Make Slogans Great and Stronger Together Again

Used with permission of the artist, Rod Gillies
https://www.flickr.com/photos/24681250@N07/30756737366

Taking a break from the Four Needs for a brief acknowledgment of the imminent Black Tuesday, a date which will live in infamy.  The day we decide if we want to be ruled by a ruthless sociopath or a megalomaniacal one.  If we want the devil we know or the one hiding behind the door on the right.  But this is not a negative post.  i'm not bashing anyone more than they bash themselves.  That would be whipping an octopus which is busily flogging itself with all eight limbs.  It just wouldn't notice.

What i would like to talk about are slogans.

Mr. Trump says he would like to Make America Great Again.  i am all for that.  i would like America to be what it was when i last thought it was great.  When i was taught civics by idealists from the forties, fifties and sixties who came from both the left and the right and still shared the same ideals.  The same belief that we could do anything as a country.  That despite our foibles and faults and faux pas we were still the greatest country on earth.  When i played with white and black and filipino and vietnamese and hispanic kids and never thought a bit about what made us different.  Before i new the N word.  Heck, i may not have even known the F word.  Because those words weren't allowed on tv.  Back when stores were closed on Sundays and holidays.  Back when i thought everyone went to church except that one or two neighbor of mine who still fought and put out a fire in our house one Sunday before we got home from church.  Back before i knew the word "corporate" as a slur.  When i thought my money was safer in a bank.  i would love for America to be all the things i thought it was when i was young and naive.  What it was before i new what naive meant.  When i believed leaders when they spoke.  When i teared up for patriotic speeches.  When i wanted to stand at attention when i saw a marine walk by.  When i believed in just wars and liberations and the defeat of actual tyrannies by citizen soldiers.  When i thought America would never ever but never flirt with electing a tyrant ourselves.

Mrs. Clinton says we are Stronger Together.  And i completely agree.  Which is why as the most despicably divisive candidate to ever be put up against the most dispicably mad one we've ever had, if she actually believed what she says, she would step aside and let someone run who could actually have a prayer of uniting this country.

Mr. Johnson, i'm sorry, sir, i have no idea what your slogan is, which is really all i need to know about you and your chances.

So if i may, i'd like to propose a new slogan:
God save America.

Vocational hazard

"What do you think about vocation, Seamus?"
"Ah do-on't."
"You don't wonder what your true calling is?"
"Ah'm doin' it."
"You were called to clean septic tanks?"
"Look," he poked the rancid air between his finger and my chest, "'Callin'' is what you lazy, starry-eyed dreamers want to do instead o' work.  Ye make up words like, 'vocation' to legitimize it."
"You can't poss--"
"Fook ye, get a job."
"A vocation is a job, it.."
"Not if no one pays you for it, it ain't."
"Dude, sometimes you have to strive for something, like olympic athletes or artists or.."
"Oy aye, and everyone loves those wankers, 'cept for the one payin' their room n' board!"
"Didn't you dream about being something when you were a kid?"
"Oh aye."
"What?"
"Ah dreamt a cleaning shite holes.  And here ah am!"
"You're a miserable bastard, Seamus."
"Vocational hazard, mate."

Remember to use your indoor voice.

i have screamed at the sky. i have read Ecclesiastes and said, "yep, that's truth." Meaningless, life is meaningless, all chasing after the wind. i have lived almost forty years now and found nothing worth the effort it took to get here. No reward in this life worth the ride. i watch the trail of ants coming out of the walls of the house i built and across the counter of the shiny new kitchen and i see a world that is infested with entropy, decay, filth and i hear the laughing of an evil spirit mocking my attempts to recreate a private Eden. There is no rest or refuge on the earth. i have spent four hours working on a drawing for the Rabbitrails only to have someone tell me it isn't work and not so much as imply that it is a waste of time as make it a declaration of fact. And so i get lost in these dark places where i can't see what the point and movement of history is for. You're born, work at something someone else want's you to do for forty-to sixty years and then if you're lucky, you retire before your back, knees and/or health gives out and you putter around your yard looking for shrews but what you're really doing is hiding from one. This is life in America. Finally having your first child and buying your first house in your mid-thirties and then finding out you have cancer. It's watching your children make the same mistakes you did. Watching your parents walk away from each other and you. It's realizing that optimism is a belief that can only be held by the psychotically insane or the so-far astoundingly lucky. It's never being good enough, smart enough, wealthy or healthy enough. It's working your whole life and having the river or the ocean or a fire or a mean neighbor or a total, mind raping, freak accident take it all away in seconds. There are no guarantees. None. Yes, i have screamed at the sky. Why? What's it all for?

"If you don't love your story then you don't love the author of your story." That was a quote by Dan Allender that i heard one morning on a podcast that i was listening too in my search for the answers to those questions. i dunno if you've screamed at the sky but i can assure you that it rarely gives immediate, discernible answers. And from what i've read, you don't actually want it to. So i went looking the only place available to a guy like me: i Tunes.

Well, sort of. Lemme explain. What i went to was the Word of God. But as the Ethiopian eunuch told Phil, "how can i understand this unless someone explains it to me?" See, wanna guy to be humble enough to ask for directions? Geld him. i don't want anyone to eunuchize me so i try to be humble now. So, taking his example, i also go looking for learned folk who have not only read it but spent considerable time praying and studying it and arguing over what it all means with other folk who've spent considerable time praying and studying it. And then got recorded telling others what they've learned or think they've learned. Some of those recordings are on iTunes. One of these guys is Dan Allender and he's worth a listen or two. For the very reason that he drops bricks like "If you don't love your story then you don't love the author of your story," on you when your spackling a ceiling with your headphones on.

i tell you right now, i had to stop. Spackle knife in hand and ask God to forgive me for hating Him for much of my life. All those curses i had been launching at the air around me, they didn't hit the guy responsible for my curse, the guy laughing at me as i cursed my maker, my author, the lover of my soul. They hit the guy holding my ungrateful fist through it all. Trying to explain it to me. Trying to show me the answers to Why and What for?

i still don't know why or what for? i still ask. But i try to remember that i'm asking the guy in the chair next to me who went to the cross for me and while hanging there asked the sky, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" He died for my stupidity, rose and is sitting in heaven somewhere above the sky, i figure that gives him some interesting and worthwhile perspectives on it all.