Automotive Tyranny

When Americans turn 50, they receive an AARP invitation.. When they face their 65th birthday, their mailboxes are full of Medicare insurance supplement offers. And when their car odometer hits 100,000, they learn the new language of automotive disintegration.

Don't know what an actuator is? You will. It follows the alternator to perdition, and once hundreds have been tossed at both these parts, the starter will start screaming as well. I know this because I am now a beggar without a car. My neighbor is taking me to work tonight because I cannot depend on greedy Nashville cabbies to get me there. They do not come out to the provinces on weekend nights.

A starter, one would think, would be no big trouble. $100 for the starter,$100 for the labor.
Even I can afford that.

But not in Toyota Tundra land. In my truck the starter is under the engine, which must be lifted out of the truck for five hours and 500 bucks worth of labor. With tax and a tow I am looking at 700 dollars to pay a penalty for stupid design. Who was the idiot who planned this? Was common sense under anesthesia? On vacation?

Cars rule our lives for the worse, and anyone who thinks their worries are over when the car is paid off learns that the car is never paid off. I have paid out at least 4000 grand in repairs in the last two years.
And that is not figuring in the interest in loans and the late rent penalties that clank along behind the vehicle like tin cans tied to the bumper-

Why Toilet Paper is Provided Only By Request In My House-

Italian Sausage and Kidney Bean Stew

When I dug through my pantry this week, I found not one can of cannellini beans. I had used the last of the beans to make a bread and bean soup, and now had only some black beans and red beans left.

Perhaps chili, I thought,but discovered I had no ground beef either. What I did have was a pound of Italian sausage and seven ounces of roasted Piquillo peppers that I had frozen. With the addition of a few cloves of garlic and 1/2 sauteed yellow onion I created a tasty and unexpected stew.

1 pound of Italian sausage-hot or mild,according to your taste.
1/2 medium yellow onion,diced and sauteed till soft and golden.
2 cloves garlic,chopped.
2 15 ounce cans red kidney beans
Salt to taste(used when cooking onions).
4 or 5 red roasted peppers,chopped.


After sauteing the onion till soft,crumble the sausage and brown it a bit, stirring it in with the onions. Add chopped garlic and the kidney beans. Add the chopped peppers. Cook the stew for about 1/2 hour, though an hour helps the flavors penetrate the beans better. Cook over medium heat.

This should serve four. I ate it with corn bread muffins.

The Destructo-Masters

Here they are. Resting from their labors. Soon they will wake, and start their day, and the dogs,plants, and I will be afraid.

My Uncle Jimmy once said that when you have kids or animals you don't have anything else, and he was right, though I give adult dogs a pass on this. They may shed on the couch, and pee the rug while you are off working a 12 hour shift, but dogs have a sense of shame. They show remorse. They do not smash Limoges. They do not smash flower pots on the carpet and then use  the dirt as kitty litter.
Dogs do not go directly from the litter box to the bathroom sink or the kitchen counter. They do not toss cookbooks off the kitchen shelves.

The mother of these heathens is a community cat named Brushy. She had these kittens in October, and when I saw they were not ordinary ferals, and after a raccoon tore one of their siblings to bits, I took pity on them and brought them inside to pursue civilized life. I thought I might keep them, but have revised my thinking and am looking for dupes to take most of them off my hands.

The top tom in the neighborhood did not father these cats. He is a big nasty tuxedo cat with a Hitlerian mustache. I call him "Oreo". He is father to the porch cat kittens whose mothers have no standards. They will hook up with any body.

Oreo is beneath Brushy, who is upwardly mobile and found herself an uptown man-a Siamese.

These kittens are beautiful. They are decorative, which is a good thing because if you adopt them you will have to put away all your other decorations if you want to keep them out of the trash. You need not worry that these cats will get into your purse and chew up your credit cards, but you will have to lock up the paper towels and the toilet paper.

Our Kind of Guys

I was cooking tonight while the four o'clock news came on on our classical music station. I try to avoid the news, but I did not succeed tonight, and I heard one of our governments ever present idiots say that in order to fight radical extremists we had to find "more moderate rebels".

I believe this was an oxymoron spoken by a moron, for when have rebels ever been moderate?
To paraphrase George Santayana, those who do not remember history are doomed to be Americans, and our history is rife with rebels we thought were controllable and would be our guys.Saddam Hussein was our guy until he wasn't, and look what our generous interference has wrought there. To fight the Russians in Afghanistan, we chose Osama Bin Ladin as one of our guys. We are always trying to depose leaders we do not like on every continent, and then are surprised by the snakes who slither out of the rocks to help us, then turn on us.

Iran,Panama. Vietnam. I do not suppose anyone remembers them. I suppose we will be looking for "moderate rebels" in Nigeria next. This is the danger of being a people who do not care about history,  like the Americans interviewed on Martin Luther King Day who thought King had died peacefully in his sleep and had been the first African American on the moon.

Snow Day

The Southerner is baffled by snow and ice. I looked out of my apartment this morning, and I saw a young man on his hands and knees taking a photo of our snow covered,ice encrusted parking lot.

Ah the young!  They see an ice spectacle. We oldies see a chance we might break our hips.

The Southerner thinks that SUVs and four wheel drive do not have to conform to the laws of nature. In his sport vehicle he is invincible! He is safe at any speed. That is why photos on the local news of SUVs off  in the ditch  and littering the median strip are so predictable.

When I was a child in New Hampshire, snowstorms meant hearing the sounds of tire chains rattling away. I have never heard them here.When I lived in Connecticut, 6 inches of snow closed schools. In New Hampshire you only stayed home if the boiler blew up or the roof fell in.

In Nashville people do not take snow days, they take snow weeks. This is because nothing smaller than a state highway gets plowed. Neighborhood roads are only passable when the damn stuff melts.

And I dialed Amazon this morning to order snow grippers to attach to my shoes. They are certainly not for the fashionable Nashville belles who would rather freeze than wear a bulky coat, or any spike other than a stiletto on their shoes..

I do not care. I am still thinking about my hips. I received my medicare card a week or so, and that has concentrated my mind wonderfully.

A New Post

Being tired, I inadvertently published a new poem on my other blog and I am not clever enough to move it. So here is the address

thenashvillegardener.blogspot.com