He was a baby then. Just before we got him. A couple months old.

He’s been quite the boy for us. Life changing. He’s not a baby anymore. Mysterious, loving, conniving, unpredictable, wise at times, pure cussedness at others, affectionate, mischievous, occasionally morose, stupendously vital, fun, and beautiful, in every way the larger than life lord Sir Walter Scott declared the breed to be.

But still a baby when he wants to be.

Like when he detects the package containing his birthday present.

Have you ever seen such longing?

Happy Birthday, my boy. You can open your present when Mommy gets home.

Yeah. Gorgeous, wasn’t it?

Here. Shame on NBC.

What price for light is worth the light?

When you get to be as old as I am, you are reluctant to give advice. It’s unlikely to be followed and highly likely to be resented. But there are times when you throw caution to the winds. Here’s my half of a three-part dialogue with someone who probably doesn’t need my advice. But my wife thought some of you might like it.

**************

Why do I ride you so hard? So many answers. None you should take personally as a member of your generation. You should take them personally as you.

You’re not mad enough. My rage is volcanic. You don’t want to draw lines between you and liberals/progressives you work with. You, regardless of what you say, think I’m extreme in cutting off relations with such people. They’re only just people like you and me, right? Can’t we all get along? No. They’re sick in the head and the soul. My wife got into a yelling match with me about the Olympic opening ceremonies. I said I didn’t want to watch an apologia for Soviet communism, which I was sure NBC would do in service to Soviet Putin. I went to bed early. She watched. Ultimately I won the argument, because NBC did exactly what I predicted they’d do. The narrator called communism a “pivotal experiment” and Meredith Vieira called the moment when the child on stage let go of the red balloon symbolizing communism a “bittersweet moment.” The media show also featured a giant hammer and sickle. My wife didn’t even see it. And she was a Russian major who knows exactly how murderous they were. The stroking of network news is embedded more deeply in her than her own education.

Why I am absolutely and completely out of my fucking mind crazy mad about what is happening to our country.

She thinks I’m a lunatic until I argue her into the ground. You think I’m a lunatic until I run you to ground.

You have an enormous built-in inertia to keep thinking that what’s imminently fatal is merely a bad trend. Which YOU can fix by being a great teacher.

Bad news for you. When my wife and I argue, for hours, about these issues, she sees my point. She concedes. It’s all dying. There’s no chance your kids can have a normal old fashioned life. They won’t. You’re running a two track version of reality in your head. In one version you can be happily married with excellent and hopeful young children who can go on to have excellent lives of their own. In the other track, the part that’s stuck so inconveniently on me, you know that track one is a sheer fantasy.

We’re at war for the soul of our nation and our children. It’s not an impending war, a possible war, a thing metaphorically akin to war… It is the deepest, darkest, most important honest to God real life fucking WAR, already deeply engaged, ever fought.

You got drafted all those years ago in BalowStar’s back yard. What I ask is ‘asked’ only for the sake of politeness. You have been educated, by me and others, to know where your duty lies.

I’m sorry that this isn’t a literary story. Not about my books and blogs. You wouldn’t want to trade my nighttime dreams for yours. Trust me on that. I keep wanting to go back and do it all over, make myself a conventional success in terms my father would approve. Every night I’m back at Mercersburg or Harvard doing it better. Every morning I wake to the reality. I am an outcast, a failure, a loser.

Except that I am content with the decisions I’ve made. Understand. I have no desires anymore. This from someone who used to have more desires than time to list them — for cars, for women, for admiration, for money and comfort, for followers, for everything a man can dream of. The Buddhists speak of nirvana as the end of fear and the end of desire. I’m very close on the end of desire. Less close on the end of fear. Because I fear that I haven’t done enough to try to save my faith and my civilization.

Do you understand? Why I get up every day and do whatever it takes to write for one more day. Not because I think I’m a savior. But because I haven’t yet done enough.

When you get old, you’ll have the same obsessions. How do I know? Because you’re a version of me, not a copy, not an imitation, but a variation. Only in terms of specific interests and talents. Essentially, you’re a kind of brother. You have dark desires, as all men do, and you think you might transcend them by doing good things. The light you see is in your own mind. Which is not an illusion at all. That’s exactly where the light lies.

