Unlike a lot of people I know, I rather like my life. I work, paint, write, go to art shows and live music, I’ve started this blog and I’m working with friends who are making a film. My social life includes a small group of well-tested friends that meet regularly and share intensely and honestly about ourselves and each other — there’s an honesty about us that is borne of trust and loyalty. Tonight, we’ll meet on the Paseo, decide about dinner, eat together and a smaller group will come to my house for a movie. Tonight’s movie is “Being There”, but it could be anything and often is. I think that only boring people are bored and that there’s always something interesting to do. Or someone, he leered. Tuesday night for me was formerly “Take Out Tuesday” and included me sharing the evening with a wonderful friend and we got takeout Chinese food from a place near my house and watched something on the tube and cuddled. That’s over, sadly, and I’m trying to put together another way to behave on Tuesdays and last night was my first real test. I picked up fried chicken from Church’s, an artifact of a coffee conversation at 4:30 p.m., and ate alone in front of the computer and then watched “Finding Neverland” by myself. Late, about 10 p.m., I popped out of the house and went to Galileo’s and heard a little acoustic guitar, mandolin and harmonica music before dropping by the lovely Juliet’s house to meet the parents. YIKES!!! Dad was all about sports and baseball and Mum was looking at me with an appraising eye that was daunting and I could see her calculating the difference between 29 and 56 (relative ages) over and over and trying to make the calculus work. I got home a little after midnight. Today, I was thinking about missing my “Take Out Tuesday” and my first thought was that, without it, Tuesdays might well be boring. On second thought, it strikes me that Tuesday is like any other day/night: it’s what you make of it. I might well have gone to Heterosexual Night at the HiLo. I didn’t have to eat alone, it’s that I made no other arrangement. Moreover, considering my social schedule after 5 p.m., there’s something to be said for a quiet night of reading, painting, writing and recovering all on my own. Might that be boring? “There is nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so,” as Shakespeare wrote.

You don’t have to like it

My friend, The Gary, told me this morning that the guy who got me excited about Barbara Olson being arrested on the Polish border with millions of counterfeit lira was not excited about my post. I understand. Later, after I posted, he brought me a printout of his source: a guy named Flocco who is supposedly an investigative journalist. It’s not like Higgins just made it up. But, gee, this Flocco person had other, equally outrageous items posted on his site, not all of which — OK, none of which — seemed to be credible TO ME. Maybe, like my cajun friend, it seems all very well and good to you to believe in giant government conspiracies to change the weather and cover up the role of space aliens in our midst. That stuff just doesn’t resonate with me. I find it very very unlikely to be true. Does that mean that there is NO evidence of the veracity of those notions? Oh, hell no. I simply find myself thinking about Occam’s Razor and coming down consistently on the side of those who don’t find it credible. (Look up Occam’s Razor for yourself, I don’t do links very well at this point. It’ll do you good.) So, disagree! Tell me where and how I’m all wrong about it. The lovely RebL has made an absolute passion out of being iconoclastic where I’m concerned. I’m always ready to be “taken to school”, most especially when I’m wrong and out in the intellectual boondocks barking up empty trees. Sorry, Mike, I just think that there are some holes in the story — starting with the fact that you’d think Ms. Olson would have Euros instead of Lira and that someone in the “mainstream” press, the New York Times, Reuters, AP, SOMEONE would have been willing to take a flyer at what would be the biggest story of the 21st Century to date. I’ve been a journalist and most of the ones I know would absolutely take the risk of assassination for a scoop of that magnitude — it couldn’t be kept a secret, not even when Rupert Murdock owns every press in sight. My experience with government employees of all types is that they CANNOT keep such a secret, much less fix the potholes, and that they just simply are not the brainy chess players of fiction and are, in fact, rather mediocre as a rule. For one thing, massive conspiracies require massive identity of interests that don’t change over long periods of time and that’s just impossible to believe. Even the undoubtedly brilliant Karl Rove finds himself with his ass in a crack over the Valerie Plame affair. Truth has a way of getting OUT! Petty jealousies and hurt feelings that generate a desire for revenge come into play. Government spooks are still people and they have emotions and they can be very self centered. Politicians have their egos. It just doesn’t wash out for me. Don’t be offended, MH; I still think you are one very swell guy. I just don’t buy everything you tell me.