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Author: Richard Kimball

TO THE FIRES FOR YOU!

 She broiled children’s brains over the fiery pits of Hell. It was the mid-1950s when Holy Sister Mary Margaret got her chance to imprint on the supple believing minds of six- and seven-year-olds.

She would be dead now, and the children of the world are better off for it. Should I think her still alive, I would have a moral duty to seek her out, rip out her tongue and stitch her lips closed forever. In the 1950’s, she and her ilk could cause serious damage to any child, not yet aware that some grownups grew down instead.

Back then and sometimes even now, religious instruction was not so much faith as it was fact. It was a fact that the “everlasting fires of Hell,” as Sister Mary Margaret put it, “was where your flesh would be consumed by fire, yet be continually reborn so that you would be in agony for all eternity.” God’s desire as she saw it, was to get you to Heaven through your fear of Hell.

According to the good sister talking to children, the great joy of Heaven was not to be found in mounds of candy bars, cookies, cakes, and endless feature cartoons, but the ability to “look upon the face of God.”  To a six-year-old, my age at the time, I simply wondered how someone could possibly be so pretty, as to beat out a Root Beer Float.

Holy Sister Mary Margaret had much to offer, not the least of which was her informing us that it was not necessary to actually commit a sin in order to be guilty of the sin. All you had to do was think of a sin and you were equally guilty. This was very discouraging, my being guilty on so many layers of sin that I had no hope of escaping the fiery pits.

It was the stuff that put thinking and believing believers into insane asylums as they aged. At six, I had not yet come to realize that such nuns torturing children with their unforgiving, cruel nature of God should be imprisoned, if not themselves thrown into that everlasting roaster.

Holy Sister Mary Margaret understood that our minds were too young to comprehend such horror. To remedy this unacceptable situation, she would tell us stories that were sure to reach into our imaginations with lasting effect. One juicy illustration was her telling of the “very real possibility” that our classroom might be broken into by Nazis. Nazis, who would shove us up against the wall and then ask with a gun pressed against our heads, “Are you a Catholic?” The holy Sister Mary Margaret, thinking she would tempt a correct answer said. “If you deny that you are a Catholic, they will let you live.” But then quickly followed with, “If you love God and admit that you are Catholic, then you will be shot and experience the enormous joy of looking upon the face of God.” Again, images of Root Beer Floats danced in my mind.

Years later I would recall it all, thinking of all the children she must have tortured with that kind of question, and fanaticized entering her classroom, gun in hand, and offering her that very choice.

However, at six years old, I hung on every word she said and believed every story that horrid human being told. That was until she told us how God handled the dead guy.

The previous week she had gone through some pains to explain the difference between a Venial Sin and a Mortal one. With Venial Sin (a small sin), God would place you in Purgatory, a place much the same as Hell only with a possibility that at some future time, after you experience adequate flesh burning you would be given a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free-Card. However, Mortal Sin was a sin so egregious that you roasted for all eternity in the real Hell. She just loved telling a little story or two to make certain her little charges could understand.

All her stories kept us in frozen attention, but the story about the dead guy stands alone and still rots away in my brain.

The following, minus imperfections in my memory, is a fair if not precise representation of Sister Mary Margaret’s example for Thou Shall Not Kill.

“A long, long time ago there was a man suffering from a very strange disease causing him to fall into a deep, deep sleep where his heart quieted to a soft undetectable murmur. People thought he was dead. They dug a deep six-foot hole, took his body, and placed it in the tight confines of a coffin and nailed down the lid. They lowered the coffin into the pit and filled it over with dirt.

Sometime later the poor sick man woke up in the darkness. Alone and unable to move in the black tightness of his coffin, the man realized his predicament, was terrified and began to scream. But in the blackness, six feet under the ground, he knew no one could hear his cries for help. Unable to withstand the horror of it, the man drove the forefingers of his hands into the temples of his head to kill himself. Even he, today, is burning in the everlasting fires of Hell.”