Where the light is. That’s the only question of moment. You are supposed to answer that question. Everything we tend to focus on is a distraction from that question. Your children will have to answer that question. It’s a raw, terrifying, impossible question that can only be answered by a lifetime of devoted thought and work. You can’t answer it for them by protecting them, loving them, pushing them, or throwing your body and soul over them. We all come in alone and go out alone. Parents can only provide a few years of rules and fun. Not as important as they think. Until they spin themselves into the denial of obsession.

Where the light is. The direction you have to keep moving toward. Despite the distractions. Life is not a journey. It’s a catastrophe. Fear, defeat, hurt, general awfulness, but always the opportunity to think. Also victory, beauty, enlightenment, faith, and peace of mind. Which are their own flavors of catastrophe.

I’ve probably gone deeper into darkness than you. I may have reached higher into victory than you have yet. But they really are two sides of the same demon. Why you should follow your heart, no matter where it leads.

**************

I can tell you stuff about how to live this kind of life. You have to accept that you are different, apart, perhaps from everybody. That’s the hardest thing. Nobody else can ever seem to remember that Track 2 is more real then Track 1. Women especially. Sad, even tragic, but true. They see Track 2 when you explain it, but tomorrow they are at the Hallmark store, buying birthday cards.

So. What do you do? You have to learn how to breathe. There really is something true in the cliched martial arts movies. Watch Man of Tai Chi. More there than the critics see or perhaps want to see. You breathe. You center yourself, meaning you trust your inner sense of knowing, no matter what everyone around you is doing or saying. You love them but at a certain level they are mere noise. It’s your job to be you, more their exemplar than their servant. It can make you seem narcissistic to yourself, but that’s just a collectivist trick. It’s not narcissism to know and believe in yourself. It’s the Leonardo in you. You have every right to make demands on others as long as you are making demands on your self for purposes that have deep meaning to you.

You take the time, every day, to withdraw from all of it. Every last smidgen of the camouflage created by the details of daily life and feel you being you.

If this is not making sense to you, we’ll start over from another tack. If it is making sense to you, tell me and I’ll explain further.

**************

Why surprising coming from me? I lived all my life alone until I married Lady Laird. She just knows. I can remember whole stanzas of poetry I haven’t looked at in years, but not the names of members of her family I’ve seen a dozen times. She laughs and covers for me. She doesn’t think it’s a problem.

And it isn’t. You’re allowed to be ‘out there.’ That’s the enormous gift she has given me that no one else ever did. Why I can tell you, so many years on, that it’s perfectly okay to be strange.

I tried to do what you’ve been trying to do. Keep the people around you happy. You understand them better, you have more skills, more perception, the responsibility must be yours. It isn’t.

Years and years and years into this mess we call life, I have learned that you can’t save anyone who isn’t already working to save himself. It breaks your heart, this lesson, but it’s a necessary one. Most people are headed where they’re headed, and nothing you can do or say will change their course.

Worse, they don’t want your skills and perceptions. They hate them, and in time they will come to hate you, after a long period of simmering resentment.

But this is not the unfairness of life. It’s life sending you an important message. Be a Christian. Forgive. Offer help when you can give it specifically. But don’t get sucked into the dramas of others, including your intimates, if they’re making you think your life is all about them. It isn’t.

Your life is about you. I think I need to repeat that. Your life is about you. If you believe in God, you must also believe that he gave you talents, propensities, and a unique mission. It’s true that for some the mission is service, which is fine and admirable. But it’s also the case that for some the mission is bigger and its achievement more costly.

Those moments when you feel you are here to do something important are absolutely correct, divine in origin. You can feel more confident about this as you realize that the motives are not about power, money, or sex, but rather an intensive need to SHINE. There’s a glow you’re looking for. Can’t put a name on it. People run themselves in circles unto despair trying to put a name on it. Don’t get distracted that way. Your mission is not about changing diapers. If changing diapers elevates your consciousness in some way, fine. But you don’t need to do it again and again and again to take the lesson. What a thousand generations have known as women’s work is (Surprise!) true. Women don’t get tired of doing the same thing again and again and again and again.

