“Congress is so strange; a man gets up to speak and says nothing, nobody listens, and then everybody disagrees.” - Will Rogers
“You know Lincoln’s famous remark about 'God must have loved the common people, because he made so many of them?’ Well, you are not going to get people’s votes nowadays by calling “em common. Lincoln might have said it, but I bet it was not until after he was elected.” - Will Rogers
“In Einstein’s equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is that it can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers. So, if the river of time can be bent into a pretzel, create whirlpools and fork into two rivers, then time travel cannot be ruled out.” - Michio Kaku
If you’ve never actually had the good fortune to see a brave Blue Tick hound and a Bobcat go at one another like it was life or death, as far blood sports go, it’s pretty intense and entertaining at the same time.
This sort of duel for survival loses a good deal of its entertainment value about the time you decide your dog needs a helping hand with getting the mad cat off of his belly.
I was thinking about such things when it dawned on me that the Vols were playing the Cats in the very near future. This particular annual matchup always makes me do a quick inventory of two specific commodities necessary for watching this battle; aiming fluid and disposable income.
Both commodities were found to be dangerously close to being bottomed out. So dangerously close, that I decided to bite the bullet and saddle up the jeep for a trip uptown to the bank. I think a wad of cash beats a plastic card any day, and besides, there’s this young little teller at the bank that is pretty easy to look at, even if she is only on a monitor, at some undisclosed location, in some foreign downtown bank somewhere.
I blame the lack of disposable income on the present state of inflation we find ourselves wallowing in. I do not give one single solitary darn who started it, or who caused it; this has got to stop, and it’s just simply got to stop, right now!
And, that brings us to the mid-term election nightmare. Vote for WHAT? Vote for a PARTY?
“I promise that if you vote for (fill in your favorite liar’s name here) that liar will make all of your problems disappear?”
You have to ask yourself, why do these folks who want to get elected, tell us so many things that they think we want to hear? When they do get some fool to give them millions of dollars to actually get them elected, they seem to forget all of the things they said they were going to fix after the good voters put them in the position of actually fixing these things.
I guess new power erases a lot of powerful people’s memories. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Maybe it’s more of a lie like a great-grandmother tells. You know the one, Granny says to her favorite eleven year old great granddaughter, “Now Precious, if you make all A’s on this next report card, I’m sure your daddy will get you that little pony you’ve always wanted.”
Granny knows darn good and well that daddy has no intentions of getting the child a pony, but if she gets all A’s on that report card then Granny has done a fine job, even if she had to tell a lie to get the job done.
When it comes to accountability and politicians, no matter how big the lie, they know that we can’t touch them with the old accountability hammer the way they deserve to be touched. To a politician, a good lie is one that is never going to really come back to bite them.
What needs to happen is, you and I, every man and women, every tax paying, flag loving, America The Beautiful singing, red blooded inflation suffering patriot need to get in the truck and drive up the drive way of every politician’s house.
Get out and walk to the front door and ring that bell, knock the big brass door knocker, and when the butler answers the door say this: “Good Morning! I’d like you to tell (Joe or Don or Nancy or Mitch)-(use any wealthy liars name here) to come to the door and answer a few questions for me. Tell them I’m in kind of a rush, I’ve got a fairly lengthly list of elected officials to talk with today.”
And, if the unaccountable politician has the guts to actually come to the door, you look them square in the eye and say this, “How on earth did you think you could get away with all of the BS promises you made to the voters? Do you really think we’re that stupid? You haven’t done anything to fix anything since you were elected and because someone gave you millions of dollars to get you elected for the sake of “CONTROL” we now have to endure your nonsense for years to come? You Sir/Madame are a bald faced liar and you should resign immediately “
Then get in the truck and come on back home. You’ll feel better once you get home. I think this is some kind of useful accountability measure. But, politicians know good and well that none of us would actually take the time to go to their front porch and call them out for what they really are.
So, I made it to the bank uptown. After looking at the disposable income balance and the young teller, a sudden wave of sadness swept over me for a brief moment. I was suddenly back to thinking about inflation and power hungry politicians again.
Sandwiched between two burger flippers and potato fryers is an aiming fluid discount emporium. It’s one of the scant few benefits of being uptown.
To get my wandering mind off of gnawing inflation and sad mid-term adds, I pondered the term “UPTOWN” and juxtaposed it with the term “DOWNTOWN”.
