Tag: Me Myself I

Personal stuff

Bucket List Entry #4: Old Battlefields

Bucket List

Back when I still lived in South Africa, a couple of my jobs required car trips to small towns to check on stores or visit cooperating agencies. Several of these out-of-the-way places happened to be near old battlefields of the Boer War, so I’d try to set aside a day or two to visit them and “touch history” (my shorthand expression for such activities). Over time, I visited Spion Kop, Paardeburg, Ladysmith, Mafeking and Majuba. I also got to see a couple from the earlier Zulu Wars, Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift (described in the movie Zulu) . I wrote about my trip to the last one years ago, but it’s buried in the archives and if I can find the thing, I’ll re-publish it sometime.

Anyway, one week from today is Memorial Day, and as always, it’s the day I remember my late grandfather Charles Loxton, who fought and was badly wounded at the Battle of Delville Wood in 1916. As the saying goes, it’s “where 25,000 men marched in; and one week later 2,500 marched out.” Here’s Delville Wood now:

..and as my grandfather probably saw it in 1916:

After battle for Delville Wood France

So #4 on my Bucket List is to visit not just Delville Wood, but as many old WWI battlefields as I can. Time permitting, it’s one of the activities I’d like to get done during my upcoming sabbatical in Britishland, because to see most of them would require a trip of only a few days across the Channel.

Mr. Free Market suggests that I do my pilgrimage during late November or early December, “…when the weather is foul and one can appreciate the absolute misery — the cold, the rain and the mud — that the poor infantry had to deal with.”

Sounds like a plan.

Eye Spy

General

I’ve often said that getting old isn’t for kids, nor for the faint of heart: you have to be seasoned and tough to be able to handle this aging nonsense.

Hence: eye trouble. Last year I was having trouble with my vision, so I went off to see my eye specialist — okay, opthalmololojist or whatever [10,000-word rant against medical terminology deleted] — and he gave me the good news that I have cataracts (a symptom of old age, apparently; everyone gets ’em sooner or later) which will eventually require surgery, oh joy. Also, the itching and pain in my eyes are caused by glaucoma (i.e. incurable, and eventual blindness). Oh, happy happy joy joy. The conversation then ran as follows:

Kim: So… are you going to measure me for a glass eye, or what? How do we deal with glaucoma?
Doctor: Drops.
Kim: Drops?
Doctor: Drops. Take a single drop in each eye every night, and that’ll at least reduce the pressure. Here are a few bottles to get you started — samples, no charge — and let’s take a look again in a few months. Your eye pressure is 21 [I have no idea what that means – K.] and we’ll want to get it down to at least 13 on your next visit.
Kim: Drops?

Last week was my follow-up. Good news is that the pressure is down to 11, so the doctor is happy. I am less happy because the cataract in my left eye is worsening, and will require surgery next year. Aaaargh.

My eye specialist is a good man. His old office was in a medical suite attached to a hospital so at the front door there was the usual shitty “30.06” (as we call it here, the thirty-ought-six) sign which forbids concealed carry in the building. Of course, at my first visit I forgot to de-gun in the car because Idiot Kim, and when I sat down in the examination chair I winced as the gun stuck into my back. The conversation went as follows:

Doctor: You okay?
Kim: Yeah.
Doctor: Gun got ya?
Kim: Uh… yeah. [no point in lying, he had me dead to rights]
Doctor: What are you carrying?
Kim: Uhhh a 1911.
Doctor: Cool. I’ve got a SIG 220 myself [patting his hip]. We should go to the range together sometime.

Man, I love Texas. A doctor who shoots .45 ACP… it just doesn’t get much better than this. Oh, and earlier this year he moved to his own office suite across the road: no 30.06 sign outside.

Harmless Addictions

General

As a rule, I have to drink quite a bit of liquid each day because if I don’t, the old kidneys malfunction and Mr. Gout puts in a reappearance:

(Yes, I take Allopurinol daily, and haven’t had a gout attack, not even a twinge, in years — but I’m taking no chances because excruciating agony, not wanting.)

Of course, “hydrating” means drinking water, but that actually makes me thirstier afterwards and anyway, as I was once told by a doctor:

…so generally speaking I ingest water only in solid form, surrounded by Scotch or gin.

But I still need to drink liquids in fairly large volumes each day. For a while, I’ve been drinking water flavored with lemon juice (just to make the water taste better; Plano is a fine city, but our tap water while potable tastes like shit). One cannot live by lemon water alone, however, so I sought out other liquid alternatives.

I don’t care for iced tea, and I can’t stand fizzy drinks as a rule — forget Coke and such — because with my lap band, gas causes me pain almost as bad as gout. I don’t mind a teeny bit of fizz such as found in costly products such as Perrier, but for the quantities I require (I’m not a Russian oil oligarch), Perrier is out of the question. And I feel like a pretentious dick carrying it out of the store. So what to do?

