The Long and Winding Road

Well here it is, 13 December, Friday the 13th, and I'm just about to the end of this mess of a year.  25,000 miles on the box truck I picked up in June, thousands more on the car, and another 1,000+ by air.

It started in April.  I'd been planning on ditching out this year and rejoining Frau in Washington State.  Target date was August since that was the month we'd moved in and that was what had been the "annual date" even though we'd been on a month-to-month for years.  But Landlord Spurge and Property Manager Debby Does Deseret had apparently been plotting, and in April 3D told me I had until the end of June.  So I had to scramble and find places for Boy and Le Crap and then get myself hauled the 1,000 miles to Frau.

And I did it.  Nearly turned myself into a crater, but I did it.  Now I'm sitting in Salt Lake City wrapping up some business, Then I'll run the leg to Washington one more time.  Then I'll settle in for a long, Winter's nap.  And I'll tell this story serially over the next few months.  Buckle up, it's been a bumpy ride.

Back To The Actual Road

Well this has been a year from Hell, a substantial percentage of it spent on the road.  In April I was informed we had to be out of the Cottonwood Heights place by the end of June.  I started arranging moving Boy to the Iowa farm and me to Washington to finally rejoin the wife.  This resulted in seven, cross-country road trips between Utah and Iowa and two between Utah and Washington, with the ultimate monster, Washington to Iowa and back, coming up some time in November.  It's been a real bite in the pills, and I have many tales to tell that I shall spin out in the dark, wet Winter to come.

The Religious-Hate-Ure of the Theocratic Republic of Utardistan Strikes Again

Back in January, the Utah Bar offered an online CLE for that pesky and farcical "professionalism and civility" credit.  Since I didn't have to go anywhere, and since it was free, I signed up.  The program was our glorious governor Spencer Cox (aka Spence Buddy and Dick With Ears) and another governor bemoaning the incivility in current political discourse and solemnly advising us to be nicer.  What it really amounted to was a big promo for the status quo.  "Be nice.  Don't get angry.  Keep things safe and sedate."  That works well enough for those at the top of the hill and they treat each other more or less civilly because they don't want to mess up their cushy sinecures.  How they treat those down the hill though is another matter.  As I've pointed out with law firms, the tower firms treat the rest of us like something they just stepped in, and they do so with impudence because no one will enforce any behavioral rules against them.  That's the way it is across the entire system.  So if you want the people at the top of the hill to stop pissing on you and calling it rain, civility is not going to get you there.  You're going to have kick in some doors and then kick in some heads.  Sorry Friends of Gandhi (FOG, because that's what you're walking around in), but Stokely Carmichael was right: For nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience, and the US and the rest of the crapitalist plutocracies have none.

And this last week Governor DWE demonstrated yet again just how easy it is to control a flock of sheep.   At the request of the Fools on the Hill (which, like the RethugliKKKon Party in this this state, is really just an arm of the LDS Church), he signed into law a ban on all alcohol over 80 proof.  Say goodbye to all whiskey and a lot of other things.  This of course is religious legislation aimed straight at all of us who aren't delightsome.  It's part of Larry H. Christ's Parent's Empowered program, which I got to see up close and personal at its inception as a member of the study group at Dan Jones Research (Which is another arm of LDS fascism.  Dan Jones was at Utah State when I was there, a geography professor whose specialty was finding new and interesting ways to lie with statistics.  It got to be too much even for the goose-steppers running the university, they told him he couldn't do partisan politics on company time, and he left to make a mint ginning up bogus numbers to "support" LDS and RethugliKKKon shit-shoveling.).  It was a deliberate attack on everyone who wasn't ortho-Morm, and this is just an extension.  And they'll get away with it until the Hill-Top Temple is brought low.

 CORRECTION: Finally got my hands on the law, and it's 80%, not 80 proof.  Whiskey is safe.  Governor DWE is still a douche.