That night when I went to bed I could not sleep. I was tired but every time I started to doze off, I woke with a start. If I slept, I was sure someone would think me dead. Finally, in the wee hours of the night I had an idea. I got up, stumbled over to my desk and switched on the light. Searching around in the drawers I found my drawing book and ripped off a little piece of paper and wrote out a short note. I then quietly crept down the hall to the bathroom where my mother kept the safety pins. A few hours later she came in to wake me up for Sunday church. Pinned to the middle of my pajama shirt, where no one could possibly miss it, was the note: “Pleese do not berry me, not dead.”

You must understand that I believed the Holy Sister Mary Margaret’s story, absolutely. I had not the slightest doubt that was exactly what God did. Only, the effect of the story was not what the Holy Sister hoped. That morning at church, sitting at my mother’s side as she dutifully focused on the word of God, I was staring above the alter where Christ was draped on his cross, thinking, “You Poo Poo Head!”

Today, I think a kind of God may exist but one that is wholly unlike the insanely narcissistic jackass preached by so many religions.

My best guess is if there is a God, it is far beyond any lowly human’s ability to comprehend its existence and would clearly be powerful enough to talk to me directly, without need of some self-anointed human middleman. The same middlemen so galactically arrogant as to presume to speak in God’s name that billions pay homage to and fund their nonsense.

If there is a God, and I hope there is, he already knows how to, and actually does speak to me directly through the guilt, shame, pain, and pleasures I feel with my every intention and action I take.

Don’t others think of the unimaginable, often inconceivable, grotesque agonies that consume the utterly innocence? No all-powerful God — not yours and not mine — can answer for the unfairness of life, the damnable repugnance of the hulking injustice that puts one existence in the convulsions of an agonizing death before a single step is had and another’s anointed with a passel of servants to care for their every need.

The line, “God works in mysterious ways,” exposes the poppy cock heart of much religious training for any willing to open their own eyes. What is the mystery in a child who has done nothing, can do nothing, unable to speak, raked with painful cancerous cysts, gasping a final breath in a struggle to whisper, “Please help me mommy?” Every conscious soul on this planet would struggle so to stop such a horror if they could, but the “all-powerful” God of organized religions does not.

The incomprehensible suffering of incalculable numbers of starved, enslaved, diseased, burned, bombed, drowned, murdered, maimed, tortured living things repudiates any notion of, or any need to be humbled before the nonsense of an all-powerful, “loving,” living God. I may have a good life, you may have a good life, and we feel compelled to thank our lucky stars, but we do not represent, nor can we poll the countless, faultless others who never asked to be born and now largely reside amongst the gratefully dead.

Richard Kimball

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GOLD BAR BOB

In a normal world someone standing at the apex of political power going to prison for 11 years would saturate the news. After all, Bob Menendez was charged with leading foreign-policy, and overseeing billions in foreign aid, the sale of arms to foreign powers, holding confirmation hearings, NOT the cash discovered stuffed in his boots and pockets or the gold bars anointing him with his nick name.

I have witnessed such sliminess at every level both as a Congressional staffer, State Senator, Corporation Commissioner, a non-profit leader, and as me.

Sometimes the payouts were enormous from those willing and able to dip the largest shovels into special interest public projects.

While others just getting started get their beaks wet with offers of free trips, premium seating or just some movie tickets.   I loved movies, and although I refused all others, I went to see a few free films.

It is a cycle, little known, little written about, but contagious with those elected.  You grow a big head; think you are somehow worthwhile and more deserving than those that voted for you.

Richard Kimball

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TRUMP IS LEMON REFRESHING

He does whatever he can to do, what he said he would do, legal, illegal, everything and anything that can be done to do what he promised.  Can you name a single other President willing to do so much for what he said he believed?

What a different world it would be if Obama, Bush or even Clinton had the mind set to be so craven and committed to their cause as is Trump.

If precedent, the rule of law, decency and conscience is going to be so thoroughly trashed, I wish it had been trashed by a President concerned with issues like global warming, an educated citizenry, health care, insurance companies, or just a love of people struggling to become part of this glorious achievement we call America, just as my ancestors and yours likely did.

