One year ago today: June 18, 2023, fence repairs.
Five years ago today: June 18, 2019, Memphie-poo.
Nine years ago today: June 18, 2015, Investment Street.
Random years ago today: June 18, 2017, Rebel with Denver Fender.
I got out of town around 9:00AM and it was a 13-1/2 hour drive including two stops. Yep, Biden stole half my retirement in a wink. Thirty years inflation in three years, and he’s go the gall to brag he’s got it under control. It was the perfect day for a drive, so why wait? A usual, the first two hours is the longest, getting through Lakeland and over to I-95, where they do not enforce the passing lanes. A stop for a coffee and sandwich cost me $9.62. If this continues even one for year, I’ll have to make some changes.
Finally, I finished the book by Gore Vidal and now I thoroughly dislike the guy. The book is an elaborate ruse to portray male homosexual behavior as normal. He purports to take about wars, diplomacy, and current events, but injects some faggotry into the matter every time, as if by Chapter 25 you were no longer suspecting anything. Around a quarter of the book is his descriptions of homos, how all this acquaintances are homos, but oh no, he continually assure us he is not. Rather he fancies himself a master of the cleverest sort, that he’s got everyone including you held in a mystery. There is one searching question, is he a queer or is he not.
He also goes into some detail about all his male friends dying of some form of cancer. Pancreas, lungs, liver, throat, brain, blood, and kidneys. He mentions AIDS only once, as an abstraction. The book title fooled me, “Point to Point Navigation”. From what I surmise, he only “cut a wide swath” because he was part of a literary circle who took turns calling each other such things. Most annoying? His constant implication that anything could be made just a little better if only there was input from a homo in the works. How much better the movies, novels, and radio broadcasts would be if they openly lauded the sort of people Gore plainly liked so much.
I found this photo later, probably a drone photo. It shows what I think of the Signal Mt. scenic drive.
I drove straight through, except a small planned side trip through Signal Mountain, a town across the river from Chattanooga. I took a wrong turn at Ringgold, where I’ve never been. It seems like your rather typical small town, past its prime and converting to a bedroom community. Thus, I also drove though parts of downtown Chattanooga I’ve never seen before. It’s full of old buildings that used to be important now renovated into cheap offices, expensive lofts, and restaurants that don’t open until mid-afternoon.
This was a waste of time. The roads wind up the steep sides of the mountain, buy any straight stretches that might have a view are heavily wooded with no stopping. And the corners so sharp you don’t take your eyes off the road. As usual GPS is no use in a close urban environment. When you zoom in close enough to see the street names, the icons blot your view, and if you zoom out, the street named disappear. It’s truly pathetic how Garwin so obviously must have hired people specially to screw this up so badly.
J. Lopez without makeup.
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Two hours behind, I finally got on the road to Dunlap and emerged back on Highway 111, the final two-hour leg. It got dark near Sparta, I arrived in time to take the doggies for an evening walk, check my reports, and discover there is no Carnation, coffee, bread, pepper, and lots of other stuff I can’t live without. On the way, I found a better audiobook, this is a spy mystery called “Gideon’s Sword”. While the hero is not quite believable, the rest of the plot has few holes. It is very well-researched. The only major dislike for me is it suffers from the 1960s crime novel syndrome. That’s where somebody thinks it is classy to detail what people order for dinner and that weird hallucination that people who listen to Blues and Jazz have superior taste in music.
It’s about a Chinese scientist smuggling what was thought to be a secret weapon. The authorship is remarkable for an audiobook. The plot twists are quite logical and you cannot readily guess what’s next, nothing is telegraphed. So far, the only sex was implied, with some lady CIA agent in an Arabian hotel. Good, what 30-year-old people do is, to myself, a matter of profound indifference.