Mozart does. Einstein does. Shakespeare does. And so do you. The interior world is so much more important. But you feel guilty about it. Which is a cultural conspiracy against you. Our inclinations toward greatness are weapons used against us. If you honor yourself and the gifts God gave you, you will learn that none of the mundane distractions are a reason not to shine.

All people are not created equal, except under the law. Some really are more equal than others. The ones who are can tell who they are because they have all the same temptations you do. They are more compassionate, more thoughtful, more easily subject to hurt and worry and guilt. They are walking targets for the fears and needs of others. But they are also supposed to learn the difference. Their superior abilities are not intended to be wasted in futile rescue attempts. They’re meant to do what they so obviously always do: isolate and force a focus few are capable of.

Do you find that your inner self can block out everything? When someone asks, Did you hear a single word I said?, you find that you can’t? It probably makes you feel guilty. It shouldn’t. All it means is that you need to get better at covering your uninterest in nonsense.

Almost everything most people spend all their energy on is nonsense. Including the people you love the most. But your job is to see past it all to the Track 2 stuff that is your mission. You don’t look down on the others, you don’t regard yourself as more entitled in any way, but you keep doing what you are here to do, and you don’t let anybody talk you out of it, guilt you out of it, or shame you out of it.

And when it comes to the truly important stuff, you don’t take shit from anybody.

Why there has to be an assassin lying latent in all of us who aspire.

**************

There are times when the only sensible position is to give up and go along. Old as I am, I grapple with that every day. But many of you are younger. If I haven’t given up yet, how can you?

Ridicule, contempt, fear, and institutionalized/legal discrimination. That poor poor woman.

Conservatives are the targets of a new Jim Crow system of deliberate subjugation? Really?

It’s not as far-fetched an hypothesis as it might seem. Consider how obsessed the left is generally with race as the be all and end all of political integrity and moral virtue.

The first response of the progressive establishment to opposition is that it’s white racism, excepting of course those white elites who trace their political awakenings back to the civil rights movement.

Why it’s always racist to criticize policies of the Obama administration. It’s an idee fixe with the left. Also why it’s not surprising that they have adapted their keen sense of the original Jim Crow era into their strategy for eliminating the power of their critics in every domain.

It didn’t escape their attention that in the Deep South, a committed white racist minority managed to render a sometime black majority powerless by a system of interrelated measures which succeeded for a very long time.

As the caption above delineates, the principal means of maintaining power were ridicule, contempt, fear, and institutionalized/legal discrimination.

The one change they had to make was to transform hated political, religious, and lifestyle convictions into the equivalent of Jim Crow stereotypes.

The stone idiot, the unapologetic Christian, and the self-reliant capitalist or gun owner.

But they have been using all measures against all stereotypes, hoping and intending to reduce them to a single category of threat, one which must be suppressed at all costs.

Their offensive has achieved near invulnerability because despite the minority status of hard progressives, they have nevertheless succeeded in capturing the entire educational system from bottom to top, the entire mass media establishment, the federal and many state courts, the entertainment/celebrity culture, and the Democrat Party and most of the Republicans in congress. As a result, we have a whole new set of Jim Crow stereotypes and restraints firmly in place.

Conservatives are not only racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic but also terminally stupid and worth responding to only with name calling and derisive laughter. Why they have to be systematically excluded from the faculties of the nation’s greatest universities even if we pretend to value “diversity” in every other respect. We have ways of recognizing and silencing them (e.g., their books will never be reviewed in The New York Times). Which we can also use to keep them out of elite universities in the first place. See how much damage they can do from North Dakota State Agricultural Seminary and Journalism School. See how cheap their football jerseys look? See how cheap their girlfriends look? Enough said.

