Death of a DEEBOT

Warnock won Georgia, and Ossoff is projected to win, so you know: Happy Day!

Neighbor Ed woke me up this morning, texting, A Jew, a Black and a Catholic walked into the American government… Which is like the opening line of one of those jokes my grandfather—another old Jewish guy—used to like to tell.

Perdue and Loeffler are among the slimiest and most pernicious of the slimy, pernicious Republican Senators, so you know: Ass. Door. Slam. No, no, you’re walking down the wrong corridor—the whitecollar crimes prosecution unit is that way!

Trump must be up to 350 pounds. Good tailoring can disguise a lot, but it can’t disguise that chin.

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Am I naïve for allowing myself to entertain the wispiest hope that (maybe, maybe, maybe) the political horror of the last four years is ov-ah?

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Meanwhile, my bad mood abruptly vanished just before sunset.

Maybe it was John LeCarré’s prose, which had me so firmly under its spell that I added a mile to the customary tromp so that I could finish listening to Chapters 12 and 13 of The Honorable Schoolboy. Poor Jerry Westerby!

Maybe it was the letter I got from my beloved Barbara Angell, complete with photographs of her beautiful, lookalike daughters.



(That’s the Petrified Forest in Calistoga on the bottom, Barbara’s hereditary estate.)

Maybe it’s that one of my clients wants to placate me by paying me more money and that I am on the short list for the Stimulus Payout today.

Strictly speaking, I don’t need the Stimulus Payout, so I'll be donating most of it to the Hyde Park foodbank—after I buy a new vacuum cleaner.

The DEEBOT gave up the ghost! Well. I mean, I’ve had the thing for three years. It died so abruptly that I decided to take it apart to see if I could revive it simply by de-glomming the rotors. I took it apart, I did the deglomming—but then I couldn’t put back together. A part that should have lain flat kept not lying flat.

Of course, I have no mechanical aptitude whatsoever, that’s a given, so I called up Mrs. Neighbor Pat for a second opinion. She grew up on a remote Wisconsin farm and in consequence, knows everything there is to know about dissembling and reassembling machinery.

We stood fully masked and at a respectful 10-foot distance on her freezing porch while she tried jimmying the thing.

“No, can’t do it,” she said finally after 10 minutes.

Rather than storing the broken DEEBOT in a closet until such time—maybe just before the Rapture—it mysteriously fixes itself, I threw the thing away as soon as I got back to the house.

The DEEBOT was awfully cute, but, of course, it only did floors plus I could never train the cat to ride on it.

I think I’m gonna get a portable standup vacuum cleaner this time.