subconscious , just waiting for a signal to emerge and remind us of a past experience. Sometimes these memories will emerge from events that happened years ago or they can be something that happened only days ago . If you're old enough you will readily remember what you were doing when JFK was assassinated. , or you can see in your mind what was going on when 911 occurred that morning. Sometimes even a smell will take you back to childhood as maybe the first day of school when you enter a classroom saturated with the whiffs of books and paper. Or a certain scent of perfume will take you a time of mini skirts and peace marches. The sound of soldiers marching still takes me back to ROTC and ugly baggy uniforms and even uglier, pie faced NCOs trying to get us to sign up for Advanced ROTC and become "Lifers". I can still smell locker rooms at gymnasiums as we dressed in shiny, short basketball uniforms, usually in advance of getting our country- boy asses humiliated all over the shiny hardwood floors. I can still feel the bruising punches in my skinny back as ugly, pimple faced forwards tried to intimidate me , hidden from the view of the referees as they tried to control the game. Just the sound of a bouncing ball brings back the smell of the old gymnasium with its balcony that was obscured from view by cigarette smoke and loud catcalls. The real games  were being played up there and out in the gravel parking lots. Back in those days 57 Bel Aires and Impalas weren't classics. They were means to get from point A to point B. You could smell 39 cents per gallon ethyl gasoline as they rocketed out of the parking lot on their way to the burger joints or some dirt road guaranteed for privacy. We were left on the hardwoods getting bruised and beaten. Sometimes we would go to the drive in if we had a ride or admission money. It didn't matter what was on because no one watched the show anyway. Again the show was really secondary as Social Rituals were taking place at the concession building. People met there to find romance, to fight, or to learn things, sometimes all at the same encounter. Many times the first taste of beer was found at the drive in. We didn't have drugs of any sort back then ,unless you counted Polio oral vaccine on a Sugar Cube. We did have talk of fallout shelters and local civil defense as we prepared for Nikita Khruschev and his Promise to bury us in Communism. The Cuban Missile Crises still comes to memory at odd times, and I still can see Lee Harvey Oswald shot in the stomach in black and white on our snowy old tv. We didn't know that down the road HDTV was lurking or that scratchy 45 rpms and 33s would be replaced with digital. A defining moment was installing an Arthur Fulmer 8 Track under my Gran Torinos dashboard and listening to Led Zeppelin . The Immigrant Song was perfect coming out of 4 speakers as a skinny brunette drank Boones Farm straight from the bottle. That smell of alcohol and strawberries seem to be positive in my memory.Then there was a Homecoming where my friend's date slowly ate her football mum corsage during the first half of a hazy football game. It was bright yellow with a large ribbon that was certainly a defining moment to me. She was chasing the flower petals with Bacardis Rum and left nothing but the bow and a green stem. I have wondered what happened to that girl from 1970. I imagine she went on to live a normal life and be a productive member of society, probably with children and grandchildren , who would be aghast at a picture of grandmother eating her corsage as a sexy young coed. Obviously this was a very defining moment as I have beaten it to death. Nevermind that my date and I were to be married after graduation, a pact that went different directions.Movies are an incredible source for memories both from the actors and the audience. Again the differences in male and female perception is nowhere more acutely displayed than in movie attendance. No chick flicks for me! No actor stands out more in male moments than Clint Eastwood. Dirty Harry is what we all want to grow up to be. "Do you feel lucky Punk?" or "Go ahead , Make My Day". What about "Beam Us Up Scotty"? Or how about Maverick and Goose? Especially when she lost that loving feeling, or when Maverick called the ball?How about Maverick requesting a fly by? Even when the pattern was closed?How about Doc Holiday Telling Ringo"I'm your Huckleberry"? Or how about Val Kilmer's portrayal of Doc?I think we all need writers to pen us scripts for daily conversations. That way we can all create defining moments for future generations. Sometimes I do get quoted ,but it is by Sandy's friends and generally of the negative type of defining moments.How about when Quigley shot that bucket from 10 miles away? Or when Quigley told a dying Alan Rickman,"I didn't say I didn't know how to use them. I said I didn't have any use for them". Almost Shakespearian. Another favorite Defining Moment is Lonesome Dove.Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall could have quit because everything else is commonplace after that.The soundtrack is perfection.The final two minutes of A River Runs Through It should be on everyones Desk Top.Norman MacClean said it all right then.I'm still trying to figure out whether I like "American Pie " or not.Most of the time I do ,But this driving my Chevy to a dry levy at times renminds me of that dirty, pimply faced SOB that punched me in the back nearly fifty years ago . That seems to have been a Freudian moment. Maybe I need some counseling. Take us out of here Mr. Sulu.

