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3-D Printer walks into a bar

 

"Are you the plumber printer?", Maggie, the bar tender, asked.

"Yeah, where are the restrooms?"

"Down the hall, on the left side", Maggie said, "We need four new plungers."

"They told me two plungers. I've gotta go back to the shop and get more resin."

As the printer plumber waddled back to his truck Maggie and I looked at each other and laughed at the vestigial human ethos in a manufactured worker.

"I have to remember that these machines are not real", she said, and touched my arm with the intent of reassurance. Reduced to a life of basic existence in this dystopian society on the banks of the Mississippi we humans latched onto any morsel of feeling or behavior that might remind us of the distant society we had enjoyed prior to the Missouri Printed Gun and Sex Bot Compromise.

Shades of Fifty Truckers

 

Printed paperback books had re-emerged in companionship with the introduction of "mommy porn", the first fruit of the splinter-demographic-porn-fiction movement---which now encompassed "plumber porn", "farmer porn" and, thanks to Ena Faye Wilkins, "trucker porn".

Dickie Ray's new Venture

 

An investor in small start-up companies, I had given a guy named Dickie Ray Hoskins some front money for his new venture and arranged for him to meet with the Peoples bank of Paris, Texas, to get an operating loan. I had a good relationship with Tiffany, the loan manager, who had acquired her skills with a much larger bank in Chicago. She was in her early thirties, smart and attractive.

The importance of being carl.

 

Jane was a "closet" anti-vaxxer---not the sort of attribute one might expect in a high profile CEO of a large conglomerate of hotels and restaurant chains.  She worked in downtown L.A. and lived in Pasadena where her twin girls went to a private school---which had just sent them home because of a large measles outbreak in California.

Two hundred dollars short.

 

Vera shuffled into a strip mall bank branch which was flanked by a nail salon and a vitamin shop. The mall had drifted into premature uselessness, with half the stores selling vacancy signs. Vera wore a quilted robe with ample splashes of fur in floral patterns front and back plus on the cuffs, collar and hemline. On her feet were white cotton slippers with velcro straps undone. As she flowed up to a teller window, clumps of streaked grey hair tried to escape from underneath a fraying ball cap.

Heartless Poet

 

He wanted one poem to plop down in his lap,

Contented and revealing within the first draft;

It's phrases weaned...lines well proportioned,

.....a poem like that seldom walks in the door.

 

We need to talk. she said.

Odd timing, he said, I'm writing.

No, I mean it, she said.

O.K., just a minute,

    .. a wildflower steals under yon fence row,

     poignant, the shy hues of parting glances,

Is your heart in this? she asked.

A New Year Rose Ceremony.

 

When I was in High School I was active in a Baptist church which today stands in near ruins, its stained glass windows having been extracted and used in an office complex.

The pastor took a special interest in me and when I turned sixteen and could drive my mother's Chevy, he suggested me as a Sunday substitute preacher at some smaller country churches.I had several prepared sermons and stuck to basic themes. On the debate team in High School, I was not bad on my feet.

Jim Webb's PAC questioned.

Out of our over amped predatory two party oligarchy to maintain the status quo comes a news story of how Jim Webb misused his PAC, Born Fighting.

Well, darn---game on!

The floating of such a story at this early point in Webb's possible Presidential run can only mean one thing---someone out there thinks he can upset the apple cart.

The Clintons?

The Republicans?

What's up with the white working class?

There is a current meme in political commentary---can Hillary, Democrats, win back the white working class vote which was not particularly good in 2012, and seemed to deteriorate even more in 2014? My first response is, for a lot of reasons, I don't like the term "working class" because it is meant to describe whites---with little college education who work with their hands and who are in the lower half, or less, of the economic stratus---as less than or low than. This group describes a lot of friends, relatives and workers with whom I mostly interact. If I must categorize these folks analytically I would rather use a term like heartlander working stiff, or as a last resort, Walmart Mom. They run our infrastructure. And they are numerous. There are, for example, far more white working class folks than black working class folks---hang on, I want to google that---black working class....

The Take Back queen of echo park

I can't let the doom and gloom get to me, after all it's the holidays. People out shopping, the Salvation army collecting and---some people just don't get it, they're ripping off corporations returning clothes they've purchased and worn for three months, or junk they bought somewhere else. If these scams continue, the economy will tank faster than North Korea hacking the entire Fortune 500! But retailers today should stop complaining because they don't know how lucky they are never to have encountered the Take Back Queen of Echo Park.

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