Wayward Landlubber

She's gone.  As of 3:45 pm Pacfic Standard Time.  I walked in with my companion of the last 7 years.  My emotional comfort cat.  She has not wanted to be with me  for the last three days, She hid from me and scooted away from me  if I tried to reach into her space.  I had to pull her up by her scruff To put her in her cat carrier.  She used to like the carrier. And I walked out with my cat carrier And Gracie's bling collar.

My name is Larry Ramsay and I have deep connections in the mid-Willamette Valley. Both my parents went to high school in Molalla. I have kin buried in graveyards from Eugene to Portland, and towns in between. I know when there was no whiskey in Whiskey Hill, and how Liberal is not liberal. I picked hops in St Paul and bucked hay a bicycle ride in any direction from Woodburn. I stand before you having spent all but my first 6 years in Marion County. I left for a while after 20 to travel some, I came back. Every person in this room can find an ancestor who migrated here from somewhere not here. They weren't called illegals in those days, but they were accused of many of the same crimes as these people of color that Republicans can't abide. Some may have been guilty, some might have been hanged unfairly. Many just wanted a better place to live free from the oppression their extended families grew up with. I live in a blue state and that pleases me. Idaho may be a beautiful state, ...

For a while now I've been wanting to write a little something about a lot of nothing. A tribute to my old cat, Gracie maybe, or the beauty of nature, the susseration of the river, as it makes its slow journey to the ocean, or the delight of a Blue Heron wading in the shallows. But now is not the time. We are citizens of a land that is no longer familiar to us. We have watched it getting closer, like a jagged rock threatening to slice into our hull, but we are helpless, our steering is damaged, we are on a collision course, and the helmsman is incompetent. There could have been a solution, but that is gone. We are no longer protecting, however awkwardly, the Constitution of the United States. It is gone, POOF. We can credibly ask the question, will there be a 2028 presidential election? We can even ask, what will it look like? Russia has elections, very well run elections. India has elections, also tightly controlled, which is a phrase you never want uttered in association to democr...

I'm no expert on humor and comedy, but I hope someday to come pretty close. I don't know how it happened but it seemed to just open like a rosebud as i grew older. I can remember sneaking down the staircase to almost see the Johnny Carson in the far corner of the living room when i was a child. Some of the comics I listened to were Lenny Bruce, Mort Saul, Don Rickles, the Smothers Brothers, Laugh-in, all the way to John Stewart, Stephan Colbert, and a host of others. Somehow, along the way, this saying stuck in my head and never left: HUMOR SHOULD OPPRESS THE COMFORTABLE AND COMFORT THE OPPRESSED. It may have come from Mel Brooks. It took me a while to recognize the truth in that. It could be no other way. If you reverse it, humor should comfort the comfortable and oppress the oppressed, you are a sycophant of power in the first case, and a sadist in the other. Only a Republican could fail to see that, and you know which group they choose to comfort. One of Mel Brooks many film...

Many years ago, when I was more interested in Tonka trucks than in this new piece of furniture my parents purchased; an Admiral TV set with a record turntable in the top of the cabinet, as well as containing an AM FM radio. There was a weekly television drama that I suspect was watched by WWII veterans like my dad. It was called, The Man Without a Country. The historical and biographical information comes from Google and Wikipedia. Two places rightwingers avoid, lest their minds be poisoned  by George Soros. The short story was written for Altlantic magazine in 1863 by Edward Everett Hale, a greatnephew of Revolutionary War hero, Nathan Hale. The subject of the story was a young Army Lieutenant, Phillip Nolan, who  befriends Aaron Burr  on a visit. When Burr is charge with treason, after a duel where he proved the better shot than Alexander Hamilton, Nolan is charged as well. I do not know if Nolan was an active participant, or an innocent bystander, but he is convicted b...

Some of us are obsessive about words. Or obsessive compulsive. That's  fine, delusion is over-used by those who overuse words, why should we not be obsessive or compulsive  about words? The definition of any word is agreed to mean something. Some of us challenge those rules, as we should; it is how we strengthen the boring rules of lexicographers. And we can be criticized for the content of our words. Cynics and humorists need to stretch truths the same way they stretch credulity. Lawyers and politicians must hue closely to those boring lexicographers definition of words. They are either prosecuting, or defending people who have no respect for what those truths represent, or who were prosecuted by elected people who have no respect in those words. And then you know you're screwed. A sign of a healthy polity, is not having to concern yourself with how narrowly the controlling power interprets your words or actions. Or what you possibly might be capable of. Would you want any Re...