John Swinburn

Why is it that women, in general, are more interesting than men, in general? Why is it that women tend to be unafraid of being silly and emotional, whereas men tend to avoid being silly for fear of looking silly? Men hide their insecurities behind façades of bravado. Women admit their insecurities and, in fact, celebrate them more than occasionally. Again, I’m speaking in generalities, not in absolutes. But generalities tend largely to be descriptive of reality.

The genesis of these thoughts and this rant was a conversation I heard on Saturday afternoon at a reception following a celebration of life memorial service for a church member who died recently. A woman sitting at my table mentioned that she and a group of her women friends had organized an obituary-writing party. They gathered at a group member’s home, sat in comfortable chairs, and broke out bottles of wine. Then, they commenced to writing one another’s obituaries. Though I didn’t hear full details, I gathered that their objectives were to write fun, funny, memorable obituaries that described the personalities of their friends—peculiarities, warts, glitches, and all. The obituaries, as I understood it, were to celebrate the lives of the people about whom they were written. The real lives, not the after-the-fact, cosmetically altered lives.

As I thought about this obituary-writing party, I considered how different an all-male event of this type might be. The men, to start, would not partake of wine. Instead, the drink of choice would be Scotch or bourbon or beer. A few of them would abstain and, instead, would drink coffee. And the men, I supposed, would recall their friends’ pratfalls, golf blunders, and hunting accidents. On the more serious side, they would attribute to their friends attributes such as bravery, gallantry, grit, determination, and protectorship of the family. If they allowed themselves to be even remotely maudlin, they might recall a loving spouse, loving father, and steadfast friend; they likely would go no farther, no deeper. Allowing one’s emotions to go on display endangers one’s masculinity.

The women, on the other hand, might recall characteristics that revealed a carefree, light-hearted person who embraced life and lived it to the fullest. They might remember a gentle person who got the most joy from helping her friends in their times of need. They might recall a fun-loving person who thrived on laughter and whimsy. Stories would abound about uninhibited and delightfully inappropriate peals of laughter in somber environments. Recollections of tender moments, interspersed with memories of fierce determination, would describe not the consummate woman but a real human being whose life touched everyone around her.

Perhaps I’m drawing too great a distinction between men and women, but I think it’s necessary to accentuate the differences between them to understand why I find women more interesting. Their conversations seem broader in scope and they delve deeper into matters that…matter. That is not to say I do not find conversations with men interesting. Yet for some reason that I can’t quite pin down, I’m more comfortable engaging in conversation with women. I don’t feel the need to be as careful of what I say, lest I be silently but obviously judged as insufficiently masculine. I suppose part of the disconnect is that I have almost no interest in the go-to conversation for men—sports. “How ’bout them Cowboys?” My disinterest generally results in my exclusion from the conversation; which is, I’ll admit, better than being included.

Insecurities. Sometimes they can be endearing. But sometimes they can be debilitating. It all depends on context. Use those sentence fragments as a conversation-starter with a woman and then do the same with a man. I’ll take odds that the woman will find the subject fascinating and will readily engage in conversation. The man, though, will awkwardly attempt to change the subject to a topic that is safer; that is, one that doesn’t risk emotional revelation.

I think it’s obvious that I am opinionated about the dimensions of maleness-femaleness. If I allow myself to think more deeply about the matter and force myself to look at the issue rationally, I have to admit I tend to focus on relatively minor things that bother me. “Bother me” doesn’t quite describe the sense I feel; it’s more like “make me realize I do not fully understand the situation.” A lack of understanding, though, doesn’t always keep me from having an unwavering opinion. That’s what opinionated is all about.

After the fact, I berate myself for having failed to soak my feet, ankles, and legs with Deep Woods Off. I curse the laziness responsible for the absence of insect repellent around my belt line. And I express displeasure at the bankrupt ineffectiveness of lotions sold as treatments for the creatures’ bites. The creatures to which I am referring, of course, are the larvae of “trombiculid mites,” otherwise known as chiggers. Until I moved to Arkansas, just over five years ago, I had never (to my knowledge and recollection) been bitten by the savage beasts. But since my arrival, I have encountered the monsters every summer. Scars, courtesy of scratching the itches their bites cause, remain today from those first awful bites around my feet and my belt line.