Christians are anti-woman, anti-science, and inherently more dangerous than Islamic fanatics who keep trying to kill us without cease. Can you imagine? They actually believe that women should get their abortions in back alleys with coat hangers. Subhuman. They must be confined, out of the public sphere, to the physical boundaries of their churches, because their crazed barbaric superstitions might infect the rational superior ones, and that’s why a crèche scene or a display of the Ten Commandments is something that has to be segregated by force of law. Not to mention their backward, yes, primitive view that marriage is something that exists between a man and a woman. Stomp, stomp, stomp. Get off my sidewalk, bigot.

And then there are the so-called manly ones who think life is all about testosterone, competing, winning, and standing your ground. They all have guns, you know. Even the women they delude with their sexual predations. Obviously no woman can be safe in their company and they shouldn’t be allowed to live just anywhere, at least not without extensive required education about gender issues. No way to tell what will happen if they move in next door or the next dorm. Why the government and the law must intercede and accomplish the equivalent of chemical castration by ensuring that they are so chained by speech codes, regulations, government surveillance, and confiscatory tax policies that they don’t have the opportunity to rebel against The Matriarchy — er body politic some of us still call “liberal democracy.” Which it would be if we could just kill off the archaic imperialist document called the Constitution and replace it with something like the thousand page manifesto of the EEU. All in good time, Crow Comrades.

Well. We can’t outright kill them all. But we can use all the old tricks. Instead of a poll tax, we can make it possible via ACORN and its heirs to let everyone else vote as many times as necessary. We can use the IRS to intimidate any idiots who think about participating in the political process. We can laugh and laugh and laugh at them for not being Harvard graduates. We can use our elite cultural credentials to persuade even professed intellectual conservatives to assault anyone who gets anywhere near the contemptible morons of the Tea Party. We can pass or presidentially declare laws that open the borders to all the refuse of the Third World, so that the less than human ones are made irrelevant forever. We can go after their lame attempts at voicing their concerns in the media by siccing the FCC on them. We can pretend that there is no national crisis that is victimizing the people who do the real work while the parasites are endlessly rewarded for their arrogance, cynicism, and greed.

We can even turn history on its head. Pretend that it was Democrats not Republicans who passed the Civil Rights bill of 1964. Pretend that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was not a racist promoter of eugenics who wanted to use abortion and involuntary sterilization to halt the reproduction of poor blacks. Pretend that the leading exponent of the first burst of progressivism, Woodrow Wilson, was not a racist, anti-Semitic authoritarian who thought he was smart enough to remake the world — and failed unto an early death. (Some commenter at ThinkProgress called this “noblesse oblige.” uh, right.) We can do whatever we want. Our JC is stronger than theirs. Evidently.

Because there’s a decent chance we could get all the way to evil. Separate drinking fountains. Tea Partiers and Christians to the back of the bus. Talk radio hosts jailed or strung up for subversive views. Military veterans sent to, you know, work camps, where the rest of us will be safe from them. Gun owners rounded up and, yes, certainly, shot.

And, maybe, just maybe, we could also shut down the churches and mount a cultural revolution against the way too many scientists who are climate change deniers. And the doctors who decide to retire rather than work for minimum wage under ObamaCare. If minimum wage is good enough for a McDonald’s button pusher, doctors should take the lesson. Or be sentenced to hard labor in the Mississippi delta.

We can characterize all conservative women as imbecilic whores and make all the dirtiest jokes we can think of, because she’s just the sex toy of the conservative plantation owner. We could, with impunity, root for the death of conservatives with cancer or, better yet, celebrate when they die, because one less of them is one more vote for us. Not to mention the fact that we could even crack down on all the conservative (or Republican) Uncle Toms who are the ultimate Quislings of the prize we’ve all been keeping our eyes on. Which is the thing that makes us permanently, transparently, morally superior, especially to the race traitors who reject the settled science of consensus politics.

Republican Michael Steele in progressive blackface. Cool, huh?

About time. Don’t you think?

“Over in the meadow in a nest in the sun
Lived an old mother beaver and her little beaver one
Beave said the mother/ We beave said the one
So they beaved all day by the light of the sun”

When did we become the laughingstock of the world? Was it when we elected a president who thought our bravest heroes were called the ‘Marine Corpse’? Or did it start long before that? Survey says:

When Newsweek set 1,000 Americans the challenge of completing their country’s citizenship test, 29 percent could not name the current vice president (Joe Biden), and almost three quarters could not correctly say why America fought the Cold War.

