9/18 -- I Don't Care About 9/11 Day

Editor's note: I realize this will be my most controversial post since the debacle of me reducing Johnny Law to a simmering pile of ashes, when I lost one follower and three others refused to speak to me for two days. That and death threats from every police force in Missouri. But I feel the time is right, and America can now bravely face the plain truth, that it's time to move on from 9/11. If you also think so, and are ready, as I am, to undo the knots our little panties have been twisted in, then join me in celebrating this, the first 9/18, now and forever to be known as "I Don't Care About 9/11 Day."

This is going to be a great thing, undoing the knots America's little panties have been twisted in, and getting America back on track. It's been one week since 9/11, the day that everyone's sadly been conditioned to "really care about," aka Patriot's Day, ignorantly so-called. But today is 9/18, when we declare that we're over it. Imagine how it might be on September 11 next year. No more vigils at the Tomb of the Unknown Stranger, no more reciting the names of people we don't know, no more cheap yellow ribbons, and, best of all, no more replays of George W. Bush and his idiot bullhorn. I feel better already!

Right away, I know the objections. A little under 3,000 people died on 9/11. To answer that, there's more than 3,000 people who die everyday, from one damned thing or another. Or, you're being insensitive, because the nation faced a huge trauma on that day. True, if your little panties are all bunched up and you find a lot of joy in that, you'll want to nurse your traumas along. Or, how about this, 9/11 reminds us to be alert to the dangers facing us in an ever-threatening world. If you need a particular day to remind you to watch out for yourself, you pretty much deserve what happens. Beware always, we don't need a reminder. Minutes ago I was patrolling the shoe store for potential shoe bombers. You know 'em because they're learning to tie their shoes but not untie them.

The original 9/11 is now a long time ago. And just because we "remember" it doesn't mean we need to linger. I remember lots of traumatic things in my life, but if I carve out a whole day for each one, there's no time left for normal stuff. We don't need it, leave it behind. We took a licking, but kept on ticking. We're just giving the bad guys more glory by keeping our little panties twisted in knots over their deeds. Those who do you harm, you should wipe the dust of your feet off against them and press on with your journey.

Therefore, you and I and every intelligent, right-thinking, clear-headed, guts-and-glory, true red, white, and blue American, must advance past this. I know there's some contradiction in making a day in response to a particular day. But sometimes you need to take two steps back to rediscover the correct path, then go around an obstruction. Therefore, yes, after a while, "I Don't Care About 9/11 Day," we trust, will be superfluous. That day has not yet come, with our little panties still so terribly twisted.

At this point, though, proclaiming it on 9/11 itself is not a welcome thing. So many folks are into it, as we see from our Facebook friends. They're putting up the various icons of that day, firemen looking at oddly askew flags or holding children in remorse, folks in prayer, beams of light, tangled girders, yellow ribbons, and the aforementioned Bush and his aforementioned idiot bullhorn. Yes, it makes us gag, but these people can't be reasoned with in the heat of the moment. By the time of a week's passing, though, they've sobered up a little, and, I would hope, they're subconsciously (at least) thinking over the folly of the observance. Bush with a bullhorn ... That evokes something other than complete revulsion?

This is going to start small, OK? You and me and a few other right-thinking Americans. I purposely keep my blog small and insignificant for occasions like this. To address huge mental issues, widespread societal insanity. That way there's no gigantic reaction against common sense. Our better angels can appear and bring hearts and minds back to sanity slowly, untwisting our little panties as we go, which is always how it is in the best therapy.

So my counsel to you is to share this occasion with a few trusted friends, those most open to reason and intelligence. In their strength, and in our strength together, perhaps over years, we will help America find her guts again and methodically untwist her knotted panties. The only people who seriously counsel licking old wounds are themselves feeble-minded, or, more nefarious, profiteering bastards.

We have better reasons than they for not caring about 9/11, so we'll have a generally healthier outlook in life. Join me today, on 9/18, the day we proclaim, "Our little panties have been twisted in knots far too long! We're through! We simply don't care about 9/11!"

My Mom's Been Dead One Year

Well, friends, it's been a weird time of reflection for me -- the honest to God truth -- now that my mom has been passed on for one whole year. I bet I thought of it and reflected on it more than for any other person in my whole life that's died. And now that I'm getting old myself -- 61 -- virtually every one of my loved ones, with a few exceptions, from that generation is gone.