Then I discovered this evil substance:

…and OMG I was hooked on it shortly thereafter. I use it as a supplement to the lemon water (one can per day) so I probably drink only about a case of it every month in that manner. Unfortunately, the Aranciata Rossa also makes an excellent mixer for vodka and gin, so my total consumption of Pellegrino is, shall we say, somewhat higher. (Yes I know: booze is not A Good Thing for gout sufferers, that’s why I take Allopurinol so shuddup.) I generally pour it back and forth a couple of times between two glasses to take out most of the fizz (which is much lower anyway), and let me tell you, it’s nectar. I usually drink it in the evenings only, but I know it’s an addiction because yesterday when I looked into Ye Olde Iceboxe and found only two cans extant, I had to race off to the local pusher of said product — both Central Market and Trader Joe’s in Plano carry it, thank goodness — and stock up.

And no, I receive neither subsidy nor consideration from San Pellegrino so this punt is completely without motive, other than to tell you all that I’m addicted to the lovely stuff. But yes, if someone from San P. happens to read this adulation and wants to subsidize my addiction, they should feel free to do so and I’ll duly note that in an update.

No doubt, some other doctor will soon be advising me:

…but I’ll ignore it, as I do anyway to most medical advisories which harsh my mellow. It’s too early right now to have one, so I’ll just get me a glass of squeezed OJ instead.

Afterthought: I should probably add that I’m a huge fan of the blood-orange flavor; I eat the fruit whenever it’s in season, and even the flavored yogurt is a breakfast staple.

 

Law Abiding, More Or Less

Politics

Despite my outwardly-conservative mien, I am in fact a rebel, and have been one pretty much all my life.

Most of my Longtime Readers are familiar with my 1972 arrest and brief imprisonment (at age 17) back in the old Racist Republic, for the heinous crime of daring to publicly express my opposition to apartheid and especially to the education policy foisted upon Black South Africans by the Afrikaner Nationalist government. Because this protest had taken place in public (even though on the university campus), I and many others were charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act (there was no First Amendment in S. Africa, you see) because we hadn’t applied for a protest permit — did I already mention that the protest took place on private property? — but I and the others were later acquitted on a technicality.

That was only the first of my encounters with the State, by the way. Another involved hiring a wonderful Black maid to clean my apartment and do my laundry, but refusing to “register” her with the proper local authorities because I thought that was a load of old bollocks. Then when this was discovered, the local gauleiter bureaucrat charged me with being in contravention of the Group Areas Act (the one that said that Blacks couldn’t be in “White” areas without a permit), and issued me a fine. Which I refused to pay. So I was dragged into court yet again.

Judge: You have to pay the fine.
Kim: I’m not going to pay the fine.
Judge: Can you not afford it?
Kim: No, I can afford it. I’m just refusing to pay it.
Judge: Why?
Kim: Because it may be the law, but it’s ridiculous.
Judge: If you don’t pay the fine, you could face a jail sentence.
Kim: I don’t care. You might as well fine me for not having a permit to work my job here in Johannesburg.
Judge: You don’t need a permit to work here; you’re White.
Kim: And that’s why I’m not going to pay the fine.
Judge: [mumble mumble]

At that point, my lawyer told me to sit down and STFU, went up and spoke to the judge, who then told me I was free to go and slammed his gavel down with what I think was relief.

Turns out that unbeknownst to me, one of my buddies had come to the courthouse in case I needed bailing out — he knew me far too well, I think — and he’d secretly paid the fine already. (His father was a member of the U.S. Embassy staff, and apparently he’d ordered his son to do what he did because while he sympathized with my actions, he also saw the realities of the situation, and me having a criminal record was not a Good Thing. Bah.) For the record, I was then 26 years old.

Since I’ve been living here as a citizen in the United States, though, I’ve lived a simon-pure life, from a legal standpoint anyway. The reason is that most U.S. law makes kinda sense, certainly when compared with the apartheid bullshit, although I regret to say that I did carry a handgun a lot when I lived in Chicago because that prohibition was not only stupid, but un-Constitutional (as the McDonald case would prove many years later). It was crappy. Every time I saw the potential for some villainy to be perpetrated on me or someone close to me, my thought was always, “Oh please please please pick on someone else because otherwise I’m going to get into such shit when I shoot you in the face.”

I’ve also started to misbehave a bit since, oh, 2009 (the start of The Obama Years) because socialism, no details necessary. But really, it’s been so far, so good.

And I told you all that so I could tell you this (and it was all triggered by this article).

What may come as a surprise to most is that the laws I obey almost obsessively are the traffic laws. Why? Because alone among the laws, they all make sense: slow down here for the sharp corner, don’t park there, stay in your lane, don’t run a red light, don’t speed through a construction zone, etc. etc. — all are very sound and logical, and I obey them almost obsessively. Since coming here over thirty years ago, I have had the grand total of one traffic ticket, and that was because I was lost, looking for landmarks and didn’t see the speed notice. Even the judge sympathized, and let me off. That’s a fine I would have paid, let me tell you, because I really shouldn’t have been speeding.