At last count, I had nine (or was it eleven?) chigger bites. Mostly around my feet, but a few on my lower legs and my inner thighs. I spend very little time walking through or around tall grasses. In fact, I avoid exposure to places where chiggers are said to thrive. Yet I somehow manage to attract the beasts. They dine on my flesh and cause awful itching thereafter.

From what I’ve read, chiggers are EVERYWHERE. But I’ve never encountered them until I moved to Arkansas. Hence my displeasure with this state. Not only is Arkansas a decidedly conservative state (conservative, in this context, being a synonym for willfully stupid), it is a breeding ground for aggressive chiggers. Chiggers are too small to see, but apparently have enormous teeth that rip into flesh like demonic chain saws. And, apparently, their saliva contains an ingredient that is, in effect, an aggressive antonym of calamine lotion. That is, chigger slobber causes itching an order of magnitude more distressing than abdominal surgery without amnesia.

It’s probably a good thing that I do not have ready access to a handgun, lest I injure myself  (or worse) while discharging it in an effort to shoot to kill the little red bastards. I’ve done enough damage simply by scraping the flesh down to bone while scratching the itches caused by chigger bites.  If I thought I could assassinate the monsters by smashing them with a hammer, I am sure I’d have massive bruises all over my feet and legs. I wonder whether the pain associated with dousing my legs in gasoline and striking a match would be more or less intense than the discomfort of chigger bites? I may well find out.

I am not happy with the chigger population in and around my home. I want to evict them but I don’t know how. Henceforth, I think I’ll fill a very deep tub with Deep Woods Off and will, before I leave the house, step into the tub. I will stoop down until the liquid covers every inch of me, up to my neck. Only then will I feel comfortable walking out the door. But I’ll carry a flame-thrower with me, incinerating everything in front of me to be sure I don’t risk another bite.

Yeah, that’s it.

Daydreams—call them fantasies if you like—keep a person fresh. Those reveries paint pictures in our minds of an environment in which we exercise control of the world around us. They allow us to be bold, daring, adventuresome; without fear of the consequences we might face in the “real world.” But daydreams are the real world. They simply hide from everyone but the dreamer. Yet they lack the danger that’s present in the real world. Yet they have the potential of making us believe the potential dangers are surmountable. And so they can push us to do or say things we ought not do or say. And therein lies the peril of “harmless” self-induced hallucination. When we begin to merge the real with the imagined, when we blend experience with delusion, that’s when our worlds begin to fall apart.

Now, it sounds like I’m describing a mental breakdown, a psychotic break. But I’m not. I’m describing a wishful state in which the desires and armors that surround us in our fantasies interfere with our ability to suppress our emotions and avoid emotional collisions.

In fact, I’m pretending to understand and present a state of emotional pairing about which I know almost nothing. But I’m writing as if I understand this pairing, if it exists, as deeply as one possibly can. Why would I do this? The reasons are too numerous and too complex for me to explain in the time I have given myself to write this bogus diatribe. Suffice it to say I am imitating the style of charlatans and other swindlers and fakes who present themselves as highly knowledgeable of a subject, with the objective of conning and convincing others to believe them; to come around to their bigoted, jaundiced point of view.

Daydreams can be useful outlets of emotions. For example, when thinking about the charlatans whose style I said I was imitating, I might imagine hacking them to death with a blunt axe. Imagining the act might satisfy my lust for revenge against someone who cheats and cons others. Without that emotional outlet, I might make it my mission to find a blunt axe and put it to use. On the other hand, as I suggested above, my imagination might trigger the very act by convincing me that I would not face consequences for my action. Again, I am making this up as I go. I don’t have a clue what I’m writing about. I’m just writing.

Back to my original point. Daydreams keep a person fresh. Whether true or not, I believe it to be a fact. We create experience by daydreaming/fantasizing/hallucinating/imagining. Daydreaming bends our minds just enough to flex them, but not so much as to break them. Well, usually not so much as to break them. Charles Manson may be the exception that proves the rule. Or maybe not. I know virtually nothing of Charles Manson’s mental state, though I surmise that he was as crazy as they come. I had forgotten (assuming I ever knew) that he died in prison in 2017 at the age of 83. Manson was not fresh, in my opinion. He was stale and rotten; his brain was a container filled with putrid, fetid, rancid ideas gone bad.

