Citizen Trump

        It's mid-December 2046 in downtown Manhattan on the 58th story of the Trump Tower where former president Donald Trump has lived in seclusion for the past two decades, his fingernails grown to unmanageable lengths as he watches Citizen Kane for the 132nd time. He has reached the golden age of 100 but lies motionless in bed...alone....and in the dark.
         His mind is wandering in slow-motion...not to the White House or foreign palaces, not to cataclysmic disasters or bull markets, but to a little hill in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens, New York. The hill is covered with fresh snow as more snowflakes the size of gumballs come down. His eyes are closed and he smiles at the word snowflakes in his mind for it was a nation of snowflakes that ruined his dreams as president. The smile vanishes and then comes back as his inward gaze returns to the small snow-covered hill. He is atop it yelling commands to his friends at the bottom of the hill. He mounts his sled, pushes off and glides down to the bottom, overturning and laughing joyously with these his young friends,
          His smile is then frozen.....holding a snow globe that contains inside a sled with one word written on it....his hands release the globe and it rolls off his lap and onto the floor.   His voice is barely discernible but no one was with him to hear it anyway....he utters one word......'covfefe.'

Bucket List

        I'm about as far from a Harley rider as you can get but I've always had a bit of a fascination with others who ride down the road with the wind in their hair. We're in Myrtle Beach right now and it's Bike Week. It wasn't planned...in fact I usually try to avoid Bike Week but it slipped my mind when the reservations were made. Well... it's actually interesting seeing...and hearing....all these remarkable machines.
        The first night in town we stopped for dinner at a street café with a lot of men and women my age wearing Harley Davidson gear. The waiter came up and asked if I just came in on my Harley. I said...."Yeah!" My wife corrected me with...."You didn't just ride in on your Harley!" I thought he said..."Are you ready to order?" It was kinda neat being a Harley rider for about five seconds.
         I scratched one item off my bucket list tonight. As a latchkey kid I learned a lot about life from the movies...which means that I learned a lot that was a little bit off kilter, but a lot of my love for my country comes from westerns and frontier films, and World War II and little house on the prairie type movies. I learned about love and romance from that little box with black and white movies also...which probably explains a lot.
         One of those films was A Summer Place with Sandra Dee, Troy Donahue, Dorothy McGuire, Richard Egan and Arthur Kennedy. Fortunately I don't think that I was old enough to know what was really going on, but a beach scene with two young people in love...and that theme....that theme....stuck with me for a half a century. Well tonight as my wife and I walked along a South Carolina beach with a chill in the air I pulled out my iPhone, searched for and played a few times as we walked... keeping each other warm... the theme from A Summer Place. It was special.
         Let's see...what's next on the list....the Alamo....gotta go there some day!

Sean interviews The President

Sean:                       Welcome to the show Mr. President.
President Trump:     Thank you Sean. You may kiss my ring.
Sean:                       Ha Ha. That's Funny! And that's a beautiful ring too.
President Trump:     The wall's already built.
Sean:                       What's that again?
President Trump:     The wall is already built. I like to talk in the future/past tense.
Sean:                       The future/past tense?
President Trump:     That's right. Common Core is gone and my second term is going well...
Sean:                       I get it....I think. Anyway. Let met start, I know that your a busy man, let
                                me start with this question. You said that you would sit down and talk with
                                Kim Jong-un...is that correct?
President Trump:    That's correct. And I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he's a good
                               man...a very good man...probably as good as Duterte or whatever his name is.
Sean:                      Well, I wouldn't put anything past your negotiating abilities.
President Trump:    Someday I hope to sit down with Satan.
Sean:                      Ha ha...ha........ha..............ha....Satan?
President Trump:    That's right.
Sean:                      You're a great kidder Mr. President!
President Trump:     I'm not kidding. I'm going to ask Hillary to conjure him up. She's really a very
                                good women you know.
Sean:                      Mr. President. Satan is the cause of the fall of man!
President Trump:     What man?
Sean:                       Adam.
President Trump:     Adam who?
Sean:                       Mr. President, Satan is the great deceiver!
President Trump:     That's politics Sean.
Sean:                       The good book says that Satan is a deceiver....and a destroyer!
President Trump:      Norman Vincent Peale's The Power Of Positive Thinking says that?
Sean:                       No...the Bible. Have you ever read the Bible sir?
President Trump:     Sean. I read three books in my life...and two of them didn't have any pictures.
                                So I obviously love to read but the Bible has all those thee's and thou's. Too
                                many prepositions!
Sean:                       Those are pronouns sir.
President Trump:     Whatever. I tried to read it once. I read once sentence...something like....In the
                                beginning God created the heavens and the earth. I don't think this patent would
                                hold up in court.
Sean:                       Well, I can see we're out of time. Thank you for coming on the show.....yes I
                                saw that earlier.....it's a very nice ring.
                   