There's something about a mother dying, I've found, that makes a hole that's just brutal. I always pictured it as being bad, of course, but nothing like the complete dead end void that exists in reality. My imagination didn't come near to it. It feels like a strange total silence out there, no door, no window, no nothing.

I never really saw her that much, truthfully, just a few times a year, since we didn't live extremely close to each other. But I heard from her numerous times a year. And online.

Anyway, the anniversary came, and I remembered it. About the time at night, a little earlier since it's past my bedtime, I looked at a few pictures of her and lingered on them, then went to bed thinking pretty much of what I'm jotting down here.

But it's not all that terribly sad -- let's say it isn't for a minute. Because my mom was quite the humorous person. We laughed and joked around a lot. I remember that about us being together more than anything else. I remember the only time I saw my mom ever finger anyone. That's a great memory I cherish. My dad was in the hospital, dying. One of the nurses did something, snotted off to mom, or something, and as the nurse left the room my mom fingered her. We both cracked up laughing. I was semi-shocked, but glad to see it. I thought of that on the anniversary of her death, my dear mom fingering the nurse.

Mom was also extravagant. She did everything in a big way. One of the last times I saw her before she died she was in a total manic state, thanks to meds. She seemed well. This was the last "good day" I ever saw her, since I was just there for the day. She had wild plans -- and had met with the artist -- to put a $10,000-$12,000 statue and bench on her grave site. We were going over the information, she was digging into it like a person possessed, and she was going to swing it. When everything went to pot right after that, it was all forgotten. But those moments were actually her, the way she dreamt and got things done all her life.

I guess I'm not going to put too many actual memories here. I have to save things for next year.

PHOTO: Mom died of cancer, as seen in the blood cell photo. The picture is from the movie, "Night of the Blood Beast," a Roger Corman production from the '50s. I don't know that she ever saw that movie, and I don't know that she didn't. But if she did see it, I can hardly believe she ever expected this frame to be used in a blog post about her own passing. :)

Memorial Day -- Death's Day to Shine

Happy Memorial Day! I always think about that "happy" and whether it's appropriate, but I've heard it enough, it must be right.

I'm not doing much for Memorial Day, as usual. They fought and died for my right to sit on my lazy buttootie, so I'll honor that. No trips to the cemetery -- I hate crowds. I'll miss the parade -- looks cloudy, hate to get wet. I'd put the flag out, if I had one. I'm just in a terrible way.

The parade, you've seen one truck of waving vets, you've seen 'em all.* Although it is quite cool how they have the trucks festooned with little flags. I can just see the folks doing that, taking hours sticking those flags on. I honestly can't remember how they even do it, tell the truth. Surely there aren't little flag holders everywhere on an Army truck. What would that be, some kind of retrofitting? Or are we spending so much extra time and money in military procurements to make sure our trucks have 800 flag holders?

That'd be worth looking into. That might be why a lot of guys died. They're trying to scurry off a truck that's been hit and they're caught on a flag holder. So many of them, it's like a mine field. Like all that barbed wire they had in World War I, between our trenches and theirs.

World War I. This is a big year for World War I, because it's been 100 years since it started. I was talking to a guy the other day, a geezer, really, except I've known him since high school. He reportedly spends a lot of time and money on war literature and other mementos. Civil War through whatever; probably has an empty room ready for the next war.

In our discussion, I quickly blew through my limited knowledge of the First World War. Which consists of everything I know of Eddie Rickenbacher, since I've been reading his book for the past six months and I'm still not done. It's interesting in places, a total boring bastard in others. I felt gratified that my old friend agreed with me on the WW I flying aces, that they wasted a huge amount of time after a hit, driving around the countryside looking for witnesses to sign for them, to vouch that it was indeed their hit. Isn't that dumb? Do you suppose every infantry man jumped out of the trenches and ran ahead to get verification that he shot a guy? Anyway, it was my theory -- and this guy, a self-taught expert agreed -- that it was only the novelty of an air corps in those early days that prompted such a stupid idea.