Somehow, my original point has been lost or derailed. I think derailed is a better term. My point now resembles a damaged locomotive, switched to the wrong track and pushed to its maximum speed as it approaches a section of vandalized track, the rails bent and deformed, with pieces missing. When the heavy engine reaches the broken track, it lurches to the right and comes off the rails, ripping through dense forest, splintering huge trees and setting the woodlands ablaze. I don’t think my original point has the capacity to inflict such damage, actually. So maybe the simile was a bit overblown. More than a bit, actually.

While I’m writing, I might as well mention that my deck remains unfinished. And it will until the weather cooperates. The weather must be suitable for more sanding and, following that, painting. Also, I need to get some more pieces of lumber, but that can wait. I do wish I knew a dependable handyman who could and would come help when the time is right. Wish in one hand, spit in the other, and see which one fills up fastest.  I daydream about the deck being finished and the wood railing being replaced with horizontal wire railing. See? I did manage to get daydreams back into this flight of fancy. This flight of fancy is much like the flight of a large soaring bird, high on LSD and cocaine, doing cartwheels in the sky. I swear I remember that “doing cartwheels in the sky” were among the lyrics to a song I heard in the 1960s or 1970s, but Mother Google will neither confirm nor deny it. Enough of this. I need to go sit on the deck and imagine it complete and serving as a setting for an evening gathering over drinks and hors d’ouvres.

Once again, I came across an article on Facebook about cannibal sandwiches. But it wasn’t another article. It was the same article, repackaged for distribution by NPR through Facebook on Saturday, June 22, 2019. Facebook claims the link to the original post was published four hours ago, but it already had 994 comments by the time I came across it about 4:30 this morning. The link goes to the article I first saw in March; it was dated March 29. I won’t go into any detail, as I wrote about it on March 30.

I wonder why NPR decided to repackage three-month-old information? Could it be that the organization has run out of general interest stories? I don’t know. But it just seems odd to me that, after such a short time, the piece would appear again. Yet I don’t know that it’s appearing on Facebook again. Maybe it’s the first time. Maybe, when I came across the article three months ago, I didn’t find it on Facebook.  My blog post doesn’t say; it just says I came upon it on Wisconsin Public Radio’s website. So, perhaps I didn’t come upon it on Facebook. Maybe, instead, today’s NPR post actually new.

I wonder how much other information I come across as I skim the web is not new information but, instead, is simply repackaged old information. If the article this morning had been a few months older, perhaps I would not have remembered having written about it so recently. I know some of my posts here are essentially repeats of something I thought about and wrote about earlier, unintentionally repackaged ruminations that I didn’t recall having. Or, that I vaguely recalled having but could not find the original, so I thought my “memory” of having written about them earlier was false.

This post is probably one of the least interesting and most useless ones I’ve written. So I’ll stop writing it.

I should have known better, but I did it anyway. I came to a stop, put the car in “park,” pressed the emergency flasher button, and got out of the car. I then dragged two large, broken tree limbs blocking the street to the side of the road, then pulled them off the pavement into the high grass.

Many hours later, the painful itching around my ankles and much higher, around my belt line, tell me chiggers lay in wait in that tall grass. And they took full advantage of my good deed to latch onto my flesh and drink greedily of the fluid stored beneath my skin. That damn good deed did not go unpunished. I could have left the limbs in the roadway for someone else to have moved. Or for someone else to have run over them, damaging their car’s undercarriage in the process.

There were no good options, no good outcomes. Only difficult choices with unpleasant outcomes. Of course, I could have driven home, lathered my feet and legs with something offensive to chiggers, and returned to do my good deed. But I didn’t. I actually thought of that, but considered that someone might have motored by in the intervening time, ruining their car in the process. So I stopped and did my damn good deed.

No one saw me do my damn good deed. No one would have seen me drive around the limbs in the road, leaving them for someone else to deal with. So I didn’t even get the pleasure of seeing admiring glances cast my way for stopping. The only way I can receive accolades is to write about my damn good deed and hope a neighbor happens upon my post. It would be the first time in history that a neighbor happened upon my post. Less likely things have happened. The war in Vietnam, for example, and mankind’s landing on the moon.

The only good to have come out of the episode is that a few chiggers died, crushed as my fingernails scraped across their miserable, bloated, parasitic bodies filled with fluids extracted from my flesh.

