It is particularly difficult to maintain a sense of humor at this time when unprecedented assholery in Washington abounds.

After a good deal of reading and reflection, I have come to the conclusion that our President, The One, is a committed Marxist. In order to come to that conclusion, one need only read what little that has been revealed about his background (including his own statements in books he has claimed to have authored) and take a look at those with whom he has chosen to associate for his entire life.

He certainly won’t admit as much, and I truly believe that he might well honestly rebel from such a characterization. Still, his background (to the extent we know it) and his actions, to date, leave little doubt about what he has in mind for the country and it’s not good, except, of course, for those people who really will get “free” stuff and the politicians who grow rich and powerful by seizing money from others in order to give them the “free” stuff.

To my friends who voted for The One: Is this what you had in mind?

OK, so assuming that The One is a class-warfare Marxist (Is there any doubt?), what are we to make of Speaker of the House Pelosi? Is she too a dedicated Marxist? Is she purposefully making confetti out of the Constitution? I don’t think either applies in her case. I have heard her speak, and I can only come to the conclusion that the woman is an idiot. She’s not smart enough to understand Karl Marx’s theories and she damned sure has never read the Constitution.

She started out as a local political hack with good connections. By shaking the right hands and kissing the right asses she somehow rose to the top of the heap. And now she’s leading the charge to destroy the health care system and plunge the nation into hopeless debt.

The woman is two heartbeats away from the Presidency. Chew on that for a minute.

I thought it was impossible for me to loathe any politician more than I loathed Bill Clinton, but compared to the Marxist in the White House and the blithering idiot in the House, Bill Clinton was a goddamned prince.

That is all.

HAPPY ST. PAT’S DAY.

That about sums it up.

Check out Seaweed Chronicles’ excellent slide show of the Special Olympics Polar Bear Plunge. For youse non-Jersey peeps, the slides contain some excellent photos of Seaside Heights, a locale made somewhat infamous famous by that dreadful “reality” program, “Jersey Shore.” Youse Jersey peeps will immediately recognize the places where the photos were taken.

In a restaurant somewhere in Washington D.C. …

Waiter: Good afternoon. May I take your order?

Pelosi: Yes. I want a tuna salad sandwich on whole wheat, with cole slaw on the side and a Diet Coke. Bring it as soon as possible. I’m in a hurry.

Waiter: Yes, ma’am.

Thirty minutes later…

Pelosi: Waiter!

Waiter: Yes, ma’am. What is it?

Pelosi: I ordered my lunch a half-hour ago and it’s still not here! I said I was in a hurry.

Waiter: Oh, the restaurant has deemed that you received your lunch and have eaten it.

Pelosi: That’s ridiculous. I haven’t received my order, and I haven’t eaten anything.

Waiter: Perhaps I wasn’t clear. The restaurant has deemed that you have already eaten your tuna salad sandwich and the side order of cole slaw and that you have finished drinking your Diet Coke.

Pelosi: What is this “deemed” shit?

Waiter: We figured you would know.

Pelosi:

Waiter: We’ve also deemed that your bill is $13.75. Please pay the cashier. Have a nice day.

It’s a rainy, windy, chilly and generally miserable day here in the Garden State, but this amazing little guy made me smile.

Enjoy.

Thanks to reader, Bill, for the link.

. . . is the hardest part.

Above is a photo my beloved Gibson Dreadnaught that I posted in 2008. I bought it new in 1964, the year of its manufacture (One can tell by its serial number). I think I paid a couple hundred dollars for it back then, but I cannot remember the exact amount. I do remember that it cost me every penny I could scrape together at the time. In fact, I couldn’t afford a case when I bought it and carted it hither and yon for the next ten or fifteen years without a case.

Even after I finally bought a case, I dragged it out of the case to play at some pretty wild soirees. A few times, I even left it to the tender mercies of airline luggage handlers as I toted it to a three blogmeets (very wild soirees, all). During all those years, amazingly, it only took a few dings.

By 2005, I realized that I was exposing it to undue risk of harm by bringing it to blogmeets and certainly by letting any airline personnel touch it. With the expert help of the Late, Great Rob “Acidman” Smith, I bought an inexpensive, but serviceable guitar (a Washburn), resolving to forever leave my beloved Gibson Dreadnaught safe and sound in the House by the Parkway.

A month or so ago, as it was resting in its stand as you see it above, a vacuum cleaning mishap resulted in a crack in the top of the instrument. It was an accident, pure and simple, but I still had to retire to another room for a few minutes to calm down.

Fortunately, the crack didn’t affect the sound of the guitar, as it sounded as sweet as ever. But, between worrying that the crack would worsen and just having to look at my beloved Gibson in a wounded condition led me to conclude that I should have it repaired. I didn’t want just anyone to repair it, so I decided to take the necessary steps to return it to the experts at Gibson for the work.

The process is a bit involved, including applying online to Gibson for a “repair authorization number” prior to sending them the guitar. It took a few days, but I got my number and a boatload of instructions for packing, shipping and ultimate payment.

