WOODEN SHOES

 Lately I have travelled a good bit in my state. I've seen things.

I've seen cities that were not blessed by the vagaries of history drowning in despair. I've seen blessed cities drowning in traffic congestion and their own refuse.

I've seen individuals suffering from debilitating illnesses abandoned by an uncaring government.

I've seen sign of an impending drought of maybe biblical proportions descending into some of the richest farmland on earth. I've seen interstate highways that will become parking lots in five years.

As water may become our most precious commodity within a few years, we are allocating it to large data centers, not to humans.

At our state level, the top priorities are the construction of a monstrous prison to house who knows whom yet and the destruction of the public school system.

At our national level, the top priority is world domination through military invasion. Yes, it has been tried before.

My ancestors had a saying: "Wooden shoes to wooden shoes in three generations."

Over my lifetime, the generations since the promise of post-WWII America have marched by like gray horses moving into a morning midst. It is becoming increasingly painful to watch.

The Past as Baseball

I must confess an affection for college students, not the kind that just want to get “credentialed,” for a high-paying job, but the sincere ones who want to learn. So, I felt remorse Sunday when I talked to a group from Missouri State University. We met in Mountain View, Arkansas, a nice community in a beautiful and historic part of our state. I was to talk to them about planning for rural communities. Their eyes were bright and their minds were eager. I had some hardball facts ready to hurl.

As I say, I felt remorse. It involved at least two aspects. On first base there stands the truth that my generation isn’t handing them a very good place to enter as working adults. We have started the planet to frying and I’m not sure we would have time to stop it even should we want to. Maybe, you will say, the mindset that allows this started way before my time. That’s probably true, but no excuse. We had the time and brains to go about things differently but chose not to.

On second base stands the fact that those young folks will have to survive the after effects of the worst presidential administration in the history of our country. I can only wish them luck.

It’s certainly no excuse, but my generation had a few bumps in our nine innings. The so-called “Greatest Generation,” having lived through the Great Depression and World War Two, were benignly determined that we would have it better. Accordingly they ,spoiled us unmercifully. At least I thought so until a person of impeccable veracity related seeing a family dining in public recently and watching a father spoon feed a six-year-old son who wouldn’t remove his hands or eyes from his cell phone.

“Well then there now,” as Jett Rink said to Leslie Benedict in the 1956 film epic Giant. I guess that would translate roughly to, "it is what it is." As I say, we had a few spitballs thrown our way. First in the lineup, at least for males, was The Draft. Oooh boy.

We complied with it, most of us anyway. Even when they ordered some of us to sacrifice so other runners would advance, we complied, picked up our gear, and headed for the dugout. At least we headed for southeast Asia.

It may have been an illegal war, probably was, from all accounts. It was surely a bad call from whomever was umpiring the game. We went anyway. We may have thought the Constitution of the United States treated us shabbily, but we never thought it a phony document, only one that could be used by phony people. So, into the “valley of the shadow of death” we went. Most came home. Some didn’t. Some never were the same after they got back. Now they tell the ones who are still around that there is another monster associated with the color orange that may be waiting around the next corner.

No matter. We were called. We went. We served. Each suffered in his or her own way. It didn’t matter. At this age, some of us are even proud we served.

The hard part is that our country has never forgiven us for it.

The other hard part was that when we got home there was a man standing on third base, having been born there and now ready to score for the big win.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Donald Trump and I’ve just hit the biggest and best triple that’s ever been hit in the history of baseball.”

Well then there now. I didn’t tell the students Sunday about that. I just told them that, as far as planning for rural towns was concerned, there wasn’t any. I didn’t tell them that nobody cared. I figured that they had enough things to worry about.

Not much to plan for in the rural South

Bad Days and Margaritas

Some days you’d just as soon forget. Yesterday was one. Oh, I can’t say that. Any day that ends with you still standing and on the right side of the grass isn’t bad.

It’s just that yesterday wasn’t all that good.  It was the Donald Trump of bad days.

Here’s what happened.

It started the night before. We went to bed as usual, thinking “grand thoughts of the morrow.” Just before I dove off into dreamland, I heard thunder but didn’t think much about it. I was off on a trip with some high school buddies headed to Chicago to join the Mafia. Somewhere along the line, we picked up Ursula Andress and Bo Derek. That’s all I remember. Just as Bo took my hand and Boléro began to play, my roommate, best friend, and guardian of morals stirred and woke me up.