It is as if a nincompoop stumbled into the Pitt of Endless Disenchantment where eons of candidate elected promises have gone withered and died and came out still simple and with a simpleton’s idea:  I am going to bust ass, on my absurdities, right or wrong and see if we (or I) get traction.

He will find great success, his number of supporters will continue to grow as “America First” takes root and finds purchase, up and until Americans discover they aren’t part of his America.

Richard Kimball

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“THE CHOOSEN,”

 So says the Bible ! 

Majestic elephants at a Colorado zoo do not have the legal right to pursue their release, Colorado’s highest court said.

The ruling from their Supreme Court follows a similar court defeat when  Happy, Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jubo, pursued a long-held legal process for prisoners challenging their detention in an effort to reduce sentence and live in an elephant sanctuary instead.

The Colorado court said its decision does not turn on our regard for these majestic animals, but because an elephant is not a person, they do not have standing. Thus as Isaiah 46:9 suggests: For we are the chosen and there is no other like us on earth!

So, it goes for the 680 vertebrate creations that have gone extinct and the 4,300 others – mammals, fish, birds and amphibians that have declined from human greed these past 50 years.

“His work is perfect,” says the bible even as we dismantle it, setting ourselves on the throne of judgement.

Richard Kimball

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CAPTURE THE FLAG

NO LONGER A CHILD’S GAME

We were all put on notice by those that knew him best:

His Vice President, Mike Pence: “Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”

His Attorney General, Bill Barr: He “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.”Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters” Newsletter.

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His  Secretary of Defense, James Mattis: “He tries to divide us.”

His Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper: “I think he’s unfit for office.”

 His Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley,  “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”

His Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson: “His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of US history was really limited.”.

 His Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley: “A terrible thing happened on January 6 and he called it a beautiful day.”

 His National Security Adviser, HR McMaster: “We saw the absence of leadership, really anti-leadership, and what that can do to our country.”

 His National Security Adviser, John Bolton: “I believe (foreign leaders) think he is a laughing fool.”

 His Chief of Staff, John Kelly: “A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law… God help us.”

 His Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, “I quit because I think he failed at being the president when we needed him to be that.”

 His Communications Director, Anthony Scaramucci: “He is the domestic terrorist of the 21st century.”

 His Communications Director, Stephanie Grisham: “I am terrified of him running in 2024.”

 His Homeland Security Adviser, Tom Bossert: .He “is an utter disgrace.”

 His White House lawyer, Ty Cobb: “Trump relentlessly puts forth claims that are not true.”

 His top aide in charge of his outreach to African Americans, Omarosa Manigault Newman: ” I could no longer be a part of this madness.”

Every thinking American: “THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE!”

Richard Kimball

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GONE ARE WE

If you are old, or as in the eyes of a teenager, about dead old, pitied, if cared about at all, you might remember stories from long ago parents: the miles walked to school, the starving children of China, the unfortunate pagan babies of Africa or just the garbage you could buy labeled, “Made in Japan.”

If you really get into those long-gone times, you might remember the joy found with an old board and a few nails making your palace in the trees, or one made from boards, sticks and rock dug into the dirt.  You might recall playing chaises with marbles and capturing someone’s prized steely, maybe demonstrating your turn around skills at Hopscotch, jump rope, or being cast off a merry-go-round, or that time jumping off a titer toter that seemed a good idea, maybe that swing where your mind sailed you to a new Olympic distance record.

Perhaps you can close your eyes and think back when it was too cold or wet outside, so you made do with that cozy little in-door house your parents let you create out of cushions, pillows, sheets and towels.

Playing house, dressing up in parents’ clothes come to mind.  Girls played hopscotch, jacks and jump rope while boys, if not playing football or basketball, found delight in who just farted or just some good long-distance spitting.

 For me, I add a kitchen knife and a game of splits, or  seeing what I could do to a stone with my dad’s eight iron.  

