After a week with temperatures in the mid eighties, somebody flipped a switch Friday afternoon and suddenly fall is here. It was a somewhat muggy 70 degrees or so as I waited for the bus at 7:00 Friday morning, and by the time I sat waiting for the bus to take me home at four o’clock, it was a rather chilly and damp 61. Between the relative cold and it being Friday, the bus, of course, was about 25 minutes late. Plus I (as usual) attracted the attention of one of the local street people, who decided to hang out at the picnic table with me. Which is fine, of course (theses are my peeps, after all), but he had a rather disconcerting tic that was kind of distracting. Plus he was shading my view of the bus arrivals.

Normally Friday and the weekend would give me something to look forward to, but as I’m once again on the wagon (no beer in over two weeks – not that I’m counting), basically my life is empty. It’s kind of like my best friend died or something. Where once I could look forward to hanging out with my good buddy Beer, sharing a laugh or two after work, now I got nothing. So I basically just go to bed as soon as possible (which is easier now that it gets dark so early). Since I get up before 4:00 these days, I guess that’s just as well.

On a side note – and I guess this is a rhetorical question, but… – does anybody really a give a shit whether Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are getting a divorce? I wish they’d spend this much energy on climate change or cops shooting black people. Those insipid celebrity “entertainment” programs are advertising that they’ll be telling us how the pair spent their “first weekend since the split was announced,” and another promises to tell us who the famous couple are “turning to” in their time of need. Oh for chrissakes.

So now the weekend’s over, and tonight’s the big night. The “Super Bowl” of debates, as one moron just referred to it on the news. Clinton fans think that Hillary will “mop the floor” with Donald, but I think that’s pretty naive. I mean, no matter how well you (or I) feel about Hillary’s performance or how obviously clear it is that she’s way more qualified and intelligent than Herr Drumpg id, the expectations for Trump are so low that all he needs to do to “win” is not fling is feces at the audience (otherwise, it’s a draw). He’ll make shit up (which may or may not get corrected during the post-game show, after everybody turns off their teevees) while looking “presidential,” and the “liberal” media will spin every Clinton misstep as criminal offense while the right wing nut jobs will call for her execution.

I don’t care how prepared and in command of the facts Hillary is, she can’t win. It’s the equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight. Or maybe bringing a brain to a food fight.

Needless to say, I have no intention of watching the festivities. For one thing, it doesn’t start until 9:00 and even with beer I’d barely make it long enough to see the start of it – no way I’d be around at 10:30 when it ends.

And, sadly, we say so long to Arnold Palmer. My dad was a golf fan (and therefore so am I) and if you were his age, then you were an Arnie Palmer fan. I was a Jack Nicklaus fan, but my dad wasn’t too crazy about Nicklaus at first, because he came out and started beating Arnie. I don’t really follow golf anymore (and I don’t think I’ve even played since my dad died), mostly because where once there was Palmer, Nicklaus, Watson, Player, Trevino, Rodríguez, and Elder, now there’s…. I don’t really know. Tiger seems to be washed up. I guess I should like that Rory guy since he’s Irish – but he’s from the North, so, he’s not one of the “good ones.”

I guess that’s just part of getting old. I don’t care for the new golfers, the new music, football aint what it used to be, and if those damn kids don’t get off my lawn I’m calling the cops!

But first I better get ready to catch the bus and start another mind-numbing week of work.

And so I’ve come to the end of my second week of life on public transportation. Other than not really wanting to wait around for the bus at the end of the day (not that I have a terribly long wait – but it unfortunately precluded the notion of skipping out early yesterday), it hasn’t been too bad. Thursday night was the worst so far. An elderly woman (my age) got run over by a pickup truck and the cops had a bunch of streets closed off, so traffic was terrible and I was almost an hour late getting home (as for the woman, she’s in stable but critical condition in the hospital, so I won’t complain about my slight inconvenience). They also have some streets closed for the Irish Festival (which I would’ve gone over to if I didn’t think walking around would get my feet fired up – I’m feeling a flare-up coming on, so I’m just gonna keep them on ice all weekend and hope they don’t get severely crippling, because that would really suck). Walking around with ice packs strapped to my feet makes me feel a bit like John Turturro in “The Night Of” – which I highly recommend if you haven’t seen it.