It was pitch black. No electricity. How can you make out with Bo Derek in total darkness?

I didn’t think much about it at the time. We were staying at our house in Lonoke, AR and the electricity goes off from time to time because of all the beautiful old oak trees the town is known for. No problem. I would awake and all would be well. I’m optimistic that way, or I used to be.

Anyway, my aged bones were complaining so I went to the den and switched to a recliner. All went well until the sun came up and the light awakened me while I was still calling for Bo to come back. Odd … the electricity didn’t usually stay off that long. I went back to sleep.

 

Photo courtesy
Brenda von Tungeln

An hour or so later, I gave up on Bo, and thought maybe I should take a look at things. I went to the front porch and looked. Oh my goodness. A huge oak lay against the house across the street. The owners have been working on it for nearly two years. Now a tree had crashed into it and one limb had pierced the roof.

I went outside in my pajamas. Across the intersection diagonally, a massive oak lay across the wing of a house.

Across the side street from us, a tree lay against the power line. There was nothing against ours, just some small limbs in the yard. Thought I’d best awaken El Jefa. I went in and spoke gently, “Our house is fine, but I think there has been a big storm.”

And so it began. While talking to some of the neighbors, I found that the storm had covered a large area, including around our farm. We rushed there. All was well, just a couple of limbs across the county road. My traveling companion moved them.

Then I learned it had hit Little Rock and surrounding cities. My cell phone contained a gentle inquiry from my magazine editor concerning an overdue deadline. It was finished, but I needed internet service. So off to LR we went. Things were calm at the condo. They had gotten the electricity on about 2:00 a.m. with some water damage on the first and second floors. The router was working so I sent the work in.

By this time, we needed a break. Luckily, we knew this Mexican restaurant where they serve frozen margaritas. Just the thing to help one calm down after a storm.

While we were there, the security system let us know that the electricity was back on the Lonoke house. So we rushed back there. All was well, so be early afternoon we finally made it back to the farm to do a little work.

Farewell June 20^th. I’m gonna “Scarlett O’hara” you. Today is ... guess what?

Living With Lies

At my age, re-calibration of the brain requires effort. Take the weather for example. I recall the days when my late father-in-law was farming in the Arkansas Delta. When the crops lay parched and withering in the summer heat, a “weather-man” might predict an 80 percent chance of rain for the area next day.

Yay.

What it would mean, though, was there was an infinitesimal chance that a late afternoon shower might bring a fine mist over an adjoining farm, not enough to settle the dust by any stretch of the imagination, just a thin, teasing, cruel cloud that knew exactly where property lines lay.

Farmers like him learned to live with it.

Fast forward. The abuse of our planet by us homo sapiens changed things. We might call what we experience now the monsoons except for one thing, and I speak from experience. Monsoons end. They may seem to last forever, but they ultimately end. Our climate-induced "rainsoons" don’t end, though

No, what we are experiencing now requires recalibration. Now when the “weather-person” says there is a slight chance of “showers” producing less than and inch of rain, prepare for five to seven inches. Farmers lean on their tractors staring at the lake that used to be their best bean field wondering what the next "shower" will bring.

Do the weather-people lie with evil intent? Probably not. I think that prevarication has just become so popular among some politicians that a segment of the population takes it as the normal.

This doesn’t bode well if you ask me. It has all the earmarks of a national emergency.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Six (Cont._3)

At work, the projects were progressing. We might make the April deadline after all. The rancor had subsided, replaced by a raw sense of purpose.

They had quit making sly little comments about my being a 26-year-old bachelor. I think they had decided that I really might be gay. I let them harbor whatever thoughts they chose. It didn’t matter to me. Well … being the “devil may care” charming joker that I am, I may have affected some occasional mannerisms to torment them and, more likely, to throw them off. It kept them from trying to line me up with their 400-pound cousins.

I know. I’ll pay for things like that if there really is ever a judgement day. In the meantime, I held on to my standards. I would wait for a woman who had secrets, knew how to use them, and knew how to keep them. What else could you want in a soulmate?