I don’t have it in me today. I do not have the wherewithal to write about last night’s storms or the film we saw yesterday afternoon or the meal we ate last night. And my philosophical side is torn and ragged and frayed. I’m tired and angry at the world and disappointed in myself. I feel guilty for being the brittle, reactive, immature bastard I am from time to time. No, not from time to time. Frequently. Often. Too often. The aforementioned having been said, I’m documenting this unhappy mood as a reminder that my flaws are insufficiently hidden away. They are unsafely visible. They should be burned and buried. But what would be left? What’s the opposite of flaw? Strength? Nothing like that here. Today can only get better.

I read an interesting but painfully true cartoon caption this morning.

You don’t want to hear my opinion. You want to hear your opinion coming out of my mouth.

Too often, that’s true. And the thirst for affirmation is the reason right-wingers watch Sean Hannity and left-wingers watch Rachel Maddow. When we seek confirmation that our perspectives are the “correct” perspectives, we give aid and comfort to the enemy of enlightenment. When we doggedly search for corroboration that our opinions are right and others’ opinions are wrong—skillfully avoiding exposure to information that might damage the credibility of our points of view—we willfully reject opportunities to grow, both intellectually and morally.

As painful as it is for me to hear Sean Hannity utter even “good morning,” I think it’s my obligation to hear, from time to time, what he and others like him have to say. It is difficult, indeed, to weed out opinions masquerading as facts, but it is a necessary obstacle. Even in my left-leaning universe, I often have the same experience listening to Rachel Maddow. While she and I often think alike, I get more than a little miffed when she, like her right-wing counterpart, presents as facts her persuasively-dressed opinions.

It gets worse, though. As much as I hate the phrase and its chief advocate, “fake news” is a real phenomenon. Fox, CNN, and even NPR on occasion stray far, far away from presenting hard facts and, instead, present “information” in a way that supports their very obvious biases. Other so-called news media don’t even attempt to shade or hide their biases from view; they lie with abandon and fabricate stories that, if true, would support their jaundiced perspectives. But the stories they present are, indeed, lies. Deeply biased opinions dressed in “facts” created out of thin air.

One of the problems facing us today is one of our own making: we reward media that strokes our egos and feeds our biases. If facts that fly in the face of our deeply-held beliefs are presented to us, we change the channel or switch to another URL or turn the dial until we find the comfort of a confirming opinion, a voice that agrees with our own.

Truly, we “can’t handle the truth.” Too often, it hurts so much we prefer lies. The media knows we can’t handle the truth. Even when the legitimate media is forced to report information that conflicts with the perspectives of its audience, the facts are presented in ways that soften the blow.

Politicians have learned the same lesson. So they fabricate, stretch, bend, and otherwise do damage to facts so their constituents will continue to support them. A politician who votes to dismantle financial oversight agencies will lie to his constituents, telling them the agencies are endangering constituents’ privacy. In the meantime, he will accept money from financial institutions that wanted the agencies to disappear. And, when constituents begin to suffer from those institutions’ malfeasance, the politician will lie again and lay blame at the feet of the members of the opposition party. Everyone hears what they want to hear, because they have taught the communicators to say what they want to have said.

Until John Q. Public and his female counterpart insist on getting the hard facts, we will continue down the road toward happy but fatal ignorance. I am nearing the point of turning off any media that puts its own spin on reality. While I feel obligated to hear both sides, I think the best way to get there is to get the straight facts, first, then see what both sides are saying about them. In that way, the biases and interpretations can be screened and identified. Or, maybe, one or more media outlets will take a long, hard look at themselves and will insist on getting journalism right. Still, we’ll need to accept the possibility that we’ll hear both facts and opinions we don’t want to hear.  That’s really nothing new, but it’s infrequent.

Yesterday afternoon, our neighbors took us out for a boat ride on Lake Balboa. Their small catamaran party barge accommodates four people quite well and could, I imagine, hold up to eight comfortably. Yesterday, though, it was just the four of us. We skirted the shoreline, floating into dozens of coves, peering at large lakeside homes. Many, probably most, of the houses have large decks and/or big verandas that must have superb views of the lake and the lakeshore. Their views, though, could not be better than our view from the water.

We took our time wandering around the lake, putting in at about 2:00 p.m. and docking again around 5:00. I used sun block on my forehead and neck, but didn’t bother putting any on my arms and upper thighs, the two areas most often in the sun’s rays. Today, I have slightly red lower arms and decidedly red upper thighs. Just the front of my leg, above my knees. I suspect I’ll peel before long.