Six per cent could not remember the date of Independence Day.
A blind telephone survey of over 1,000 Americans, carried out by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum (a museum dedicated to the first amendment), found that more Americans could identify more members of the Simpsons cartoon family than first amendment rights.

Maybe that explains why New Jersey state legislators think they have the power to rename the Sea of Japan.

Did the Garden State legalize recreational pot use and I just missed the story? The initiative was apparently pushed by a “large and politically active Korean-American community.” It seems that they find the name racist, offensive or something of that sort. But it seems to skip over the question of exactly how the New Jersey legislature determined that it had the authority to rename a body of water on the opposite side of the planet. Frankly, I’m not sure they’d have the duly vested power to rename Barnegat Bay. I don’t even know if there’s any sort of recognized process to do this at all, since most of the names of bodies of open salt water have been around since the earliest days of sailing ships.

Or, maybe, they just thought we’d all be too distracted to notice on account of how in love we are with Mylie Cyrus, our new American Sweetheart.

A giant tongue slide, a marijuana leaf leotard and crotch grabbing: Miley Cyrus kicks off her Bangerz tour with VERY raunchy performance

Her tongue has gotten so much press it should have its own PR agent and management team.

And in an overt nod to her infamous tongue wagging antics, Miley Cyrus opened her Bangerz tour by sliding out of a giant replica of her own mouth on a pink slide.

The 21-year-old kicked off the tour in Vancouver, Canada, on Friday by wearing a marijuana leaf leotard whilst performing her now predictable raunchy antics such as crotch grabbing and derrière waggling.

Riding the hood of a car, the Wrecking Ball singer spread eagled her legs as she dropped her microphone over her crotch in a racy dance portion of the show…

But Miley actually has big hopes for her tour, telling MTV last month: ‘I hope people open their minds and they look at my tour as something that I do feel is educational for kids.

‘Because I think a lot of people aren’t exposed to art enough and that’s something that I had to learn about.’

“So they beaved all day in the light of the sun.”

Of course, it’s also possible that the problem of the Tea Party’s racism against women is just getting everybody’s panties in a twist.

“I think they’re racist against blacks, Hispanics… I think they’re racist against women.”

Only, why would we be like that? We’re not stupid or anything. If we were like racist against women, we wouldn’t be able to look up their skirt. Duh. Which we have been for practically forever and are sooooo grateful that it’s so much easier to do now.

“Down in the meadow…” She knew how to sing for children too, not just for slobs.

Hell. I’m thinking even Marilyn knew who the Vice President was. LBJ looked up every skirt he ever saw. But in those days there was something worth looking at. Now where are we? Hell.

Yeah. He ate my money.

I told him we weren’t going to be celebrating him everyday on the Internet anymore. He did the burp that usually means no problem. Then he raided my nightstand and chewed up my bills and loose change. He also set off the alarm button on my wife’s Jeep key. Poor woman had to go out and make sure thieves weren’t stealing her Patriot. (I kid. She diagnosed the problem and solved it with a click without leaving the media room. But it makes a good story.)

I think Raebert was telling me that I can run off to the Garage and start the new site called Media Knackers (look for it), but sighthounds are still a force to be reckoned with, mysterious, wise, and only seemingly stupid. Except when they’re overwhelmingly, obliviously, mind-numbingly idiotic. Though thrifty.

He didn’t eat all or even most of the dollar bill. He stopped short of rendering it invalid as currency. He’s a Scot, after all.

As am I.

I get it. He knows I still have a link-filled post or two in the queue. Why waste it? Scots detest waste. And after what he did with my loose change, I think he’s also making a point about the tip jar I never set up here. Raebert would like a tip, please.

I say don’t give it to him. He’s been a beast lately. Doesn’t deserve it.

And I still can’t find my other sock. He’s almost four, for God’s sake. Isn’t it time he stopped abusing my stuff?