But, back to my fledgling career as an urban planner. They proceeded with plans to tear up Capitol Avenue, just below our office window, and make it into an ersatz replica of a modern mall. Since they had not asked my opinion, I decided to let them proceed with the insanity.

At home evenings, I had found my old copy of Design With Nature, by the immortal Ian McHarg. Today, they often refer to him as the “father of GIS.” His approach, the use of polygon overlays, forms the basis of many complex analyses and reports performed with Geographic Information Systems. His use of those overlays to solve urban design challenges formed the basis for many modern approaches to planning.

I had actually seen the man speak at Fayetteville. His strong Scottish brogue and highly elevated thoughts created a tough cognitive shield, but a little of his wisdom had sneaked its way into my psyche. Now I wish that it had for others as well. I seem to recall that he used the term "low-grade urban smear," once to describe our settlement patterns.

At the time of which I write, he was a voice in the wilderness and he once got me into a lot of trouble with a man named Paul Greenberg. I will dutifully relate the experience further down the line. I noticed back then that his writings bore no resemblance to the things my bosses had given me to read. It was a matter of controlling and conquering our natural environment, or designing human habitation in harmony with nature as a co-equal but governing partner.

You guessed it. The other side won and our planet may burn itself to a crisp as a result.

Allow me a short break. How did I go from women to urban planning to direful warning of the coming apocalypse? Oh, it may be that the wisdom of women, a turn to the sequential thinking of planning our environment, and the electing of better leaders may be our only hope as a species. Don’t hold your breath, though.

As I was contemplating these things, a short and spritely woman with one of those highly educated minds was sashaying her way through the final days of her college experience. No doubt she would have taken one look at me and said, “Who the hell are you?”

Maybe I would grow on the job and make myself more worthy. After all, I had my Gibson guitar and my copies of Design With Nature, The Wasteland, and The Golden Bough. With those in hand, Isaac Hayes on the phonograph, and a bottle of sweet white wine nearby, I could get better.

I would get better. I was determined. As great person once said, “The height of our life’s mountain is based on the solidness of a foundation formed by bitterly learned lessons and bravely fought struggles.”

On no, that wasn’t from a great person. Not at all. I said that.

Ian said that. A little harsh? Read the headlines.

Morning Thoughts: February 25, 2018

It’s always something. The monsoons lifted, but the “mudsoon" lingers. Outside, there is a two-inch thick coating of claymore mud. More on the kitchen floor. The spiders have tracked it up the walls creating limericks along the way. Here’s one:

There was a Black-Widow named Lexis,

Who hooked up with a Recluse from Texas,

She showed him some fun,

But when they were done,

She feasted on his solar plexus.

Around the world:

On Facebook, there’s muddy reasoning.

In Washington, there’s muddy talk.

From Hollywood, there are only muddy films.

The top brass in the military is bragging about their doctrine, developed in the 1970s, of only invading dry countries. “Mud is for fools and farmers,” they say.

I heard a TV evangelist say that “there is no mud in Heaven,” but how in the hell would he ever know?

Even the TV commercials are muddy now. I don’t even know what they are promoting.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, It’s a mud-prone world.

 We have to change the HVAC mud-filter daily.

I tried to go for a walk but found that, when I took a breath, I exhaled a fine mist of mud.

They had to close the barber and beauty shops in town. Hair was so muddy it ruined the scissors.

Birds can’t fly for the caked-on mud. They are disguising themselves as dog-turds to fool the cats.

The catfish have made the pond bank into a mud-slide. They are the only ones having fun.

If it will only dry up a bit, I have to search for our vehicles. They all slid away to parts unknown.

When they fired up the church organ this morning, only wads of mud shaped like notes came out.

And speaking of churches in the community, the favorite hymn of the day seems to be, "When the Mud is Dry up Yonder, I'll Be There."

Church sign down the road reads, “Don’t build your house on shifting mud.”

The missionaries are using Skype.

Elsewhere:

Walmart is running a special on mud-pie shells.

This morning, I saw a group of nightcrawlers building a mud-raft out of bamboo shoots.

Later, I saw a periscope moving through the mud. It was the postman.

A peddler just came by selling mud-filters for baby bottles.

  

The mud-mist is so thick that the 18-wheelers on I-40 are slowed to 93-miles per hour.