After the boat ride, which was made better with the bottle of sangria our friends brought along and the watermelon cubes we provided, we opted for an early dinner at Home Plate. All of us ordered prime rib with various sides. Nice way to cap off a delightful afternoon!

I could have spent the day prepping our deck for paint, but the last few days of doing that convinced me I needed to kick back and heal my sore muscles. It was the right thing to do.

I wish we could reciprocate our neighbors’ hospitality in some fashion. I suspect we’ll find a way. We must. It’s only right.

There’s a chill in the air, if one believes 61 degrees can constitute a chill. And I believe it can, when one finds oneself in mid-June in the Bible belt. It’s not an uncomfortable chill, though. It’s the sort of chill that accelerates the heartbeat and makes one grateful the temperatures aren’t hovering near 80 in the early post-dawn hours. It’s only a few minutes before six and the sun’s light is sufficiently bright to make nighttime a distant memory. I love cool mornings that hold the promise of a warm, but not hot, day ahead. Tonight’s low, though, is forecast to dip only to 70. Dammit. I prefer 61.

***

Today, I expect I’ll spend time outside, sanding wood damaged by too-aggressive power-washing. And I’ll smooth the edges of paint still attached to the wooden substrate. If time and energy permit, I’ll start painting, but I doubt I’ll finish even the first coat. There’s a lot of deck to paint and there’s only a little energy in my muscles and bones. Depending on our neighbors’ decision as to whether to go boating tomorrow, I may continue the job tomorrow. If they opt to take us out on the lake, though, completion of painting will wait until another time, when my muscles and bones have had a chance to rest and recover from what I’ve been putting them through these last few days.

***

I’ve been coughing almost non-stop, it seems, for several months now. I think I might have an allergy of some kind, though it could be the aftermath of surgery and radiation and chemotherapy. Spending time inhaling paint dust and pollen can’t help. Does a man ever really grow up and become a responsible adult? I’m stubborn and stupid and forever a child.

***

I just watched a deer amble by the window. It looked like the same deer I watched last night, just before dark, heading in the opposite direction. Last night, the deer walked up the hill beside the house to the driveway, where it took a sharp left and walked through the front “yard” and disappeared from sight. I enjoy watching wildlife meander through the neighborhood. Even though I know deer tend to eat gardens and flowers and other carefully tended plants, I’d rather have them around than not. The armadillos and raccoons, on the other hand, are welcome to relocate out of state.

***

I’ve let my coffee get cold again. I did that yesterday, too. But yesterday, I had an excuse. While my wife slept, I cooked bacon and prepared the batter for pancakes. Those tasks drew my attention away from my coffee. The pancake batter, especially, required my attention. I didn’t make the “normal” pancake batters. I jazzed it up with the addition of baking powder and vegetable oil and sugar and vanilla extract. That jazzing prevented me from focusing on the coffee. Unfortunately, the jazzing had no appreciable impact on the flavor or fluff of the pancakes. It was as if the additions constituted wastes of time, energy, and products. I’ll complain to the pancake batter adjustment corps, the party responsible for the suggestions I followed.

The handyman texted me this morning. He had “just” been told by my neighbors that he had committed to work on their driveway on Friday. Unfortunately, that meant he could not come to work on my deck as promised. He asked, how about Saturday?

My response wasn’t especially friendly. No! And, by the way, your contract calls for payment upon completion, but I acquiesced to your request to pay the first 2/3 because of rain delays and your need for money. And you repay me by accepting a NEW piece of business instead of finishing mine? It was longer, but no less unfriendly. He responded an hour later, asking if I wanted him to come over then to do the painting. I was away, so I told him no. I didn’t tell him that there was no way in hell I was going to let him work on my deck in my absence; I want to be present to correct his mistakes. Plus, he thinks he just needs to paint. No, he needs to say, scrape, blow the dust off, and THEN paint. Plus, it’s a 2-coat job. But I don’t think he understands that.

Am I peeved? Just a shade. A tad. A bit. A smidgeon.

I doubt I’ll have him finish the job. I suspect I will do it myself. I’m at least as capable as he is. I’d rather have someone more capable, but I’m tired to trying to find such a person.

Enough.