                                   

How Do You Say 'My Name Is Special Dog' In Polish

          Many many years ago, back when a phone call was ten cents and if a man shaved his head bald then everyone avoided him, a friend fixed me up on a double-date with a girl....a very pretty girl...who spoke only Polish....not even a word of English. Now there's more to the situation....how should I say this.....I wasn't exactly the fastest horse on the track. I really didn't know how to handle a date with a girl that I couldn't communicate a single word with. I had enough trouble on dates with girls that I could communicate with. I tried sign language and that only made the situation worse. I won't bore you with the details on how the date ended but will say that it took me a year to recover from it.
          I once almost burned down the oldest "Authenticated" as Wikipedia puts it "authenticated structure west of the Allegheny Mountains." It happened like this...it was a cold winter day and I had a little bit of a cold so my pockets were full of Kleenexes. As my young son and I were about to enter the "oldest authenticated structure west of the Allegheny Mountains," I tapped empty my pipe and put it in the vest pocket of my leather coat. The size of this "oldest authenticated..." you know the rest "structure" is only a little bigger than the average kiosk in any mall. The only employee panicked when he smelled the smoke. I've never been back since, it's been twenty years, for fear that I would see two pictures on the wall....George Washington's with the caption 'Father Of Our Country' and mine with "Have You Seen This Man?'
          I have great difficulty being the center of attention. Thankfully I've never been given any awards in my life for I could never handle the pressure of accepting it. I panic if I go to a concert and one of the singers walks down into the audience singing. It's happened more than once. I  just know that they're going to stick that mic in my face to sing along.  I once had a very popular celebrity whose name you would know, sing a beautiful song right next to me and I'm looking off into the rafters, probably on television, as If I didn't know where I was. No one wants to put a mic in the face of a crazy person. I was though surprised once at Sea World. I was minding my own business enjoying Shamu perform in a pool with a giant video screen over it.....she appeared out of no where and stuck the mic in my face asking me a question. I looked up at the screen and there I was. I had a flashback of my date with the girl who spoke only Polish. It was probably one of the more awkward moments in Sea World history.
         I had to slow dance with my wife in front of over a hundred people at our son's wedding. It almost paralyzed me. After about two minutes of terror others stepped onto the dance floor. Someone tapped my wife on her shoulder to dance. What on earth was I going to do? My new daughter-in law's mother was there so I somehow communicated if she would like to dance....it seemed like that was what was expected of me. The dance ended and I felt great relief for my entire responsibility for the reception was over...relief until I realized that I clung to my son's mother-in-law like a drowning man to an overturned dinghy with sharks fins all around. I later made matters worse by trying to explain to her why I clung to her like a drowning man holding to a dinghy with shark fins all around. The great blessing of our son's wedding day ended. I took off my suit coat for the first time since I put it on fifteen hours earlier. I put my hands in my pockets out of relief and there was a tennis ball in one of them. I'm fairly sure that I'm the only man in the history of Western Civilization to have a tennis ball in his pant pocket during his son's wedding.
         I tell you these things, and there are many more, to explain why I write an anonymous blog...that isn't even a blog. It's just me on one side and seven billion people on the other who have no idea who I am. Hey, some people in Poland may even read these posts through a text translator. I could probably handle that situation if it were today....nah.
        
Addendum: I wanted to add this because it happened only an hour ago as we spent a nice Saturday afternoon at the Butler Museum Of Art that's basically on the Youngstown State University campus. By the way it's a wonderful museum and I highly recommend it although after reading these posts you may not appreciate anything I recommend. Anyway, in one of the many rooms in the museum they have a very real to life sculpture of an old man dressed as a security guard and sitting somewhat slouched on a chair, of whom I said Hi to on the way in and went back to ask him if it was ok to take a photo of Norman Rockwell's Lincoln The Railsplitter! I'm certain that this episode will wind up on Candid Camera,