And I’m working on an essay entitled, “Mud As A Metaphor – How Life’s Most Worthless Things Stick To Your Shoes the Longest.”

Joggers beware!

Growing Up Southern: August 31, 2017

Folks from different places see life differently. Take storms. Inland, they are like redneck sex, over in seconds and “Let’s eat!” That’s assuming the kitchen is still standing. On or near the sea, they are like being forced to ride the entire length of Interstate 40 with Donald Trump talking all the way. It seems the agony will never end.

I’ve been in a few fair blows, nothing labeled a hurricane. One reached the status of “tropical storm,” and if it wasn’t a hurricane, I never want to be in one. And we sailed through a storm at sea in the old USS Hunley, out in what they call “The Bermuda Triangle.” I thought that was kind of neat, for Jimmy Huddleston, Sidney Bussey, Carl Ferguson and I pretty much had the fantail to ourselves before it got too bad. Everyone else was inside hugging a “head” if they could find one vacant. We were eating kipper snacks and channeling old John Paul himself.

The old girl was seaworthy, but she had a pronounced fondness for rolling. Men who had bounced across the Pacific in seagoing tugs or LSTs grew ashen at times when it seemed like she wouldn’t stop on a particularly bad roll. But, she always did. She’d shudder like a drunk with the DTs and start back the other way. Port to starboard. After decks up. Starboard to port. After decks down. Port to starboard. After decks up. Starboard to port. After decks down. Get the picture? Oh, go ahead. I don’t mind waiting.

They finally chased us inboard and closed the decks. It went on like that for two days. Imagine trying to sleep in conditions like that.

Out in the heartland, we deal with tornadoes. They are swift, deadly, and totally capricious. When one hit our community in the 1940s, it obliterated the houses on either side of our store/home. Our only damage, and it was minor, resulted from a large oak tree blown over in the back yard.

A religious person might assign some spiritual hand to all this. From our undamaged grocery store, my father gave away goods to whomever needed it and never asked for payment. Oddly, he didn’t wait for the city to tell him he needed to. He just did it, and bankrupted himself in the process. A headline praising his actions carried the subheading, “George [von Tungeln] said, ‘If you need it come and get it.’” I guess those were different times, sort of the “prosperity gospel” in reverse.

Later, I recall a man relating his story to a group gathered around the old pot-bellied stove my dad had in the store. The man had gotten his family to safety, and returned alone after the storm had passed. His home, barn, and other buildings had completely disappeared. He described walking around where they had once stood and finding the only undamaged thing still standing. It was a large board resting on brick supports, a make-believe cookstove his daughters had set up to “play kitchen.”

The storm had not even disturbed the inverted jar lids the kids had used to make mud pies.

Yes, storms can be capricious. For 32 people in our community, that particular one was also deadly.

Carl Ferguson and and the author.
Shipmates tried and true.

Saiing To Oblivium: August 28, 2017

It almost seems unfeeling to be planning a normal day when our brothers and sisters in Texas are experiencing such horror. But, we beat on, as F. Scott said, “boats against the current.”

What we might learn from these dreadful days is that Nature plays a catastrophic game when she chooses, and we are powerless.

A bully can’t shake his hand in her face and stop the gales.

A billionaire can’t show her his bank statement and escaper her wrath.

A general can’t order his battalions to counterattack and send her fleeing in fear.

A politician can’t “whip” his party into formation and outvote her intentions.

A person blessed with uncommon beauty can’t charm Nature out of destruction.

A thief can't steal her power.

No, at the moment Nature unleashes her fury, we all equal, one of the few moments during which that is true.

What can we do? Perhaps catastrophes such as this will help convince us that neither ignoring nor challenging Nature is the answer. Perhaps the answer lies in a new reverence and a more accommodating posture. Perhaps it is time to let wisdom, education, and decency lead us away from defiance and toward harmony. Perhaps it is time to spend more of our resources working with Nature and less warring with one another. Perhaps it is time to sweep the halls of government clean of climate-change deniers, greed-mongers, and divisive charlatans. We can replace them with women of thought and prudence. (I leave men out of the equation as we’ve had our chance and it’s gone with the wind).

Heck, we might even start electing leaders on the basis of thought and hope instead of fear and hatred.