There was kite flying, bicycling with playing cards clipped in the spokes or just being Robin Hood with a tree branch and OH GOD his bow and arrow. Stevie Bogard, my best friend and I couldn’t hit a living thing that wasn’t a plant that Christmas morning with our new bows. When frustration set in, I challenged him to who could send an arrow the highest without a thought of its return trip when we panicked slamming into each as the arrows plunked into the dirt.

Our childhoods were stuffed with our imagination, glories won and lessons learned in a cacophony of gregarious social interactions.

ALL NOW GONE AND REPLACED:

Richard Kimball

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IN THE END A HORSE’S ASS

I always wanted to be her hero, her knight errant off on the road to right all wrongs, vanquishing any detractor, asserting my love month after month, year after year, to win her. I felt my efforts knew no end, no plan too distant, no event to extreme, just a perfect knight exemplar fighting her every foe to win her love.  In all, a life well lived only to find at its end, I was no knight. To her I had been, always been, damaged goods. I was to her not a hero, but a grief.

Such a blow one cannot bear.

Richard Kimball

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I AM HEADED TO JAIL?

I was young in 1974 when President Ford granted a “full and unconditional pardon” to Richard Nixon.

I thought that first punch in the face that we are NOT ALL CREATED EQUAL a freak occurrence!

Some have wealth, some do not.

Some wealthy earned it, some did not.

 Some have little but worked like dogs.

Some have nothing and did nothing.

What time has taught me is that what makes us equal is that none of us are equal under the rules of law.

Trump is not, you are not. There is not a single other one of us that would not be headed to jail this very day!

Richard Kimball

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THE TALK

As the word penis came out of her mouth, I would have willingly stretched out underneath an elephant turd and hoped its owner would take a step on it.

When a widowed mother asks a 13-year-old Catholic boy to take a seat “for the BIG TALK,” low organs will crinkle up into raisins frantically looking for somewhere they won’t exist.

It was some years earlier that my older brother Bobby, flatly stated, “Dad put his penis in Mom’s pussy and because of that I came out.”

“NO, NO! Say it isn’t so!

Richard Kimball

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BUCKLE UP: GOING TO BE A BUMPY YEAR!

LIKE TITANIC WE CALMLY SET SAIL WITHOUT BINOCULARS

Good people with thoughtful hearts seldom recognize how horrible an event can be and when they do, most sit frozen, drop jawed, as their heart is slowly eaten.

Titanic, The Gulf war, Deep Water Horizon, Pearl Harbor, Challenger, Chernobyl are amongst the many sufferings that could have been avoided if our better angels were heeded.

Now the most odious flight of all is about to take wing. As it has slimmed its way above to lord over us all, those saddened, thoughtful hearts hide in the cracks dreaming that lucidity and sanity will magically reappear.

No massive demonstrations planned, no public outrage evident, “Brownshirts” have won the day and there will be Hell to pay.

Richard Kimball

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JIMMY CARTER MY HERO

When former Texas governor John Connally took a private jet in 1980 to convince Iran not to release the hostages, the Carter Presidency was done. Such was the underhanded ugly, in old time politics.

Carter, the antithesis of what is to come, thought we should not only be the top military power but also “the champion of peace, champion of human rights, champion of the environment and the most generous nation on earth.”

Carter knew that knowledge was the only real source of human success and thus created the Department of Education.

Carter knew that bringing adversaries to the table and convincing them peace was a mutual advantage, might bare fruit and thus the Camp David Accords, which won for Begin and Sadat the Noble Prize.

Even out of the Presidency Carter spoke truth to power as when he was amongst the first to say, “There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq,” or when he suggested we cannot be peacemakers if American government leaders are seen as knee-jerk supporters of every action or policy of whatever Israeli government happens to be in power at the moment. That is the essential fact that must be faced.”

But mostly I loved Jimmy Carter for his devotion to us after his Presidency, his tireless journeys all over the globe to promote peace, health and justice and his passion for the less fortunate here at home.

All former Presidents retire, comfortably cocooning in their former glories. Not Jimmy Carter, my hero!

Twice my boss, first as my boss’s boss when I worked for Walter Mondale and second as a founder of an organization called Vote Smart where I was dogged on his example for 35 years as its President.