Monumental is one word. Gigantic, glorious, and heroic are three more words. You choose your favorite. Still doesn’t deserve a tip.

The Difficulty of Control.

All in all the Olympics are dull. Snow is falling again. We’ve been snowed in for days. Result? Contrary to her her usual preferences, Mrs. Laird has seen a whole bunch of action movies in just twenty four hours. Hollywood Homicide. The Glimmer Man. Expendables 2. Mullholland Drive. And Man of Tai Chi.

Have to tell you, she enjoyed them all, except for maybe the one I hadn’t seen. Man of Tai Chi. Which I just loved. Critics way too harsh. Never seen a movie with so many hooks into so many other movies. The Chinese Connection. Kung Fu Panda. Kill Bill 2. The Matrix. Bloodsport. The Karate Kid. Kung Fu the TV series. And the proof that Keanu knew what he was doing. In the final confrontation, he’s confronted by the same arm choreography he used in The Matrix and he grunts in self-conscious recognition. It’s a masterful updating of Bruce Lee movies. Not only deft but eerie. The Chinese hero really looks like he could be Keanu’s son, which raises hints even of Taras Bulba.

Best thing. The missus finally gets how good Steven Seagal was before he got fat and scotch-faced. How many husbands can make the same claim about the perspicacity of their wives?

Of course, if you want to understand the uber-reality, you might want to go to Johnny’s Garage, where no one wants to go. Everybody thinks they’ll get killed at JD’s place. A sawbuck to anybody who doesn’t get lost there.

British Imperialism wins again.

Somebody told me recently they don’t take the links at this site. Don’t do that this time. Actually, you shouldn’t ever do that. Links are a huge part of what I’ve always done. I wouldn’t point and say read the whole thing if I didn’t mean it. Part of the reason I’m sitting in a corner in the Pine Barrens. There are no shortcuts in thinking, no easy bottom lines, no chutes and ladders to the obvious right answers. If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand me.

I’m not going to tell you what these links are about. They just are:

Link One.

Link Two.

Where were we? Oh. Something lighter. America’s premier dog show, which concluded last night. I’m sure a lot of you missed it, what with all the excitement about the resuscitation of the Stalinist era in Russia being celebrated by NBC on one-and-a-half or two channels of Comcast’s new show dog news network for the 99 percent, including MSNBC. So I took the liberty of acquiring some erudite quotes about the event, which are always much much better than encountering the event itself. No links, though. Who needs them? The words are all you need if you’ve got your mind right.

“Anybody else catch that dog action in one-percent land last night? Seven dogs competing for Best in Show. Not one whose origins aren’t associated with white, imperialist, racist, homophobic powers. Germany, France, Portugal, Ireland, Wales, and, of course, England. How dead white European male can you get?”

“Where was the dingo? The African Wild Dog? The scarred up Urban Pit Bull? Why do they all have to be so Upper East Side. Speaking for myself, I’m disgusted.”

“I didn’t feel any suspense about the outcome. Five of the seven finalists were brown or mostly so: the bloodhound, corgi, Irish water spaniel, Portuguese Water Dog, and Miniature Pinscher. Then there was the French poodle, obviously gay as can be and an obvious loser in this context. The inevitable winner? The vicious, racist little prick of an English breed that has already won more than any other: the Wire Haired Fox Terrier. Mostly white but always pure killer.”

“Is it just me or is there some kind of horrifying irony about yet another win by a breed whose whole purpose in life was to support the Brits’ mindlessly cruel genocide of foxes? What victim has ever been pursued by more outlandishly overmatched forces? Dozens of uniformed men and women mounted on 1200 pound horses, accompanied by packs of their specially bred dogs, to run to ground one brown colored fugitive? Oh. Now I remember. The pursuit of runaway slaves. And we are still elevating this shameful past and bestowing laurels upon it? When will we come to our senses?”

“Did you see the “champion” standing there in his shrunken but puffed up pomposity? He is carrying the DNA of the criminal imperialist past in his every pore. I shouldn’t say this, I suppose, but I yearned for some PETA activist to run into the arena and put him down on the spot. How surprised and shocked the little bitch would have been. He might have had a last moment of recognition of the foul legacy of his founding. I’m reminded of the old saying, “Every dog has his day.” I haven’t had mine yet, but neither have the foxes. We’re both waiting.”

