when ya feel the need....

?..to blow sh*t up at 3am, look no further than Indiana my friends! The Hoosier State is East Missouri so to speak, for her plethora of both fireworks and adult entertainment. But just like part II movies, Indiana (East Missouri or Missouri part II) lacks the tetanus causing joy of rusty crap and the 5th grade humor of kum and gos. And Hoosiers don't have adult arcades or adult supermarkets. But yes...Indiana is full of fireworks. TO a person (me)who lives where you aren't even supposed to smoke and drive, its so flammable out, I still flinch to the increasing occurrences of Sh*t is that gunfire? Fireworks episodes in a state full of explosives. Truly, I have heard over 40 fireworks today (who knows, statistically one had to be gun fire) and it just keeps coming.°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°(why do I do these °°°°? Because my tablet and blogger don't understand a break between paragraphs°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° And as said, when ya feel the need at 3 am to blow sh*t up, there are indeed 24 hour fireworks stores. Man I would pay to see (and photograph!) The clientele at 3am and hear their stories. But alas, since I like sleep, don't like the town of Gary at 3am for its ghetto-scratch that un p.c. term- urban enterprise zones, and am not fond of things that can kill me, I won't go.

50 shades of trazadone

Trazadone is a gray pill used to relieve insomnia, depression, anxiety. I think to think of the plot for 50 shades of gray, one would have to be on a gray pill, trazadone, and probably oxycotin. And then some.°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°OK I like f***ed up plots sometimes and avidly read books about the Holocaust, Khmer Rouge, Abusive under-age arranged marriages, etc, but this....is over the top. I refuse to even read it, which I guess means my opinions are null and void but whatever. I can't stoop to that level. And if you read it and loved it? Whoa. But whatever. The plot is something like, a girl who has never really been in a relationship falls for some hot millionaire dude. He says in order to date her, she must sign a contract where he gets her way with her, and can physically punish her in his torturous room of doom. Insert whips, chains, hatred of women, and lots of orgasms. Wow I just wrote that word. Anyways. Add the f***ed up stereotypical woman thing ofv"I can fix him. Poor little guy was a victim" add in more torture and orgasms, like a Harlequin Romance for serial killers and people that put kittens in dryers and voila. Best seller.°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°OK to be fair, I read V.C. Andrews as a kid. Children in an abusive house forced to live in an attic, some incest, done. That is as Z50-Shades as I could ever get. I am a sucker again for stories about orphanages, drug addicts, concentration camps...mostly cause they somehow end good or at least hopeful, a lesson for humanity, and insight into some f***ed up people. You learn from history not to repeat it, and about resiliemcy of mankind. And incest...ok not my thing but I did feel all grown up reading about s-e-x-y things. Heck my friend who let me borrow the book, and I, were the awkward kids no boys seemed to like. We weren't the freaks of the school, but with thick glasses, hand me down clothes, our noses in a book and our legs all scratched up from tree climbing, we were no Angelina Jolie. So I liked the clandestine part of the book, and if you removed the element of taboo, not very risque. And besides. We both got over the V.C Andrews stage. Most girls went through it ,a sort of 1970s-early 90s rite of passage. 50 Shades is V.C. after watching a 60 hour block of Lifetime, meets that awkward kid who cried a lot and liked to torture dogs and skin squrrels alive and is now in the penn for American Psycho style acts. °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°And there is a larger than cult following for this crap, and people ADMIT to it ,and they are making a movie and...and...and my head is hung low today in shame towards the future of humanity.

negative nancy

I had the distinct pleasure to dine with Negative Nancy this morning. Again. Why must some people be so..... witch with a b? She was an older woman, probably in her 50s orv60s, with two adopted children,girls probably around age 7 and 10. They were adopted and I say this with assuredness because the parents (which the kids referred to as mom and dad even though they were too old to have created them) did not match the girls who were dark skinned and the parents, Scandinavian light.°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° So ifyou adopted children, you'd be a kind, loving, save-the-children awesome, right? Wrong. The husband was whipped and let Negative Nancy go on a rampage, and, he never spoke to his children, just his wife...even when the kids would say, "dad, dad guess what?" And Nancy would respond, "shut up your father is speaking to me". Yes. She said shut up. And Jesus Christ what is wrong with you? And, finish your damned plate. She then talked negatively about the older daughter when she went to get juice, and when she returned, mom went silent. The older daughter said something about the conversation stopping when she returned, so it must be about her. Mom respinded with, "your ears must have been ringing. But I am just gonna close my ears and go nanana". Meaning, she admitted to the daughter they were talking smack about her, and now mom would just refuse to listen to older daughter. When youngest daughter was all, "dad guess what?" Mom responded with "close your damn mouth. Shh." Instead of, I dunno, letting dad ask "what sweetie? Wow, really?" °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° Mom looked like a Stepford wife meets a L.L.Bean catalog model, and kept checking her cell phone as if she were some CEO of some important company. CEO of Bee-Otch Inc perhaps. Something has to have gone wrong to make her so mean. Heck even if she is as important as she acts, but that is still no excuse. She even snapped at her husband who grabbed a banana to take with him, and she barked, "we already have apples" in that condescending voice which really means, "you f****ing moron, we have apples in the room, did you forget, you twit? All we need is apples. Bananas are soo last year and I want apples. Gosh. How can you think you can just waltz into the darn room with a banana and disrupt what I havev tried so f****ing hard to do? Now put that f***ing banana back you a**hole." And guess what? He silently obliged and put back the banana. Yes ma'am!°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° I hope tomorrow I am not in a rare snarky mood cause I might just say something. Oooh! Or if I could determine her room number, I could leave a bowl of bananas at her door with a note...hmm..I will have to get back to you on the note but I am open to any ideas.