Richard Kimball

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THE CHRISTMAS GIFT

Like you, if you were lucky enough to have the perfect childhood, my young years looped around that one magical day. The days leading up to it were loaded with wonder and on the very morning of Christas Day an explosion of dreams come true.

But child time is short time and the day after came with thoughts of the eternity that existed before that day would roll around again.

Yet on the Christmas morning of 1960 my view was forever altered when I saw real magic.

Everything was as my years had come to expect: the glittering tinseled tree stretched to the ceiling, the felt, sequined Mr. and Mrs. Clause our grandfather had made hanging on the wall, the fireplace already aglow, and Mom and Dad in their robes holding cups of coffee. What was different was what was under the tree. The number and size of the packages did not fit under the boughs, and instead flushed out all about.

My eyes went big and wide at the wonder of it, unknowing that the biggest, best, most valuable lifelong gift I was about to receive wasn’t under the tree at all.

As always, I tore into the packages marked for me, and those marked from Santa or Mom and Dad were their normal great.

 What blew me away and affected me more than any wrapped package was this: the most perfectly wrapped gifts, often the most expensive gifts, were all marked “From Billy,” my 16-year-old, oldest brother.

Turns out he hadn’t spent all that money from his double newspaper route on himself. He spent it on us.

I would spend the next 65 years lighting up others just the way he lit me up that one Christmas morning when I was 11 years old.

I would never again receive a gift that beat my heart as hard as my giving one.

My brother did that for me when I was very young, and his giving had no end. Later he would do it for his own kids, and much later he did it again for me, when he dragged himself out of bed in the middle of the night just to hand me a seat in my first political job as an Arizona State Senator.

Richard Kimball

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Hand in Hand with Jesus

I know it is an odd thing when I say Jesus talks to me. But somehow, he finds a way. 

If I do good, I am kind, thoughtful and giving, he inflates my senses of self-worth and joy.

If I do bad, he loads me with self-doubt and roils my brain in the darkness of a sleepless night.

It is because of him, I never think of harassing, bullying, abusing or grabbing a woman by the pussy.

He talks to me about supporting the poor and needy, not judging or condemning others, or seeking revenge or retribution, or promoting conflict and division. All spot on with what he said and exampled in his life.

He also talks to me of the modern-day temple profiters pointing to their new leader who warps his every example into the most grotesque deformities persuading acceptance of a smothering of all he lived for.

Richard Kimball – more historian than Christian

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Tired of Fake News?

Go to:

Reuter

Associated Press

BBC

Wall Street Journal

Forbes

The Hill

Newsweek

NPR

Not much left in the world of unbiased news and even some of those I’ve listed struggle mightily to hold a toe in the lane of unopinionated.

Most of us just choose news elsewhere that plays sweet music for our own ears.

Richard Kimball

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THE BARBER BUTCHER

 The announcement was casually made in front of our living room mirror as Mom stroked my two-year-old hair, “We are going to get this cut.” The shock was instant. I was going to be “cut.” Cutting hurt and I had no reason to believe cutting my hair would be any less painful than cutting off fingers or toes.

 My protests, apparently laughable, were ignored, and I was unjustly packed into the family’s Packard and off we went.

 Entering the shop there he stood, as sinister a sight as any little boy had ever seen. He just stood motionless looking down at me. Recognizing my fear, that grim-faced, slick-haired, spectacled little man with the tiny mustache and stiff white shirt grimaced and looked up at my mom. I was doomed.

 My terror was splayed open for all to see as I took in the various fluid-filled jars containing combs and cutting devices, along with assorted objects plugged into electrical sockets behind him. And the chair, OH GOD that chair, what was it?  Huge with various handles and levers and a long leather strap swaying at its side. I lost it!

 Dismissing a child’s fears as simple childishness is so convenient to an adult who has long forgotten the traumas of their own first-time childhood horrors: the time you first got the needle at the doctor’s office, wobbled and crashed that first two-wheeler attempt, the dark that came at night, when you first rode The Hammer at the State Fair, or just the creaking noises in the closet when all were asleep. . . and a hundred other childhood traumas. 