It seemed like the thing to do at the time. Where exactly was I? Was it downtown Ooltewah, or was it uptown Ooltewah? Was Old Ooltewah really a town? Is New Ooltewah really uptown or downtown?
The new Ooltewah now has it “all” since they added multiple red lights to the only one red light that was there for years. There are chicken cookers, bankers, surly Muslim gas vendors, homeless bridge lovers, box stores, gas stations and grocery chains. All the modern trappings of the country gone bad, gone suburban, call it uptown or downtown; it’s definitely in some kind of strange spiral.
New Ooltewah even has three-story, no-tell-motels complete with breathtaking views, overlooking the interstate, where if you and a neighbor’s wife need to get caught up on things that good neighbors sometimes need to get caught up on. You no longer have to drive the agonizingly long drive to Cleveland no-tells to get caught up. And, conveniently, there is a store with a name that ends in ‘bucks’ where you and your neighbor’s wife can get further warm and fuzzy with a latte-mocha-frappe-alfredo-mach-ee-auto espresso.
All you have to do to get one of these wonderful uptown concoctions is to pay some kid who is sporting more hardware in his nose, tongue, lips, ears, eyelids than you’ve got in your tackle box and hand the pink haired kid a twenty dollar bill and you are “uptown new Ooltewah,” my friend.
All of a sudden, across the main drag, at a burrito flipping store, there are two ambulances, two emergency response trucks, a Collegedale Police Cruiser and slowly but surely, bringing up the rear, a Chattanooga City Police cruiser. After all, this part of new Ooltewah, is in the city limits of Chattanooga. Go figure? That’s six sirens, all manner of flashing blue, red and yellow lights and, a lot of arm waving that resembles chaos. Traffic was “new Ooltewah,” uptown/downtown rubber necked to the max. I wondered since Collegedale is a town. Do you go to downtown Collegedale or is it uptown Collegedale?
The guy behind the counter who takes the disposable income for the fluid necessary for watching Kentucky play Tennessee says, “Looks like somebody got hold of a bad taco!”
I retreated to the Jeep. Uptown was getting to me. Any and all escape was blocked by New Ooltewah. I longingly surveyed the fall colors on White Oak Mountain in the near distance.
When it hit me, it wasn’t anything like a lightening bolt, but it was close.
“Where were you a year ago today?”
“What?”
“Where were you 365 days ago, about this time of day?”
“Wow! Where did that come from?”
Suddenly, I was tele-ported, lifted, sailing through the roof of the jeep. I was flying. It was a genuine, out of body experience. No more new Ooltewah! No more political inflation! It was time traveling, 365 days at a time! It was simply incredible! Who could forget? It was a day that will live in infamy.
365 days ago is etched, burned, locked in place forever. The buck was huge. He had taken his final steps in a steep blowdown clogged ravine, so steep and tree covered, it was a massive chore just getting him to flat ground. This was the biggest deer I had seen in decades. And, the conversation went something like this:
“Wow, he is absolutely huge! Look at the mass on that rack! You hit him just right! How far did he run? Where’d he come from? Was he alone or was he chasing a doe? Look at the size of his neck! How far away was he when you shot? Did you get the shakes? I would have gotten all torn up! How in the world are we going to get that monster out of this hole and up that rocky hill?”
My son had arrowed this trophy buck with a traditional bow, making this all the more special. But, special wears thin pretty quick when you’re trying to climb a steep and boulder strewn mountain side with a deer too heavy to drag up hill.
The conversation continued something like this:
“What do you think he weighs now? Let’s take a break for a minute. Next time we hunt back here, I’m bringing a pack frame, some meat bags and we’ll break ‘em down Elk style. Let’s swap shoulders! Let’s take another break! Why do you think they like this hollow? I don’t think you could even get a horse in here, do you?“
The pack out part of 365 days ago took easily better than three hours. But, the memories of that long day were as fresh as this morning’s clouds over old Ooltewah.
It is truly an odd thing what one can manage to remember about a particular hunt. Is it really time travel? I can recall hunts in my minds eye that have museum level photographic quality. Some are just snap shots, some are full length feature films, pano-vision and wide-screen technicolor included. Maybe it’s the old “escape from reality thing” that seems to creep around every Mid-term election year. Who knows?
It beats driving up to some politicians house and talking with his butler. It beats a bad burrito, or a taco so bad as to snarl new Ooltewah traffic to uptown/downtown levels. It also beats having to pull a mad bobcat off of the belly of your favorite dog. Go Vols!
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