Since When is the Rightful Maintenence and Distribution of Social Security a "Bailout?"

In perusing the news headlines the other day, one in particular caught my increasingly myopic eyes. "Wall Street Bailout First, Car Industry Second, and Now, Social Security." Since when has the minimal insurance policy that we Americans have technically been paying into since we were old enough to work, essentially our OWN bank account, then, been lumped together with the bailout for freeloaders on Wall Street and for their trickle-down nieces and nephews, those head-cracking car-business carnies? I was, am still stunned.
To my knowledge, Social Security was set up by the Roosevelt Administration in the wake of the Great Depression precisely to preempt the need for some sort of massive financial onus upon the government for the unemployed aging population in this country. It was a way, in a sense, of making the American worker responsible for himself, even if and when the banks and/or the government could not be. Clearly, then, if I have been contributing (a.k.a. having money taken even if I don't want it to be) to Social Security since I began working as a sixteen-year-old, and I am forty-eight now, what "bailout" would I, could I possibly need? How could my account be empty? No, my account, which the government forced me and millions of other working Americans to establish, should have the money in it that I contributed, plus whatever interest it has accrued. (Not to mention the taxes I, we, have all been paying over our lifetimes, which too should guarantee that the money is there. You can see the steam coming from my ears now.) Is the government telling me that somehow, that money is NOT in my account? Who has been dinking with my money, then (I really want to use stronger language)? And beyond that, even if the government could somehow come up with some sort of daffy explanation as to "where have all the dollars gone, long time passing?" that isn't enough. The fact that the money is gone is criminal, and the government must replace it. Childish and naive view? Of course. But this is my bank account we're talking about here, folks, mine and yours. And what's right is right. Yet on top of that, if there could even be something more disturbing than this revelation and consequently the need to demand what is rightfully ours and see it restored is the mentality of the purported leaders of this nation that is disclosed when they call the essential responsibility of replacing our missing Social Security funds a "bailout." What are these people thinking? Or rather, how are they thinking? Are they thinking?

Potassium in Coffee: Something to Drink Over

I don't know about you, but being a fairly avid cyclist, I'm always looking for ways to get more potassium. Salt isn't a problem. Neither is sugar/glucose, or really calcium, but the potassium magnesium thing: that's another dealio.

I automatically and categorically denied Jim's assertion the other day that a cup of coffee has the greatist potassium hit in it of anything known to man. "Nuh-uh!" I spurted, vigorously shaking my head. "Look it up," he said gently (which provoked me even more); I did so, and yup, yup, yup, there it was, like Marcy Playground: over 20,000 whatevers per cup. Dayum.

Many cyclists drink copious cups of coffee. I know I do, but then, I was drinking coffee way before the biking bug bit. Lance Armstrong, for example, drinks at least two large cups every morning, likely, more. Could it be that imbibing coffee isn't about the caffeine per cup, necessarily, or rather, that the caffeine is just an added benefit, and in fact, the common addiction to coffee has to do with the potassium?

...for that matter, could Americans' collective addiction to coffee have less, even little to do with the caffeine, nothing to do with the ambiance of the coffeehouse, and possibly everything to do with living in a "Fast-Food Nation" and eating hugely minerally deprived diets? "Potassium....give me potassium or bust."