 Most adults could easily revisit those fears by trying a bungee jump or first sky dive, taking a quick dip into a frozen lake or maybe a bit of harmless water boarding – all would likely do the trick and give a taste of what we have forgotten about first-time events. And you will never have so many first-time events as you did as a child.

 Anyway, I stood in front of the barber butcher, and he was going to cut me. For some incomprehensible reason the person I trusted most in life, picked up a box, placed it on the torture device and stuck me to it – then let the butcher have his way with his sharp pointy objects.  My fear was intense and real.  My mother, like all mothers, knew such fears absurd, but mine also had the presence of mind to see an opportunity for posterity and documented the event.

Richard Kimball

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A MOMENT OF CLARITY FOR LIBERALS

Biden pardons his own of crimes that deserved the due process all the rest of us agreed to live by and do whether we like it or not. 

As fortune would have it you do not have, I don’t have, none of us has a private President with the power to give you a “Get Out of Jail” free card.

If you are a liberal supporting this pardon and feel not at all responsible for the soils that grew a Trump and what is to come, Trump is the seed that you sowed.

Richard Kimball

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ESSIE

  I was sitting in my highchair looking out the window at my dad’s Packard when she set a bowl of soup in front of me. It had to have been the Campbell’s kind. I could see the bits of drowned vegetables and occasionally flaking cubes of chicken, but what caught my eye was the teensy weensy, perfectly round, shiny bits of oil that floated on the top.    I wanted to know what they were but was not yet far enough along in life to manage an inquiry. I was still having enough trouble managing a capture with my spoon.

  She stood behind me that morning, all round and dressed in white, but black. Her name was Essie, our maid and cook. My mother did not have her help often and I do not remember much about her other than the chicken she fried, great chicken my older brothers later assured me. Chicken that our mother, the German antithesis to fine dining, could never duplicate.

  A year or so later, I visited Essie’s house. She lived in a home very unlike our own.  My mother was bringing her some Christmas gifts, and I happened to be in the back seat. 

 We lived in a big house. I didn’t know it. We lived in the nicest neighborhood.  I did not know it.  As we turned onto Essie’s street the houses became tightly jammed, any half-dozen of which could have easily fit into our front yard.  As best I can recall, there were no driveways, and the yards were all barren dirt with a few broken toys, flat balls and scraps of various objects scattered about. Inside, where doors would be, there were hanging sheets and there was one stuffed tattered chair. The walls were unpainted with one wall having a large chunk of missing plaster which commanded my attention because I could not imagine the purpose of the wooden slats that were now exposed underneath. 

 Above all, I remember that Essie had a family; this was a very big surprise. It never occurred to me that she would be a wife, have children, a home, a life.  Essie was just our maid.

  I did not feel sorry, have any sense of pity, I was not old enough to know such things.  I only recall being confused, wanting to leave and being happy that my parents chose not to live that way.

  I would not see those kinds of living conditions again for 15 years, not until I stood in the dump three of my college buddies and I could afford and used to eat, sleep, drink, and smoke dope.

Richard Kimball

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Happy Thanksgiving

It was a grand Thanksgiving feast.  I had rented two enormous side by side beach houses able to bed a party of 20 along with my two dogs. My wife and I prepared a fabulous meal with all the standard sides of Potatoe, asparagus, muffins, cranberry’s, some of those God afoul jarred pearl onions and topped by the most scrumdiddleumpcious pumpkin and pecan pies. All centered of course by a turkey.

The turkey was my one and only responsabilty…..well along with the stuffing and giblet gravy I would make from its various entrails.

The bird I found was just magnificent. A 24-pound Butterball, 28 pounds if you count the crumbs, mushrooms, sausages, onions, garlic and seasonings I stuffed up its private quarters.

My meticulous care had me basting it with butter every half hour or so. Five hours later I had achieved golden perfection.

