CSotD: Old Age, Death, Revenge and other pleasant topics
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At Between Friends, while Maeve ponders quitting her job to gallivant off with her wealthy boyfriend, her assistant Helen contemplates what would happen to her then, and wonders if it's time to retire.
I'm sympathetic. Having "retired" at the start of my career in order to try being a novelist, I'm now in a position where I'll have to keep working until I either die or become incapacitated or simply run out of people who want to give me money.
Fortunately, I don't give a damn, and mostly don't have to.
I'd feel a little more comfortable if I'd held onto one of the houses I had, but I'm not sure that the little rent I pay is more than the land taxes and maintenance I'd have to pay even in a mortgage-free house.
Plus I just got a letter from Social Security informing me that, inasmuch as I worked throughout 2016 and contributed to the gummint and all, they're raising my Social Security by $13 a month.
That's before income tax and self-employment tax, mind you.
As for savings, let's go back to 2006 for another Between Friends strip:
I have enough savings that, combining that with Social Security, I could hang in for a few years without other income, but a long life would leave me, as Helen says, rubbing nickels together.
o permit me again to repeat
wotthehell wotthehell
And then there's this
If the notion of living a long life in poverty doesn't depress you, there's the alternative, and, over at Sally Forth, Francesco Marciuliano is, as he explains on his blog, launching a prolonged story arc based on his father's death. These are the two most recent strips.
He's not promising a lot of laffs and I'm not expecting many, but I've been there and I'm curious to see how he handles it.
One of the epiphanies that struck me when my own father died was that he no longer stood between me and the beyond, and so, as I read this story arc, I'll being seeing Ted as my sons, not myself.
Which is okay: I've had nearly 30 years to adjust to the shift.
My dad died a few months short of 68, my mother is still chugging along at 93 and I'm not sure which prospect frightens me more, though I figure I've got a good shot at landing somewhere between them, given that — good Lord willin' and the crick don't rise — I'll pass the old man's mark in 24 days.
(I don't keep track. It just struck me as I wrote that and so I went and looked.)
I find that, the older I get, the less I care what happens next.
However, I am afflicted, as all journalists should be, with 'satiable curtiosity, and, since I don't believe I'll be floating around watching from above, I get kind of pissed over the prospect of not being able to see how it all comes out.
Anyway, I'm curious to see Ted Forth's experience.
Plus there is the matter of this:
Jimmy Margulies mocks the bit of lunatic insanity that most antagonizes elephant's children at the moment, and congratulations to Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb), for the chutzpah to challenge the President's frontal assault upon the document he swore to uphold.
Teachers love to quote the little ode to journalism which Kipling placed at the end of the story of the Elephant's Child, which goes
I Keep six honest serving-men:
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.
Less often do you see the verse that follows, and which might be parsed today as the difference between the relatively well-organized, rational world of print in which Kipling practiced the trade and the no-deadlines, no-gatekeepers, post-it-when-you-get-it chaos that presently obtains:
I let them rest from nine till five.
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men:
But different folk have different views:
I know a person small–
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!
She sends 'em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes–
One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys!
In any case, as a small boy deeply infected with 'satiable curtiosity, I greatly enjoyed the ending of the story itself, in which the young elephant, now armed with a trunk, wreaks havoc upon those who had previously tormented him.
Acting like a grown-up elephant and not a vengeful child is — honestly — one of the real challenges of the profession.
The best most of us can manage is to suppress a snicker after having, even with all ethical justification, heaved some tormenter into a hornet's nest.
Those who do approach the job as a chance to even the score dishonor the profession, and Kipling calls the elephant child's behavior "bad," but he must surely have gotten a little pleasure out of bringing down those who, in the semi-autobiographical "Baa Baa Black Sheep," made his young life miserable.
I note that young Donald's parents also sent him away, in his case to military school.
Maybe being sent away makes children yearn for vengeance, whether they exhibit it directly, coat it in metaphor or cover it up entirely.
Anyway, Trump has come through his own "Lord of the Flies" experience knowing how to find a higher rung on the ladder than poor Piggy, and David Rowe depicts how he has twisted the protest against murderous race-based assaults into a fictional attack upon the flag and upon veterans.
Paranoid delusion or deliberate lie? What difference does it make?
At least, despite Trump's claims to have recruited him as an ally, the Commissioner has not fallen into lock-step.
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