So I must profile the typical Illinois and Indiana driver. They all smoke especially Indiana and so you smell cigarettes when you instead prefer fresh air, windows down. But I guess LA has smog so they are equal. Indiana drivers are bipolar. It seems they drive 90 or 20...plodding down the road at a snail's pace, a long string of cars behind them, acting lost in their own small county(I know, their plates depict county of residence) mouths agape, again, going slower than semi trucks, busses, streetsweepers, on the freeway, in the fast lane. The others drive 90, Journey probably blasting, mullets shaking to the beat as they speed around you, missing you by inches, emulating their own trashy version of Indy 500 at rush hour. And yet if you are a bit lost, dazed and confused, or stuck in traffic, all hell breaks lose, they don't know how to deal with traffic, and speed along the median, or ride your tail honking furiously, swerving past a police car stopped to investigate an accident, mising the patrol car by a millimeter. Literally two miles away is Illinois so you get a far share of them on the road. I thought, hey, they are fine drivers, until today when I ventured into Chi-Town at rush hour. Suddenky the prim and proper obedient midwesterners got all mideaval and rowr, would attack. There might be room for a smart car between you and the guy in front, and the complacent Illinois dude in a F-150 in the lane beside you realizes like that! Lickety split! HE NEEDS to be in front of you NOW and merges with a violent jerking, throwing off the space time continuum, to fit in a space only his front tire could occupy. All without logic, knowledge of basic physics, courtesy, or a blinker/ turn signal. Then, the tolls and road quality. Ok Illinois has better roads than Cali but not by much. In Chicago, they have tolls which go towards road maintenance, which is always going on, everyehere, with special thanks to ARRA, thanks Obama, in gasp his hometown. But the roads never actually seem to be improved upon. And yet there is a toll every 5 mi utes, demanding $1.10 to over $3.00. Every few miles. I spent more on tolls than gas, in a Jeep Cherokee, you know, gas guzzler. And the toll charge isn't announced in a timely fashion like California but RIGHT before the toll. So as you find your proper toll lane, while driving, you must dig for exact change at a moment's notice. And then, some tolls are manned so you can break a $20 bill or, if outf moneh, get a bill sent toyou and on your merry way. Then others are not manned and don't give change so you must hzve it exactly...and what happens if you don't have enough? Unmanned, you can't ask to be sent a bill, so do you just sit there, all alone, collecting linesof angry motorists before someone has pity and walks up to pay your charge? Or do they get pissed and just shoot you? So, alas, I kinda prefer LA freeways...few and predictable tolls, and predictable drivers. Sure we don't have the best drivers, but stereotypes originate somewhere and that is California. See a rice rocket souped uo honda full of teens? They will race past you, almost hitting you, with no regard to the law. See a pastel camry with "Ayden, Taylor, Jaxson and Astelin's meemaw" bumper sticker? She will petrify from lack of movement within the next mile. So in Cali, you know what to expect in every driving experience.

America Lives

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

photos of Indiana Dunes Lakeshore

A path to the lake in a residential area

deer at the end of the path

natural grasses along a dune

my favorite photo....the sand looks like it is made from
flakes of gold, so textured and bright and the soft grass
with a shadow, the blue lake blending in to the
cloiudy blue sky..,

you can see little tracks, like a rake, from the wind

I love LA freeways!

There I said it. Ok it is a bit of an exaggeration, but I prefer LA freeways. Why? Since Cali was designed for the automobile, their freeways make sense. They are in a grid like pattern, so, to imagine cartography or algebra, to go from A,1 to D,4 you might find a diagonal freeway but worst case scenario is you go down A to A,4 and across to D,4. Here in Chicago's suburbs and elsewhere, you go to B7 labeled three different things, then a curved away road to C3 then to C8 then D4. Sure you can take side streets but they take even longer. Then a neighborhood can literalluy havea "other side of the tracks" area, right across the street. In Cali, a neighborhood goes downhill over a few blocks but here its bam! And Gary Indiana, at least the edges, aren't too scary . Maybe I went to the one good part, but I saw no grafitti for two blocks,no garbage, no barred windows...I meanI would not wantto live there, but I have seen scarier parts. East Chicago or New Chicago orwhatever was scarier. And why must there be reverse racism? I was at the pool and there were a few black girls there giving me stink eye for goimg into the pool when they and only they were in there. Geez girls, I do not care and am not racist and most of my relatives are a fee generations new to America and were indentured servants in the tenements of the UK so they were not slave owners, they were treated like scum themselves.