I also got lucky on Thursday because we had a brief but powerful monsoon-type storm blow through during the afternoon that caused some flooding. Fortunately it came and went by the time I had to walk to the bus stop, because the crappy little travel umbrella I keep in my backpack wouldn’t have done me much good.

I’d be happy about the weekend getting here if I didn’t have doctor’s appointment next week. Two of them, actually. On Monday I have to go in for blood work, and then it’s my six-month followup on Friday (I really need to see about getting them to do that on the same day, and then they can follow up with a phone call if they find I’ve got something life-threatening or something. Taking the bus makes it a pain in the ass to deal with doctor’s appointments). Anyhow, I’m hoping the six month thing isn’t going to be too intrusive. I just need my BP pill prescription re-upped and then I guess she can tell me I need a colonoscopy, which I have so far avoided. Harbor Freight has a Digital Inspection Camera for $80, so maybe I’ll just do it myself. It says it “fits most spark plug holes” so I should be able to shove it up my ass. But the cable doesn’t look long enough for me to look at the screen while I’m doing it. Good thing the wife’s a nurse.

I didn’t watch whatever it was they were calling the “Commander-in-Chief” dog and pony show on NBC the other night. This is mainly because I cannot stand looking at or listening to either Donald Trump or Matt Lauer. And, seriously, I know they’re a little hard up for actual news people at NBC but Matt Lauer was the best they could do? I don’t know about you, but when I think about foreign policy, Matt the Rat Lauer isn’t a name that jumps into my mind. But if you were expecting Lauer to suck, then you weren’t disappointed, apparently.

Or, as NBC Universal CEO Steve Burke put it:

“Matt did a tremendous job – driving one of the most serious discussions to date on these topics. My deepest thanks to everyone who helped pull off this remarkable achievement.”

Ayup.

And now Trump is aghast at the fact that the interview he did for Larry King’s Russia Today propaganda network was shown to actual Russians. Whoda thunk? Good thing Donny takes every opportunity he gets to kiss Vladimir Putin’s ass. Which is a good idea, because being mean to Putie Put (whether you’re a journalist or a political opponent) gets you dead.

It’s no wonder Dandy Don admires him so much (that and he no doubt owes a boatload of money to Putin’s pals in the Russian Mafia).

Oh well, time to get some more ice on my feet.

Happy Labor Day to everybody out there who labors. It’s very kind of those who exploit labor for their own greedy and nefarious purposes to let us have the day off. Unless you work for one of those greedy exploiters who aren’t closed today, in which case it sucks to be you (and I hope you’re at least getting double pay). I know Costco is closed today, and while I haven’t checked, I’m betting Walmart’s open. I mean, hell, they even force their employees to work on Thanksgiving, right? I can’t imagine they’d celebrate “labor” (except to have a sale).

Today is also the final day of the Great NY State Fair. As of yesterday, they had over 999,000 people attend (I was not one of them, though I really would have liked to go see Robert Cray there yesterday), meaning they not only will top the million mark, but are almost assured of record attendance this year (they’re about 12,000 away, and with yet another beautiful day weather-wise, dollar admission, and dollar rides, that shouldn’t be a problem).

Yes, this is what passes for news around here.

Even though we have more hot weather coming up this week, this pretty much means that summer is over. It’s getting dark mighty early now (I hate the thought of going back to “Standard” time), and the election is a mere 64 days away (seems like it’s been going on forever). If you believe the polls, the race is tightening up now. Whether that’s wishful thinking on the part of a media that’s desperate to sell advertising, I don’t know. But I can’t say it surprises me. As utterly absurd as the thought of President Trump is (to me, anyway – is there something appealing about him that I just don’t get?), an awful lot of people seem to despise Hillary Clinton and her husband (who last I saw wasn’t actually running, but, whatever).