I also like the fact that when people break the law egregiously — e.g. running a red light while drunk — that the Law beats them over the head with the Book. I also think that if an illegal alien breaks a traffic law — any traffic law except maybe illegal parking — he should be deported. I remember talking to an Egyptian guy — a legal resident — boasting about how he’d amassed an astonishing number of traffic tickets for reckless driving because “We don’t have traffic lanes in Egypt, man. You drive where you want.” Having been to the Third World (in my case, India), I’ve seen how this approach to driving works and let me tell you folks, it ain’t pretty. I told him he needed to straighten out and clean up his act, because if he ever got nailed for driving that way and caused someone’s injury or death, he wouldn’t have to worry about the damn police because I’d come to his house and pull his eyes out of his sockets. (“If you’re going to drive around without looking, you don’t need your eyes, asshole,” were my exact words.) He was not happy, but then again, nor was I.

And I’m sick of people thinking that driving is in the Bill of Rights and therefore can’t be taken away from them. It isn’t, it can, and in a lot of cases, it should. Yeah, I know that if you can’t drive, you’ll lose your job because you can’t get to work blah blah blah. That’s the reason to drive carefully and not break the law, shit-for-brains.

I need to quit now before I get really angry.

Getting Older, Caring Less

Culture

There are three ironclad rules about getting older:

  1. Make no long-term investments.
    This means not making any kind of investment where you’re unlikely to live to see the outcome.
  2. Never trust a fart.
    I don’t think I have to explain this one.
  3. Never waste an erection.
    Ditto. Believe me, when you get up there in age, these physiological miracles are not as common as they were in your twenties.

Let’s go back to #1 for a moment. Perhaps it’s because the past few years have been so difficult for me, nursing an ailing wife and then having to deal with her death, one realizes that most stuff is irrelevant by comparison, on a personal basis of course.

It has worried me that things that would in the past have brought from me a seething rant full of invective, rage and possibly even threats, now occasion from me a wry smile, a scowl or a muttered curse. (This would include almost every idiocy / lunacy perpetrated by Our Beloved Government — may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their nether regions.)

Why is it that I don’t really care much about anything, most especially when it doesn’t affect me personally, or if it does, it’ll likely happen after I’m dead? (There is a tangential discussion to be had on this topic, by the way, which would argue that if  my attitude is common among senior citizens, then old farts like me should never be allowed to formulate any kind of long-term government policy or change any social institutions. But we’ll do that some other time.)

When we lived in the Chicago ‘burbs (Prospect Heights, for those who know the area), our little municipality was one of the very few which did not use “city” water, but relied on wells. (This despite Lake Michigan being but a few miles from our front door — inexplicable.) Property taxes were of course lower, but that was offset by occasional water shortages, which totally sucked. Anyway, a referendum was held on whether the Heights should go to city water — it would require a bond to finance bringing water lines to the streets, but residents could have the choice of paying for the water line from the street to the house, or just sticking with well water. The bond would require a one-time per-household fee of a few hundred dollars — payable by an addition to the property tax bill (which, as  I mentioned earlier, was very low). We were overjoyed, and couldn’t wait for the measure to pass. It failed. It failed because about 50% of the residents were elderly and didn’t care that the future residents would have a better quality of life — because they themselves wouldn’t be around to see it, and thus weren’t interested in spending even the few dollars necessary. So we were stuck with tepid, unreliable well water, which situation we resolved by moving to the City of Chicago when our lease ended, and living not a few miles, but a few yards from Lake Michigan. We never stopped hating those elderly residents of Prospect Heights, though — even though they were obeying Rule #1.

I don’t want to be one of those selfish old bastards; but at the same time, I find myself getting the same kind of perspective. My conscience will generally make me do the right thing, I hope — I would vote in favor for that water bond in a heartbeat, for example — but from what I can tell, that’s not the way to bet when it comes to other people, and most especially older politicians whom one would hope have the same social conscience as I, but who clearly don’t.

Have I gone soft? (This is not a reference to Rule #3, by the way; at least, I hope not.) I’ve noticed that events that would normally make me livid with rage now simply irritate me; and paradoxically, things I would have shrugged off in the past now make me want to reach for the 1911.

Maybe it’s because of the circumstances I find myself in now, maybe it’s an effect of age, or maybe it’s some of both. I need to think about it some more, and figure it out.

Your opinions on this topic will be welcome. This is important stuff to me.

Caution

General

Conversation between Doc and myself, this morning:

“Kim, the lawn guys are coming to mow the grass and spray the weeds in a few hours.”
“Okay.”
“So if you see some strange guys walking around the back…”
“Yeah yeah yeah, I know, don’t shoot any of them.”
“Just wanted to make sure…”

Life in a Gun Nut’s house is so complicated sometimes… shoot this guy, don’t shoot that guy, yadda yadda yadda… I think I’ll just go to the range later on today to avoid a potentially messy situation. Anyway, that new Ruger Mk.IV isn’t going to shoot itself, you know.