So, following Gibson’s instructions, I took it, in its case, to the UPS store to have it packed and shipped. The lady behind the counter asked me if I wanted to insure the package and, if so, for how much. Her eyes popped open when I answered that, yes, I wanted insurance, and, seeing as how one can’t buy insurance for something that’s “priceless,” I wanted it in the amount of $3,000.00. That’s the price of a comparable Gibson Dreadnaught today. So, between the packing, shipping and the insurance, I paid UPS $123.00. (You pay extra for the extra careful handling and delivery signature requirements for items that are insured for more than $1,000.00.) Add to that the $75.00 “evaluation fee” Gibson charges in order to plan a repair and generate a quote, and we’re already tickling the amount that I paid for the guitar.

I expect the entire process will take weeks (Just getting the evaluation and quote can take five weeks) and will cost quite a bit, but I’m ready to pay it. I figure that after all the pleasure my beloved Gibson Dreadnaught has afforded me these past 46 years, it’s the least I can do.

The tough part was handing it over to the UPS lady and leaving the store empty handed.

It was sort of like dropping your kid off for her first day at college.

I could have entitled this post, “One of the More Colorful Characters I Have Met in my Life.” It bubbled out of the mental soup that was sloshing around in my cruller during this morning’s groundpound. Go figure.

Anyway …

I knew him when I was a freshman in college. He had a real name, but he preferred the moniker “Rat, King of Soul.” When he met someone, he would extend his hand and say, in an affected disc jockey voice, “R, K of S, here. Nice to meet you.” He even introduced himself that way to my mother. Good thing I had warned her in advance that Rat was, … well … a little bit eccentric.

Rat was a serious musician who played upright bass and was deep, deep into jazz. His taste veered toward the avant garde stuff such as Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz,” where there is no key and no time signature. Rather, everyone begins playing at the word, “begin.” To me, it always sounded like a high-speed train wreck, but to Rat, King of Soul, it was bliss. He looked like a “free jazz” guy too. His dress was anything but stylish, and he always looked a bit like an unmade bed.

He was a wonderfully out-of-control guy.

Once he came to hang with me at my parents’ home. At that time, I had borrowed a saxophone from my buddy (Saby) in order to see if I had any natural ability to play wind instruments. (It took me about ten minutes to realize that sax playing was not in my future.) When Rat came into my room (we lived in a five-room apartment on the first floor of a two-family house), he saw the sax case, and asked, “Do you play sax?”

I explained that I didn’t, but that I was just fooling around with it.

“Let me play it,” Rat said.

Thinking that perhaps, in addition to being an accomplished bassist, he might also be a sax player, I took it out of the case and inserted the neck (crook) and mouthpiece into the body of the sax and handed it to Rat. I was anxious to hear him play.

He took it from me, and instead of putting the mouthpiece in his mouth, he violently pulled the crook from the horn (at this point, imagine a brass fish hook with valves), and screamed for ten or fifteen seconds like a wounded banshee down into the horn. I almost shit.

I was speechless watching Rat scream and wail into the body of the horn. I knew my parents were in the next room, and it sounded as if someone was being murdered. When he was all screamed out, I asked, “What the f**k was that, Rat?”

His breathless answer: “Man, that was great.”

His craziness wasn’t limited to things musical. Back then, I had a motorcycle, and Rat asked me to take him for a ride. He assured me that he had ridden on the back of motorcycles on many occasions, so off we went. As we were zooming down the road, Rat decided that it would be a riot to cover my eyes with his hands!

Holy shit!

“Rat, what the F**K are you doing?” I screamed as I frantically elbowed him to make him stop. He removed his hands after a few seconds (which seemed at the time to be an eternity), and he howled with laughter, unable to understand why I was not happy. He thought it was a riot.

He did, however, have a soft side. It seems that Rat was smitten by a girl in our class. As it turned out, she was probably the prettiest girl in the school and she damned well knew it. She was always perfectly dressed and was the Platonic form of a snob – exactly the type of girl that would not “get” Rat.

“I think she likes me,” Rat said. “Do you think she likes me?”

Although I was thinking, She probably doesn’t know you exist, and if she did, she probably wouldn’t piss on you if you on fire, I graciously said, “I don’t know, Rat, but I tend to doubt that she’s your type.”

Rat replied, “She’ll come around.”

She didn’t.

Rat spent more time composing music than he did studying biology and the History of Western Civilization. I wasn’t all that surprised when he dropped out at the end of the year in order to attend the Berklee College of Music. A few years later, I heard from a mutual friend that Rat had dropped out of Berklee as well. I suspect that Berklee wasn’t quite ready for Rat, King of Soul.

I don’t know how the fates have dealt with Rat over these many years, but if his motorcycle tricks remained part of his repertoire, I’m not optimistic.

I have it at the moment.

I trust that it will pass.

I’m headed off to spend some time with Mr. Recliner.