After all, the only real thing we can do it the face of a furious and unforgiving Nature is to dream of better days and better ways.

Just thinking …

Sailing to Oblivion: June 3, 2017

On this day in 1864, American generals Grant and Meade learned a tragic lesson: an entrenched and fanatical enemy can withstand determined frontal attacks. Will we ever learn?

For the Union, at Cold Harbor that day, the result was some 7,000 Union casualties in less than an hour of fighting. Later, for the “leaders” who thrust the planet into World War One, the lesson cost the combined countries some 17 million deaths, 11 million of them associated with the failed tactic of assaults on entrenched forces.

Our “lightening war” to pacify the Middle East is going on 15 years now and will probably end only when the last few homo sapiens die of thirst.

But we press on, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “boats against the current.”

We, as a nation, appear to be struggling against that current. I sense that the America I know is more divided today than it was a week ago, and more divided than I have seen it since the tragedy of the Vietnam War.

This week features two opposing forces, as at Cold Harbor. One, let’s call them The Deniers, is a tightly entrenched group consisting of a “Duke’s Mixture” of true-believers. Some in the group don’t recognize science as a source of guidance for a healthy planet. Instead they believe in a supernatural being who will, eventually, save us from destruction in mystical fashion, although this has never happened in the history of the earth. They will vote for any politician, no matter how craven or mendacious, who simply promises to follow their religious agenda and eschew those of others.

Other members of the group may or may not believe in science as a proper endeavor. Truth is: they don’t really care as long as it, science, doesn’t interfere with their goal of exponentially increasing profits, thereby adding mathematics to the pantheon of truths they ignore.

Another faction has sworn allegiance to a political party, and would follow it lockstep into a firestorm of destruction that would make the Battle of the Somme look like a tea party.

Whatever one may think, this group is entrenched and practically impervious to frontal assault. It has, after all, unimaginable sources of money at its disposal, and its battalions include massive churches, a supportive media channel, and popular commentators, on radio, on TV, and in print. Perhaps, though, its most powerful weapon is its ability to instill and employ false realities into the minds of so many Americans. “Be afraid,” they say, “and we will tell you of whom to be afraid. But first, be very afraid.”

On the opposing side are what we might call The Believers. They trust science to do good. “Look,” they say, “it wasn’t prayer or politics that eliminated polio as a world-wide terror. It was science.” This group believes in the power of education. It promotes a diversity of both thought and lifestyle. “Trust us,” they say.

This group includes its own fanatics. They push the others into a myriad of unsupportable positions, from denouncing our brave police officers to denying free speech that doesn’t fit their world view. Also, they aren’t above denying science when it presents facts concerning such things as the food they wish to eat.

In short, the Believers are certain they are right. They believe in the efficacy of logic over emotion.

Ah, logic. This brings me back to Cold Harbor. As our planet slowly dies, the group of believers, seeing the danger, still attacks with logic. As the bodies, in a figurative sense, pile up before the belief-structure breastworks, they attack again and again.

What will we do? I honestly don’t know, and that is why today I see little chance for healing the breach that threatens us. In olden days, leaders would sooth us by saying that we only had fear itself to fear, inspire us by saying that our country was too great—a city shining on a hill—to be divided, or challenge the “better angels of our nature” to think what we might do for our country.

We long for such inspiration now, but instead find a social media outlet filled with taunts, falsehoods, and divisiveness, a dialogue built upon the boast of “We won. you lost. Now begone with you to losers’ hell,” hardly a balm for a discordant reality.

That’s where I see us today. Maybe tomorrow …

Maybe tomorrow.

Another day. Another battle.

Sailing Into Oblivion: June 2, 2017

My sainted mother once told me that I would be known, among other things, by the company I keep. But Nicaragua and Syria? Holy outcasts Batman!

Okay, okay. I know it’s not funny that we are now one of only three major countries that care nothing about the future of our planet. You can’t blame a man, though, for trying to lighten the mood a little this morning, the first day of our gradual descent into Gotterdammerung.

I awoke this morning to the memory of the unforgettable scene from A Night to Remember, the 1958 British drama film adaptation of Walter Lord's 1955 book. The scene: as the Titanic tilts bow downward and the crew and passengers race about in panic, one elderly gentlemen sits in the stateroom reading as if nothing had happened. He’ll accompany his passion into eternity.