Grandpa was in WW I. I don't know what he did exactly. He never said a word about it. Don't remember him being in any parades. Exercising his right, too, I guess. I honestly don't remember him even going to many parades, for anything. Just sitting around the house here, going out on the half acre, moving the outhouse every couple years, and hunting and fishing. My uncles were all military guys, like in the heat of WW II, the three boys this side of the family. The other side of the family, I had a couple uncles in Vietnam.

Funny thing about that. You know how the government's always screwing the veterans in one way or another? One of my uncles who was in Vietnam, after the war, died, not war-related. Somehow the government didn't get his headstone right. They always put which war you were in, and they put "WORLD WAR II," which meant he would've been around 5 or 6 when he enlisted. They must have a big assembly line of headstones and a guy daydreaming and forgetting to change the matrix.

The way it worked out, my mom went through all the bureaucratic gyrations you have to go through, and for the length of time it takes the government to solve anything, including a relatively easy problem like this. It may or may not have involved a contact with a senator or congressman. In the end, though -- she would've made a great bull rider -- she stuck with it and they got the correct "VIETNAM" tombstone to her.

What happened to the old one? There was someone in the cemetery without a tombstone. So she took it to a stone-etcher, someone who does that for tombstones, and had a different one etched on the back, then flipped it over. So out there somewhere in "The Silent Centuries" cemetery  .... Someday, when archaeologists are excavating it, they'll go, "What the hell happened here? This tombstone has a flip side!

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*My true feelings on a truckload of 90-year-old vets, is I'd love to hug and lip-kiss them and rub their head and celebrate them without end. But you can't do that. They'd look at you like a madman, which you'd be. Inside they'd be thinking, "I'm the same guy now as I was when I was 40 or 50, an average guy on the street -- or maybe even your mean boss -- and you didn't want to razz me. Why razz with me now that I'm old? You're looking down on me! You're demeaning my humanity, manhood, and sacrifice?" Which wouldn't be true, but you can't disagree with one of these beautiful old goats.

Your Website After Death

If you have a website or blog, maybe you wonder, like I do, what will happen to it after your death.

I'd like to think that somehow, some way, everything would be nicely preserved for thousands of years. But that's not likely without real dedication on someone's part. How often just within the last 15 years, since the internet really got jumping, have sites come and gone, like Geocities? They give you a month to download your crap, then that's it. After that, you're out of luck.

Imagine your heirs. They think everything's going smoothly with the website they're trying to preserve, two or three years pass, they go back to check it, and Google has some new standard that you have to log-in before a certain date or it'll be gone. They just did that with "legacy blogs," blogs that hadn't been updated for a couple years.

So the idea of your website outliving you by very many years, while it's a great idea, is maybe unrealistic. It's certainly fraught with peril. On the other hand, they say that anything you say on the internet is imperishable, although that might be more true for embarrassing things rather than what you want everyone to remember. Like if you're a teacher and you've molested your entire class, no one's going to forget that. But if you're just an average guy like me, who's never molested anyone and isn't likely to, we have to fend for ourselves. The penalty for being good!

But let's think about that a bit more. Let's say you are a real cretin, like the teacher in the example, and you have a website. (And this goes for mass murderers, or a crazed killer like the guy who tried to kill the congresswoman, or even someone who bullies someone on Facebook into suicide.) As soon as their crime becomes known and they're infamous, you can set your watch by it, whatever they've posted on the internet will be gone within five minutes. Maybe it's because of the overload on the server, or because no one wants to be associated with them -- whatever, it's gone! Of course their incredible failure at life will always be known, just not the other...

And that's what it is for all these deranged people, they're an incredible failure at life. There's different ways at looking at life, existence, and what it is we are here to accomplish, if anything. More or less, I think we're here simply to reproduce, like every other species. Although we've tamed nature to a certain extent and don't need to reproduce like wild animals. But socially we have a purpose, and that's to get along as best we can, be a decent citizen, and someday pass on. People will say, "He lived a good life." But if you're deranged, or do something psychotic, like killing a bunch of people, we say, "What a failure at life! His one chance at life and he blew it!"

But they ought to leave their websites up. The publicity is going to die down. The rest of us then can preserve our own websites and blogs, and if we ever need to be reminded, we can go visit those folks' and tell ourselves, "I may not be much. But at least I'm not that asshole."