Even many of the people who don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to the word “Clinton” seem to have a lack of trust in Hillary. Much of this is of course baseless (Bill and Hillary have had any number of people assassinated, Hillary is so ill she’s basically a dead woman walking, Hillary is mentally unstable, Hillary personally restrained a platoon of marines to prevent them from rescuing the folks at the US Embassy in Libya, Hillary wants to take your fucking guns away…). Some things she kind of brought on herself – the whole e-mail thing comes to mind. I understand her not wanting to give the crazy Clinton haters more shit to use against her, but it just doesn’t look good. And if this was, say, Secretary of State Donald J. Trump, Democrats would be howling about it. You can say that Colin Powell did it too, but he didn’t set up his own server and he didn’t use e-mail to the same extent that Hillary did.

The only personal experience I have with Powell and e-mail come from my time running a website for the families of the Lockerbie bombing. Before the UN announced the deal where Libya would accept responsibility for the bombing and pay off the victims’ families in exchange for lifting UN sanctions, the State Department wanted to issue a statement to the families ahead of time. So I had to sit around at work late one night waiting for an e-mail from Colin Powell. It was taking a long time, because his official e-mail couldn’t connect to the outside world. So he had to e-mail the statement to his aide, who then had to type it back into a different system that he could then send to me. And I guess he was a slow typist, ‘cuz it took forever.

It always comes back to Libya, doesn’t it? My advice – stay the hell away from Libya.

And of course people don’t like Hillary because she comes across as something less than Miss Congeniality and isn’t a good speechifier (whereas Trump comes across as an ignorant fat loudmouth conman), or they don’t like her voice. Hillary admits that she’s no Bill (or Barack). Should this matter? No. I enjoy a good speech as much as the next guy, but I prefer somebody who’s smart and, ideally, not insane (and say what you want about Hillary, I don’t think there’s anybody who wouldn’t say she’s pretty damn smart). But unfortunately, it does matter to at least some extent – gotta have a marketable product. As Jackson Browne said…

They sell us the president the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us everything from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars

I think one reason we got Dubya twice was because Al Gore was “wooden” (and smart – there are a lot of people out there who don’t like smart people. I refer to these people as “dumb”), and watching John Kerry speak was like listening to an Ent. And then there was Mike Dukakis, who basically lost because he looked stupid in a helmet (I thought he looked like Snoopy, personally).

I never could understand why they called Reagan the “Great Communicator.” He wasn’t much of an actor, and he stuttered and stammered and had these pregnant pauses in the middle of his sentences where you thought the sound dropped out for a minute. I guess for some people he came across as a kindly old grandfather type. Not to me. I was kinda concerned about a nuclear war back then, and I didn’t find him the least bit endearing.

But, anyway, back to Hillary. Even though I find the hatred of her to be ridiculous, and even though I, personally, think it’s a no-brainer that she’s at the very least capable of actually being in charge of the government (and am hopeful – though doubtful – that she’ll turn out to be this closet radical socialist the wingnuts make her out to be) without fucking things up, I know a lot of people don’t seem to like her.

And the dangerous thing about Trump is that the longer he hangs out, the more “use” to him people are gonna get. They become numb to his crazy conman bullshit, and the idea of him winning gets less and less outrageous as time goes on. Add to that the media desire to cover the “horse race,” the gullibility of the all the Archie Bunker types out there (to quote the Donald, “I love the poorly educated!”), and the relentlessness of the vast right wing conspiracy, and who knows what may happen in November.

The thought of Trump and Mike Pence (because you know he’ll be doing all the work) appointing Supreme Court justices, representing the US on the world stage, controlling the military, trashing the economy (and screwing me out of my Social Security), and having the nuclear launch codes terrifies me.

But, anyway, have a happy Labor Day. Hopefully there’ll be another one next year.