Is that what I’ll do? Maybe. Then, I also read yesterday where some historian was encouraging folks to journal and keep their daily reactions to this debacle that is occurring in our country. That sounds like a good idea, but I’m not sure that the results will be of as much use to future historians (not likely to be any) as they will be to future visitors to our planet, perhaps even the originators of some transpermatic experiment that created what we call the human experience.

This series began as an attempt to present my personal, but opposing views, to friends without resorting to the vitriol that characterizes so much of modern interface among Americans. I’ve succeeded somewhat, only on occasion lapsing into anger or disgust. You can’t blame a man for a slip or two.

Now though, I don’t think I can discuss modern America absent an underlying feeling that we are in one hell of a mess. I think we are, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln when he spoke in a small Pennsylvania village years ago, being tested in a great war of ideas to see if a nation conceived as ours can endure. My bipolar brain says, “I hope so, but fear not.”

I will gladly consider and reflect upon evidence-base arguments to the contrary.

In my opinion, we being led by man, condoned and supported by his party, who has not, since being elected in November, 2016, and even before, issued one sentence designed to bring about harmony to the discordant voices and clash of ideas that are tearing America apart. Wouldn’t we do better, as a country, to have a leader who replaced, “losers,” and “lock her up,” with the words of a far greater man? For example

“… We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

What leads a country from such magnificent eloquence to covfefe? I am simply aghast. One can only hope against hope that future visitors to our planet might fail to uncover, "I am elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris."

That’s how I feel today, June 7, 2017. Now, I’m going to make sure my mental tray tables are in their upright and locked position and my ideological seat belt is fastened securely. You can’t blame a man for that. I fear it is going to be a bumpy ride.

Reconciliation: 26

When I was ten, they told me that the world might end from nuclear explosions. When I was 21, they told me that I might die at the hands of an unknown freedom fighter. When I was 30, they told me that I might die from the effects of obesity. All my life, people have been telling me I might die.

Each time I faced predictions of annihilation, cool heads, luck, or careful living saw me through. The concept of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) helped stave off a Dr. Strangelove ending to the planet. Keeping my head down and eschewing volunteering of any sort helped bring me luck, and guided me safely out of a war zone. Thirty years of daily exercise kept the old ticker pounding on schedule.

Now, they say we will all die unless we quit strangling our planet. This one has me worried. The planet has endured five extinctions in its long history and a sixth is looming, according to reputable scientists. The signs are clear.

The polar icecaps are melting.

Coastal cities in the United States are increasingly water-soaked because of rising sea levels.

The South Pacific’s Great Barrier Reef will be dead because of increasing seawater temperatures, within decades, according to oceanographers.

National Geographic has published a map showing what might happen if the ice on land melted and drained into the sea, raising it 216 feet and creating new shorelines for our continents and inland seas. My home town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, now hundreds of miles inland, would be a seaport.

From the Union of Concerned Scientists: “Every one of the past 40 years has been warmer than the 20th century average. 2016 was the hottest year on record. The 12 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998.”

Of course, a few scientifically-trained people claim this is a hoax and simply not true. If we are lucky, they will be right.

What we much ask ourselves is, “Do we feel lucky?”

Well, do we?

I don’t. Those who dispute the findings of the established science community largely serve corporations and industries that stand to increase profits be following a path of not addressing the issue.

We seem to be stuck, moreover, in a paradigm in which our leaders can hold, and act upon, two directly opposing thoughts at once. To wit:

The President of the United States, the leader of the ruling political party, is set to withdraw from a world-wide coalition that exists to address global destruction on the grounds that all this talk about climate change is a hoax. I know I have friends who agree and, trust me, I try to understand.

But. the United States military establishment, in the meantime, is spending millions upon millions of dollars preparing to meet new challenges that will result from climate change. Our president has pledged to provide the military with greater and greater funds, some of which will undoubtedly go to preparing for the changes created by new climate conditions.

As my Hispanic friends would say, “Que?”

I have a term to describe this ability to act upon and support opposing opinions simultaneously. I hope it offends no dear friends. It’s not “covfefe.” I call it: “bipolar-illogic.”

I have some future ocean-front property for sale.