Today, we took a little day trip. We drove to Hope, AR, where we ate lunch at an interesting little burger joint (decent, but they badly overcooked my “medium-rare” burger). Then, we drove to Magnolia, AR where we had a slice of pie each. Neither was especially wonderful. But it was pie. At least. I would have preferred uninspired apple or uninspired cherry. But that’s just me.

After we got home, my favorite wife called the only independently-owned pizza spot within a 15 minute drive and ordered a super-duper-supreme pizza or whatever they call theirs. We picked it up and ate half of it. The other half rests in the refrigerator, awaiting tomorrow’s hunger.

Our good friends are in the midst of a multi-state road-trip. Tonight, they are spending their time in Tombstone, Arizona. We communicate, in snippets, via text message. I wish we were with them. I’d prefer communicating person-to-person.

***

I wrote something on Facebook a day or two ago, since removed, about suicide. I opted to remove it because I sensed it might seem like a call for pity, even though that’s not what it was. I was just saying, basically, suicide should not be illegal. Since then (and for a long time before then), I’ve been thinking that I think about suicide far more frequently than I should. I wonder whether my periodic thoughts on the matter might be unhealthy symptoms that I may not be as mentally healthy as I ought to be. My thoughts are far too complex for me to attempt to explore them here. But I think maybe I am giving myself warning signs. If so, I’ve been sending them for years, but have taken great care to hide them from the rest of the world.

All the above should not be taken as a warning. Really. But I think people, more people than any of us might imagine, consider suicide. It may be a fleeting thought, it may be a constant mental burden; but it’s there, somewhere, in the back of the mind.

***

The time is closing in on 10:30 p.m. I have no reason to go to bed, but no compelling reason to stay awake. My life is not sufficiently exciting to require my eyelids to remain open. So I shall go to sleep. Soon. Before I write something I can’t unwrite.

I spent a large part of the day yesterday deconstructing and then reconstructing the sixteen-foot-long step that leads from the upper level of the back deck to the lower level. I did this because the contractor didn’t pay attention to how the original step was built and, as evidence of his incompetence, built the new step with a four-inch gap between the step and the side railing. Just enough space to be a trip and fall hazard. Plus, it looked bad. He insisted he had to build it that way. By the time I noticed his screw-up, I was too tired of correcting him to fight it. So I let him leave, thinking I would rebuild the step myself. So I did. I’ll have to replace a 2 x 6 x 16 that’s not quite right because of the way it was originally cut to accommodate a drain for the roof gutter, but I can do that anytime. For now, though, the step is as it should be. Before I noticed the latest screw-up, I caught a more serious one in time to rectify it before he had gotten too far. He was building the step two inches too high. He “thought” it had been built with a 2 x 8 x 16. I stopped him and explained to him that what he was doing was wrong. It took a while, but he finally figured it out. A light bulb, quite dim but with barely enough illumination, came on in his dark little brain and he “saw the light.”

I’m afraid the guy and his helper are handymen by virtue of the fact that they own hammers, not because they have any handyman skills. But, they have replaced a number of rotting or split deck boards, so progress has been made. And they’ve power washed the deck (though too aggressively—fuzzy wood fibers are visible on many, many boards) and scraped a bit. There were to have been back yesterday to paint, but they “got behind on another job.” So, according to a text the contractor sent to me, they will return Friday to paint. That’s the same day he committed to doing some other work for a neighbor. I asked the neighbor if her job had been pushed back, too. She responded via email that she had called him and reminded him that he had promised to do her work on Friday. He was confused, she said, but finally agreed that he would do her work on Friday and would tell me. He hasn’t told me anything yet. We’ll see.

My experience with “handymen” and their ilk has been disappointing, to say the least. The few people who do good work in the Village and who are dependable are backed up for months. And they are expensive. I’m reaching the point that I am willing to engage people who are expensive. And if I can wait, I will. It’s maddening to hire people who don’t show up or who show up only with hammers when the job calls for saws. And who do not know how to use a tape measure. Arrgghhh!

Once the deck is painted, I have committed to seeking out truly skilled, competent contractors to give us quotes on several other projects. Once we select the one we like, I’ll be satisfied to be put on the project list, even if it’s months hence. I just don’t want to babysit people who know less about what they are being paid to do than I.

Enough griping and moaning. We’re going to go for a drive today, destination as yet undetermined. I think, though, it will involve pie-seeking. Janine found something about what is said to be among Arkansas’ best locations for pie. This appears to be calling her. I am happy to accommodate. Where are these pies? We shall see.