The Trump Museum in Downtown Port Angeles

[mallorys_camera]

Best 50¢ I spent all year?

This costume. (Thrift store.)

And we did get one trick-or-treater last night.

Which is really kinda remarkable given that we live smack in the middle of Old People Acres, a kind of animal preserve set up in the middle of Hyde Park where ancient humans are put out to pasture after a lifetime of performing at IBM and other corporate circuses.

No complaints! I actually like kids, prefer the company of an imaginative child to that of an unimaginative adult 99% of the time. But life is pretty sweet here in Old People Acres where the only life forms you have to look out for on the open roads as you careen down them at a whopping 20 miles per hour are the suicidal squirrels and the remarkably stupid deer (who are clearly the Trump voters among ungulates.)

Think of the sighting of this sole trick-or-treater as equivalent to the sighting of a roseate spoonbill! It doesn’t exactly symbolize a reversal of the plunging birthrate trend.

But it is hopeful.

###

What else?

The news feeds are abuzz with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the changes he is wreaking.

This is because mainstream media uses Twitter as a current events marketing focus group.

If it’s trending on Twitter, then it must be important news, even if the overwhelming majority of humans—who do not use Twitter and do not give a shit about Twitter—aren’t affected by it.

Yet another reason to disbelieve anything that comes out of the mainstream media.

The real news is that not only are gasoline companies making record profits right now but so are food producers and distributors—this despite the bullshit you’ve been fed about how the 10% increase in the cost of food over the past six months is due to avian flu, drought, and the higher costs of feed and transportation.

No, my friends.

It is simple price-gauging.

But you’re not reading about it anywhere, are you? You must piece it together from PepsiCo and Tyson Foods, Inc earning reports.

###

Also, my former mother-in-law died.

My first husband’s mother.

Jan was a pleasant woman and smart. Committed to following through (in a non-confrontational way) on the choices she made—or maybe that’s the only excuse I can come up with for why she didn’t divorce Al, my erstwhile father-in-law.

Al was irascible.

If he were alive today, Al would be running the nation’s first Trump museum out of downtown Port Angeles. On display would be redacted federal tax forms, scrolling Tweets on giant monitors, and a little portico displaying The Donald’s favorite spray tan and hair products.

I liked Al. He had a great sense of humor.

But I kicked him out of my house one night shortly after Ichabod was born because when he and Jan came down to see the new baby, he sat around the dinner table insulting Bill in the most derisive of terms.

Bill didn’t see anything wrong with what his father was doing. His father had been doing it all Bill's life. It was set up to be joking.

But I saw something wrong with it. This was the reason why Bill was so emotionally clamped down in my never-humble opinion. Why Bill was so fiercely competitive.

We had quite the raging fight after I forced his parents to leave.

Oddly enough, thereafter I became Al’s favorite daughter-in-law—he had two others. He also liked me better than his two sons-in-law.

Or at least that’s what he told me.

Al died 18 years ago. Everyone expected Jan to go into a deep decline because Al had dominated her so completely.

But she didn’t. In fact, she thrived.

Here she is at Ichabod’s Stanford graduation:



She would have been 83 or 84 then. She was well into her 90s when she died.

Memory eternal, Jan.

Comments

[taz_39]

Lovely costume.

Sorry to hear about your former MIL...but it sounds like she had a good run and a good time.

I haven't used Twitter, ever. Tried it when it first came out, and was so outraged by the word count limit that I dropped it immediately and never looked back. The ONLY time it ever did anything for me was when there was an earthquake where we were staying; I was able to see realtime updates. But now you can get that anywhere without a ****ing forced abbreviation.

[mallorys_camera]

Yah. Well. I get that I hate Twitter chiefly because I like to write at great length—which is ridiculous from the standpoint of "communication" because I'm quite sure most people on my flist skim.

But I'm a solipsist: I write chiefly to entertain myself, and so there. 😀

I've gone on Twitter a few times. People keep saying, Legal Twitter! It's so great!

But it would take me more than the five seconds I gave to it to figure out Twitter's hierarchy of calls and responses, and five seconds is all I'm willing to give to it.

[lethe1]

Sorry about your former MIL.

Oddly enough, thereafter I became Al’s favorite daughter-in-law—he had two others. He also liked me better than his two sons-in-law.

Not odd at all, in my opinion. Al was a bully. Bullies respect people who push back.

I had the same thing happen with a manager back when I worked at Time-Life. She was an awful bully, and when we had a talk one time she tried to intimidate me by screaming and shouting at me. Quite out of character, I managed to remain completely calm and detached, observing her behaviour analytically like a naturalist would observe wildlife. After that encounter she was always very friendly to me.

[mallorys_camera]

Yah, Al was kind of a bully, now that you mention it. 😀