But I was not done.  The succulent, dripping deliciousness of my bird needed to sit for a bit before the devouring commenced.  So, I had a plan: Everyone on the beach for a few spectacular celebratory firework rockets I had planted in the sand.

Everything was perfect, planned for maximum effect and joy.

Then we went to eat.

I am not sure who first noticed it, but I do recall the looks on Madison’s face (my golden retriever) and that on Jefferson’s (my border collie).  They were expressions of the utmost joy and appreciation.

The slimy slick had crossed the kitchen floor a dozen times as they had competed in obvious efforts to both play with and devour my golden perfection.

Since that wonderful Thanksgiving pizza day, I have always given some turkey thanks to my dogs first.

Richard Kimball

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Mark Twain once suggested he wasn’t worried about death because a few billion years had passed before he existed, and it wasn’t “the slightest inconvenient for him.”

I do not believe there has been a wholly original idea since someone said, “I think I will stop using my arms as legs and stand the fuck up.”

Those of us thinking today flow from that original thought and have merely borrowed from it and wrinkled it into an incalculable number of permutations over the ages.

Everyone copies, plagiarizes, and hopefully grows the efforts of others. If there were other wholly original thoughts, they are now lost to us, buried under the passage of time and the infinite number of embellishments that were born by it.

As a plagiarist and absolute center of all that I know, of every experience ever had and the few that remain to be had, the diminishment of my aspirations seems unavoidable. Aging has settled me into a slowing dance between spasms of desperation and quiet resignation. I’ve never had an original thought. A few good tweaks were the best I could hope for.

My ego has become an uncomfortable thing. Un-stroked by recognition, awash with influence or at least a lot of cash, it gnaws as I age.

How can a life that began with extraordinary good luck, mostly happy and honest, surrounded by love, be unfulfilling? I think it must happen to many of us as our lives are stretched out in the rear-view mirror, and we see the attainability of so much more that now the loss of time and energy has rendered unobtainable.

As a six-year-old I knew time was short. It was on that birthday that one of my always wiser older brothers informed me that life expectancy was 60. Just ten more, six-year birthdays and it will all be over I was told. I am fairly certain not a day has passed in all the days that followed that I have not thought about the time I have left. Time now left? Well, that past none fourteen years ago.

I now live on lucky time. In my youth I responded to that calculation with a spasm of discomfort but would quickly recover and head out for some more play, always thinking that I would make my life worthwhile another day. When another day finally arrived, I would be 31 and about to be born again but not in any Christian sense.

Everyone has a story to tell, and this is mine. No great drama, no epic events, no marks to be recalled by anyone but me. Telling your story in a way that would have anyone else give a damn seems farcical. I have no confidence that I will tell mine in a way you would give a damn, but it has some interest to me and there seems some value in thinking through all that has been me and imagining what might have been. So why not? Hell, now in the retirement I wish I had never attained, what else do I have to do?

In the end, what I see of human beings is what little it would have taken to make life so much better than it is for all of us. If only we would recognize and invest in the obvious, that one precious difference that sets us, as humans, apart from all other species: our ability to know.

In case you missed it, I am as close to a miracle as you will ever know, and so are you. If the teeniest difference in time or circumstance had changed in your line of ancestors from the very first time a cell split, 3.8 billion years ago, you would not exist. Having been given such a fantastically improbable chance, you would think we would make more of it.

Richard Kimball

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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TRANSGENDERS DESERVE A GOLDEN ASTERISK

Courage: requires one to insist on what they know to be right even as others see it as wrong.

Fairness: requires equal beginnings.

One born with a child producing vagina the other only a dick, and that was not the only difference.

For me, I have always thought the best of women brighter than the best of men, which has now resulted in my yearning to take my chances with the likes of the enlightened Jewish woman now running Mexico rather than the nitwitted male chosen as the best of us up north.

For me, the issue of Transgenders in sports, effects so few, and is so inconsequential that it lists somewhere in my second quadrillion.

But alas it has captured the attention and passion of the media and all those focusing on their muck.

Thus I offer a solution: A golden asterisk representing both courage and possible advantage.

Richard Kimball

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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