That’s enough for now. For the sake of the squeamish, I’ve left out all the hundreds of quotes and tweets that used the words f**k, m*****f****r, c**t, a**hole, d*****bag, etc. I’m sure you know how they go. The way the enlightened, tolerant members of our most gifted elites refer to the rest of us mongrel scum.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s an American girl.

Simple. We’ve got the women. They make all the difference. I’m tiresome on the subject. My wife will confirm. I think basketball should be in the Winter Olympics. It’s played in winter after all. Then no one would ever touch us.

Our women play sports like men. It was the women who bailed out the catastrophic failure of the men in the team skate to win us a bronze.

I watched the new slopestyle event. Men did good, but then I watched the women, and I was shocked. My wife will tell you how boring I am on the topic of marginal utility and the fact that men’s 30 percent greater mass and strength translates to an approximate 10 percent differential in results. I was hoping for something like equality in the new women’s ski jumping event. Figured they were less fast on takeoff but slipperiest in the flying part. Wrong. Ten percent differential. Then came the slopestyle. Jesus. The women were just awful, slow, safe, and dare I say it, scared.

Then came Jamie Anderson. She looked, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, exactly like a guy. She was there to win, to push the envelope, to exhaust every metaphor of striving, courage, and skill. Wow.

We have a women’s hockey team too. The Canadians are supposed to be brawlers. Are the Americans afraid? No. An American hockey veteran said, if I may paraphrase, we can play that way too if we have to. Which I don’t doubt. I watched the Europeans. Their best players are their goalies, bravely reacting to offensive blitzkriegs. Women are everywhere brave and resolute in defense. But when it comes to offense, it’s the American women I’ll bet on every time.

Even in the luge and bobsled. And everything else they put their mind to. The Europeans talk a good game about female emancipation. Leave it to the Americans to do it for real.

Why I watch the women’s events. Honestly, as a general rule, they’re tougher than the guys.

P.S. For a brief view of RL watching the Olympics, you can go here.

Raebert’s tired of being exploited by the 1 percent. Not that he knows what a percent is. He’s just a registered voter. Thanks to ACORN.

Tim aside, if I’m going to be talking to myself, I’ll do it where I’m most comfortable. In the garage. Tim will catch up.

Johnny’s Last Chance Garage is actually a much older website than this one. It suits me. Hardly anyone will find it. I won’t have to try to be entertaining. There won’t be much need for links. I can just be me, and I can conclude my diary of the death of America in an appropriate setting.

It’s not a real place, I suppose. But as real as anyplace you live. It exists in my head, a weird cross between this…

And this…

You know. Idealized but dilapidated. Stuck in the country. Not the nation. The country. Where I belong. There’s really no saving us now. Only the guys who sit on the porch and watch the passing parade can see it. Everyone else is still caught up in the deadlines and ultimatums of daily existence. Not their fault. But I have come to realize that my priorities are not theirs. I keep looking all the way down the empty road. They’re racing to the next stoplight. I’ve said what I have to say TO everybody, probably too many times. Now, because I have to write or stop breathing, I’ll be writing to myself, from the vantage point of the porch as the cars go whizzing by. If they want a fill-up or a Coke, they can stop. What we old fashioned types call, uh, what’s the word?

With a faint but friendly smile.

Otherwise they can keep whizzing by.

I’ll still be here for a while. But the site has served its purpose. It’s a warehouse for writings people will discover many years from now, when they’re raking through the wreckage looking for clues about what went wrong, wondering why and how everything suddenly blew up while they were just going about their business. We don’t care much about the Olympics at the garage, so if anything occurs to me over the next couple of weeks about the world’s biggest cosmetic commercial, I’ll put it here.

Otherwise, mosey on over to the garage, pull up an uncomfortable chair and have a beer or a soda. Smoking is allowed, just not when a car is being gassed up. The only rule that’s really needed in the country.