State Of Union 2015

Well 2014 has ended and we start into the unknown waters of 2015.For some bizarre reason November was an abnormally cold month and then December was a reasonably mild one. We were in NYC to celebrate our anniversary and it occurred during the weekend of Santa Con.There were some protests down by the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall concerning Ferguson, but there's always some kind of protests in the Big Apple and it was barely noticed. We  went to see "Once" and it was ok , not great ,but ok. Then we went to see "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"and I rate it right up there with"Cats ", which means I would be more entertained with a fist fight on the subway. How entertaining can a transvestite rock singer with a heavy metal band be? The gay guy that used to be on Frazier had started the lead role but was in it only a month. The new lead role is played by a seemingly straight guy that was the lead character on Dexter, which I've never seen.The only thing worse than Hedwig was the pain in my knees from the cramped seats. I decided to get Sandy a mixed drink before the show so told the bartender I wanted a diet coke and Canadian Club. He asked single or double and I told him a single. He said $15  and I was glad I had asked for a single.We had wanted to see Beautiful again but the price for two tickets was in the range of $500 so we opted out of that rather quickly. The weather in NYC was really nice and we went down to the 9-11 memorial and looked at the finished World Trade Center.Earlier in November we had flown down to Homestead, Florida to see the final Nascar race of the season and Sandy had rented a house in Hollywood about 10 minutes from Fort Lauderdale Airport, where we had flown in . Hollywood has a wonderful historic downtown with some really good restaurants where we ate several nights. Our phones showed night temperatures in the teens back home and we were eating Italian food under the stars in Hollywood. We drove by Miami on our way to Key West on the Saturday before the race and that was probably the best part of the whole weekend. Temps in the low 80s as we went through Largo , Marathon, and over the Seven Mile Bridge. It always brings good memories to be back in the Keys. There's something about blue water meeting the blue sky that makes you want to pack up your possessions and head south, at least for January and February. That is not to be however, as we are committed to projects that are filling our schedules until at least the middle of April. One of our projects is atop a mountain in Eastern Kentucky that is gravity defying at times, especially if it is raining. Some of our best custom wood projects are taking shape in some of the most artistic homes being built.This all comes at a cost of being on I-75 at least three days a week going to Tennessee and Eastern Kentucky, which last year was going to Western Kentucky. The big difference is that it is costing us $35 less per fillup in a monster old suv that craves premium gasoline and gets 12 miles per gallon. So the first blessing of my State of the Union is $1.96 gasoline. I find it hard to feel sorry for the Big Oil Companies. They have been gouging us since 1974.Its funny that my suppliers that kept adding fuel surcharges on us have not talked about taking them off, something that we are going to start talking about in the coming months.I'm also starting to get hostile with Dish Network that keeps taking off programming and raising rates. When I complain they say that they are adding more shows. Thats BS! They keep adding shopping channels and crap that noone watches. The trend is everyone is streaming and going back to antennas and local programming. The history channel ,TLC, and animal planet ceased being educational and flooded the air with reality tv. I'm tired of watching moonshiners, Turtle Man , and Alien files. Are there no producers or writers left?Are there no subjects for movies other than XMen, Hobbits,and Vampires? And Frozen??? What can I say?Elsa and Anna have taken the place of Miley and Brittany.,I think the sales for Frozen is what got us out of the Depression/Recession. The other thing I am happiest and thankful for is that the nastiest political race between McConnell and Allison Grimes is over. Its a shame that the two mudslingers could not have both lost. Then next year we have the Governors race here in Kentucky. I noticed that Kentucky is the fifth worst run state in the Union. That will give the politicians plenty of goals to strive for. On a positive note if you want to leave Kentucky fast you can download an app and your boarding pass is now on your smart phone. The airlines are charging you $5 to print you a boarding pass, just one more reason to drive. The medical news is that we had about 2 weeks of media driven ebola panic and then it went away. People in Africa are still dying but the media shifted our attentions to elections and Ferguson.Now they say our flu shots are not going to be effective because they guessed the wrong flu strain or flu du jour.I read Charlie Ergan, the founder of Dish Network is worth $ 9 billion and is striving to give us the best value in TV programming. I'm betting that you won't miss me  when I unsubscribe Charlie.All in All my State of the Union is Ok. Its off to Eastern Kentucky tomorrow but with Blue Skies and blue water in my heart.