God Help People Who Mean Well

Today was bad. I mean, really bad. My Volksie's battery wouldn't start; my neighbor Bud said the cables leading in were completely corroded. He and another neighbor gave me a jump start, and I thankfully scurried off to Sear's ("where America shops,") ostensibly to buy a new battery. Um, no. They couldn't deal with foreign cars with this type of wiring: I had to go to a real Volkswagon Dealer. (I honestly think my hamster could file those wires better than some mechanics.) To make a short story long, the car is still there. "Have a shot or two of tequila," my boyfriend wisely advised when I arrived home via a ride from the dealership.
Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, I stepped outside, shot glass in hand, admiring the pinkening sky, delighted that this day resembling more of a haul up Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima was almost over, I noticed that the dahlias...my dahlias...they had just sprouted leaves...were gone.
My neighbor (another neighbor, not Bud, certainly no Bud of mine), without my knowledge or my consent, dug up my dahlias. Oh, I saw her working in what I am now sure she considers "her yard," and I approached her to ask whether she happened to know about the missing plants surrounding the hydrangea bushes that had just begun to stretch out and greet the sun from their tubules. "I thought they were some type of potato," she stammered, visibly uncomfortable at being "caught."
We live in an apartment building, and this woman with an evidently orange prefrontal cerebral cortex seems to think that she owns all of the land around it. She plants flowers, rakes, trims, and cultivates. She loves gardening, and it shows. However, purportedly, dahlias look like potatoes to her wandering-over-the-hoe eyes. (Do dahlias look like potatoes to you? Seriously.) "I live here," I gently intoned to her. "Oh!" she let out a raspy, reeking, smoker-compromised exclamation, as if the idea never had occurred to her. "Um, what happened to them?" I asked, about as politely as Hillary Clinton. "Well, they're here," she said with growing irritation, pointing to an earthenware pot on the patio outside her door. "Thanks so much for saving them!," I said breezily. "I'm going to go get a bag. I'll just scoop 'em right up. I'll be right back..."
The genuine desire to help a fellow human being in need, such as my neighbors who helped me because my battery cables were fried, is an admirable trait and deserves much more praise than I give here, precisely because it's genuine. Let's call it the desire to liberate another; the human interest to see and set someone else free (that certainly works well with Independence Day nearly upon us). Maybe even, call it love (don't get emotional on me here); at the very least, call it decency. Conversely, the burning need to own something--a little land, something that grows, a life--is likely so great in some people (call it codependence?) that their sense of "meaning well" starts to look suspiciously like a disguised sense of personal entitlement, grows exponentially into the cancerous "I needas, the I wannas, and the I gotta haves," and ultimately bursts all boundaries of respect and protocol, remains unchecked to astoundingly mutate and metastasize in my apparently potato-filled space.

War Enactors My Ass

It never fails. It's that time of year. You're walking through historic Gettysburg, trying to reinvent a certain battle in your mind as the skeeters nip at your creamy white legs, or you're treading the cobblestones gamely enough in Colonial Jamestown, listening as best you can to the tour guide with the menopause blue cologne drone on, while your eyes wander and your mind wonders whether you really could swim the steamy James River yourself back to the hotel, or you're negotiating the ankle-twisting rodent holes of the overgrown field of the Mumma Farm in Antietam, and in any of these situations you are relatively fine, striking that delicate balance between being present to some degree in the anecdotal world of history, feeling genuine reverence for the dead, with Nature simultaneously evoking and stoking your senses to escape such horrors, until that balance is shattered by an Enactor. That's right. Even by a far reach of one's precariously balanced imagination in said settings, the man or woman walking by in "period clothing" (which in itself reeks of female taboo--let's not mince words here, folks) ruins everything; the maudlin, inbred and arcane image of his or her reducto absurdum countenance in a wool uniform that wordlessly pronounces the anal maxim "if we do not learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat it," is about as welcome as the sound of a loud and jarring fart, and I for one, prefer to not wait around for the things that may emanate from the orifices of these people who seem to feel they have some sort of empirical einkorn to share with me (a.k.a. ram down my throat) to justify their posing any more than I wait to "experience" what toxically emanates from the original maw of that fart. Both are obnoxious and have nothing, as far as I am concerned, to offer. Why am I so down on enactors and enacting?

If you were to ask one of the few relatives in my family who survived the Holocaust, "Would you like to participate a reinactment of this experience?" I assure you, they would firmly say, "No." Similarly, if you were to ask my former boyfriend's father whether he would participate in a reinactment of his Saigon evacuation from the roof of the American Embassy minutes before the city fell, or if you were to ask our neighbor who was one of the few infantrymen to survive the wee hours of the D-Day assault on Normandy during World War II whether he would like to reinact the 9/10 ratio of dying to living, they would think you were nuts. War is a horrible, violent, ugly thing. We all know that. And for people who have been through "the real thing," it is certainly enough: too close to the bone, never far enough in the news. Apparently, though, there are people who haven't actually fought in wars, or who haven't had enough of them if they have fought in them, who must sate their unfulfilled libidinal urges and surges by putting on gooniforms and reinacting the mayhem. (Do you know that in Tony Horwitz's book, Confederates in the Attic, for example, Horwitz documents that some people actually attempt to perfect the way they look dead, after they have been "shot" on the battlefield, contorting their bodies to actually bloat the way a dead body does? Yeah. What a healthy way to spend one's Saturday afternoon. "Hey, we had a great time at the Johnson's barbecue. Jim and I played a couple of rounds of golf and got the grill going. Joanne went and played tennis with Caitlin. Hey, Mike, what did you do?" "Oh, I went over to Spotsylvania and perfected my bloating...."

For that man who likes to play soldier, then, there's only one nepenthe. Dress him in a real uniform and send him to Afghanistan, post-haste. I assure you he will come home, if he does come home, never wanting to play dress-up again.