Back From Ma's Place

 

"Do you know the ObamaCare website," Scrooge inquired.

"I should hope I did," replied the lad.

"An intelligent boy!" said Scrooge.  "A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they"ve sold the prize Health Care Plan that there -- Not the little one; the big one?"

"It's listed there now," replied the boy.

"Is it?" said Scrooge.  "Go and buy it."

I go to my mother's every Monday. Monday is the day, because Tuesday is garbage day, so the garbage and recycling bins must be set out Monday eve, and then retrieved Tuesday morning.
I tell people I shall be in Port Huron on Monday or Tuesday; Tuesday's garbage day, I say, and ofen leave it at that, giving the impression that somehow the garbage of a town on Lake Huron and the St Clair River is incredibly interesting to me.

She has no computer. I have no phone plan nor iPhone on which to access the Internet, and even if I did, there's a 50/50 chance I'd be picked up by Rogers, the Canadian system, and thereby incur a sultan's ransom in roaming charges. (Which brings to mind scenes from the Arabian Nights, and a princess sitting daintily on one side of a large balance. Various servile types fill the other side of the balance with tech gizmos and jewel-encrusted roaming charges.)

So I am incommunicado. 
I have found that lately when I use the term "incommunicado", people look at me and ask how the line of talk switched to football. I have found that they are mixed up with the term "incognito", a footballer by that name having been in the tabloids recently.
Was it "Ritchie Incognito" and the Miami Dolphins?
The team really should look for other muscular fellows with names like "Joey Incommunicado" and "Manny Ipso Facto" and "Eli Non Sequitur"
I have also found that sometimes I might as well just speak some sort of made-up, my-own-private-Idaho pidgin and people would understand just as well as they do now.

Anyway, so Tuesday past we put up my mother's Christmas tree, put the lights on it, argued about lights, bemoaned the fact that there are no design standards for Xmas lights: the electrical aspect has standards, but everything else is proprietary and idiosyncratic, which comes down to no bulb which you have saved from a bygone time as a spare to fill in for future burnt out lights has a chance of fitting into the socket.... no way, Padre del Niño!

We did the exterior lights (It was a cool, breezy, spitting-frozen-rain day in the higher 30's, which was pretty good for Port Huron at this time of year. I have done this exterior light bit in bitter cold winds with hands bleeding from barberry bush thorns, as I thought that Jesus' parents would never ask him to put up lights in the cold, but parents are parents everywhere and everywhen, so they probably did ask him.)

We did banking, grocery shopping, post office, a bit of cleaning, and chased down my brother twice to give him some Care packages my mother had done up.

We returned home and got the mail. One of the envelopes was not easy to open.
My mother began theorizing as to why a person who wished to send you information would chose to send it to you in an envelope that defied discovery of the contents.
She continued in this vein for about 45 seconds, instead of looking for a letter opener. It had become an inquiry into society in the 21st century, wherein the remnants of the Greatest Generation cast their judgmental and sour eyes over the hi-jinks of the following generations, and found them wanting.
(The Greatest Gens really should cut us some slack, even though - I must admit - that goings on in the present do more often than not resemble All Fools' Day riots staged in the precincts of Hogarth's engraved Bedlams; All Fools or Dies Irae... we are very bi-polar in these times.)

Stroke of the old genius hit me (and I wondered where it had disappeared to for so long).

"That must be an ObamaCare envelope," I said.

"An Obama-Lope," I added.

She agreed, and muttered some things limbaughian in re ObamaCare, but you could tell she was slightly off-kilter. She was used to setting me up as some devil's advocate for Mr. Obama, and then throwing offal at the opinions she imputed to me about the contemporary Fall from the Eden of the Greatest Gens, the most recent and atrocious example being ObamaCare.
Now here I was using the old sobriquet of ObamaCare to condemn faulty stationery.
She rambled a bit. She was beginning to lose focus. I took the envelope and ripped it open. It was, of course, some more polls for old folks to condemn the present state of affairs, and -  by the way - send us some dollars to keep up the good work!
So it was trashed. Even she does not send money to political goobers, even though she may watch and listen to them.

However, now I have it. Everything that goes awry will be an ObamaCare something-or-other.
I will positively focus on it.
And it must be "ObamaCare such-and-such", for that mocks the recent mad focus of the witless. If I were to say "Obama such-and-such", I would become a Palin, and that would be a cruel redundancy to inflict upon the world!

Later that evening, just before I left to drive home in the dark, I said the tree looked great, even though we had some burnt outs lights we could not replace... ObamaCare lights!

I will fill the air like a real Republican,  bereft of ideas and plans, but filled with a burning focus on a single issue.

I might even send out letters to particularly obnoxious conservative types who have annoyed me in the past. I might ask them to contribute to the fund to buy my new computer, 'cuz my old one works like... ObamaCare!!!... now!

That nice old lady picked the wrong "liberal" to mess with!

(Of course, this all depends on the continued good workings of the website, which at Tuesday seemed to be OK. If all goes to heck, I can be obnoxious and ironic at the same time, and just continue saying it.)

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