Mind full on America's Birthday

Okay, here's my present to our national birthday party: mind fullness. I'm going to empty my mind so it can focus on all the hot time hoopla and hot dogs of the fireworks day. Here goes...

I've finally figured out why people who slather their car in bumper stickers are always the slowest drivers on the road: they want you to read their messages. Ahem, is this texting while driving?

Now that we know the NSA has metadata on every phone call and every email everybody's made in the last decade, we need to know why the Justice Department isn't using it to indict the terrifying banksters who blew up more American lives than Al Qaeda can count. Is Justice really that blind?

Despite best intentions and even training, you lose your mindfulness a lot at Medicare age and can return your black portable telephone handset to the TV, thinking it's the remote.  Operator! Get me CNN.

Commentators and scholars are talking about the great ripping apart in Turkey and Egypt of the secular, educated, economically vibrant class that wants to move forward and the rural religious rest that wants to hold on and go back.  Okay, so that class is Islamist, but the set up sure sounds just like America to me. Stuck in neutral while Drive and Reverse fight it out and rip us apart.

High tech has infiltrated everything and artificial intelligence is so the rage, Americans are getting stupider by the minute. Well, if the automatic word correction on my iPhone and iPad is any indication of artificial intelligence, Buddha save me. I start typing in s..p..a..g...for you know what, spaghetti, and it jumps ahead to out think me with "slag." I see why the world's a total mess. I want real intelligence back right now.

A reporter yet again exposed the old corporate con of increasing profits by not increasing prices but decreasing the net weight of the product. You know, less Cornflakes in the same old box. Well, I've discovered another nasty trick, a new Proctor gamble: my kitchen sink detergent has been watered down.Two bottles ago it was thick and gloppy and took me months to use. This bottle was gone in two weeks.  Americans are growing fat while their products get thinner and thinner. Ah, the balance of yin and yang.

This brings me to the really really big, burning question: is it deliberate or not that Trader Joe's fabulous Dark Chocolate Bar with Sea Salt and Caramel will not break apart on the designated lines, causing caramel to ooze out so you have to keep eating it and of course you eat more than you intend. Which means you have to buy a new one faster than you wanted to because who can be without chocolate this good in times this bad?

I think it's exquisite how all the ruckus and rampaging about the Second Amendment and the right to carry concealed loaded guns wherever you damn well please has become the fight to shoot yourself in the foot. There is a very tight correlation between the gun toting states and the suddenly abortion banning states and that's a huge HA HA because there's just as tight a correlation between these states and the growing population of young "nonwhites" who are going to breed these bastard rednecks out of existence. You'd think they'd be all for abortion!  But no. How sweet to get what you deserve.

The outsourcing of work to what Computerstan denizens call "end users" and I call "us" seems to have no end. In the latest grab for ridiculously nasty profit taking, the Golden Gate Bridge Authority removed all toll takers from its fabled bridge and made everyone who crosses responsible for figuring out how to get the $6 to them. Got that? You are now responsible and liable for collecting your own toll and getting it to their bank. They don't have to do anything. If you have one of those beeper gizmos on your dash, good going. If, like me, you forgot to take it with you the day you rented a car and had to go through the toll booth wondering what to do and then tried to pay the car rental company the cash, you're screwed. The car rental companies don't want to be toll collectors for the Golden Gate Bridge Authority. They tell you you're on your own and have to contact the authority to arrange payment. If you forget, eventually you find your credit card charged the toll plus a hefty penalty.  That's American enterprise for you!

And finally, a young foreign friend of mine has a wonderful boyfriend whose name turns out to be Perfecto. "Not a joke," she said. "It's his real name."  Well, I just love it!  Imagine how magical my life would be if everyone had to call me Perfect.


~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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