More Buck For The Bang

One of my readers recently offered me the chance for a mutual suicide – and I laughed and laughed.

When the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – and the aches and pains and misfortunes of modern life are too much, I was to obtain a box of .308 rifle ammunition, and transport it to his home in the wilds of the Ohio outback.  We would load similar guns, face each other, and on the count of three, shoot each other dead.

That’s how it would work, In Principle.  In Fact, if his gun-handling abilities matched mine, we’d probably shoot someone’s pig, and flatten the tire of a passing farm wagon.  The Amish Mafia would kidnap and abuse us.  The part that I laughed hardest at, was the American-centric notion that I could just, somehow, waltz into a local Canadian establishment, and be handed a box of shells.  Even with me not owning a gun, the Government is afraid that I might throw them at someone.

Canada is not like Russia, or China, or North Korea, where civilian gun ownership is banned, prohibited, and strictly prevented.  In Canada, Anyone can own a firearm – as long as they have a healthy bank account, and the patience of Job.

To possess anything firearm-related, you have to sacrifice a tree to produce enough paper to satisfy all the bureaucratic boondoggles, and to print enough money to pay for it all.  There are forms for this, licenses for that, and certificates for everything else.  Only when you have generated enough paper documents to equal the weight of the gun, are you actually allowed to acquire and keep it.

I would require a background/psychological evaluation form, a signed permission slip from the wife, to have and keep it in our home, a carry permit to bring it there from point of purchase, a different carry permit to take it (Only) to and from home, to a licensed shooting range.  None of this target practice at bottles at the dump.  I would need a form proving to Police officers where and how I was safely and securely storing the gun – with any ammunition locked in a different location, and they all cost money. The police – local, Provincial, and RCMP – have a license to randomly search my home, a minimum of once a year, to ensure that I am complying with all the rules.

It would all begin with – despite the fact that I have almost 300 hours of gun safety training, the government would force me to attend their $200/$300, 30-hour course and test, where, if I carelessly used the vernacular terms bullet, or shell, instead of their OCD-authorized word, cartridge, I would be failed, and my wallet and I would have to start all over again.

Twenty years ago, when I still rode a motorcycle, I would occasionally ride to the north end of town, where there was a company called Shooter’s Choice, a combination of retail sales, and a supervised shooting range.  They had a glass display case with most of the handguns that I would never be able to afford.  I was warned to stop drooling on the counter.

The fact that there was also a nearby strip-club, and one of the Region’s best French-fry wagons, might help explain the attraction – one-stop sin shopping.  Alas, they are all gone.  The strip club was too close to a Mennonite Worship Hall, and the city cancelled their license.  Now it’s just a road-house bar.  Skin is taboo, but booze is okay.  The fries-wagon moved to a smaller city.

An automotive repair had me nearby recently.  Just for old-time’s sake, I drove over.  The glass handgun display case now contains fishing lures, archery equipment, hikers’ trail-bars, and rifle scopes – to be used to watch our gun-owning (non)-rights disappear into the distance.  😀

Sharing My World

Standing in for Melanie, pensitivity101 has sponsored a post, urging us to “Share Your World.”  Since I’m a selfish old bugger, I refused, and changed the title.  Always on the lookout for a good blog-theme, and being garrulous, loquacious, vociferous, talkative, voluble, gabby, thesaurus, and repetitive, I’ve decided to bare all.

Here are this week’s questions:
1.  Do you have family photographs on display in your main living room?

Yes, we do, finally. For years the living room walls have been adorned only with prints of artists’ originals, including one by a friend/artist, who turned it into a Remarque by painting an extension of a flowering Magnolia branch, out onto the matte.

The family pictures, including a water-color of the daughter, spinning yarn, begin at the half-landing, and extend up the stairway wall toward the bedrooms.  It looks like the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Gallery, caught in a stiff breeze.

Having run out of upwardly-mobile vertical space, the recent birth of the Great-grandson required finding space in the living room to hang a photo of Mr. Blue Eyes on one wall, and a montage of him and his parents, printed on fabric at Staples, on another.

2. What was the best vehicle you owned?
This could be a pushbike as a kid, your first car, a motorcycle, or something else.

I would be hard-pressed to pick any of the vehicles we’ve owned, as a Favorite. Each has been what we needed at the time. We started with a couple of sedans.  As the children grew, we graduated to a station wagon.  As we became more rotund, numerous and arthritic, we’ve moved up to an easier entry, 7-passenger sport-ute.

Automobiles are sedate and functional.  For cheaper, easier, more fun and freedom transportation, I owned 5 Jap-crap, rice-burner motorcycles, over 20+ years.  If I were forced to pick, I would probably choose the last – a Corvette blue-on-blue, Honda CB750K

3. Did you pass your driving test first time?

I did! I had to choose between two cities with examination centers, each 25 miles away from my home town. One possessed steep hills, and examiners known to reach over and turn off the ignition half-way up, to see how you coped.  I picked the flatland one.

I took the test in a left-hand drive Vauxhall, exported to Canada.  I lost four points, not once, but twice, for failing to gear down the manual transmission for turns, and lugging the engine.  I needed 90% to pass and ended with 92%.

4. Does loud music from a neighbor or passing cars annoy you?

Thank an un-named (and possibly imaginary) deity for allergies and air-conditioning. We remain inside mostly, with the windows closed. Our nearest neighbors are quiet, and those who play music while they’re on their decks, do so at reasonable volumes.  The son works all night, and tries to sleep all day.

Idiots in cars, with their radios jacked up to 11, puzzle me, but usually don’t anger me.  At a light, some fool rolls up beside me.  My windows are up.  His windows are up, and I can still hear his stereo blasting and the bass just a-thumpin’.  I think it’s like buying a hot-damn car as a penis substitute.  They’re compensating.  And it’s often some young white dude, blaring Black rap.

Gratitude:
What has made you smile over the last seven days?

Grumpy Archon is getting soft and mushy in his old age.

“Happy/Smile” is not the same as gratitude.  Despite claiming to be grumpy, I am easily pleased.  Mining humor sites for future blog-post jokes, and interacting with fellow bloggers keeps me happy and smiling.  I am grateful that, even as I have reached the age of 78, I still remain reasonably strong and healthy.  I much prefer seeing the green side of the sod.  If that changes, I’ll let you know.

Dum Crinimals

I’ve stopped asking, “How stupid can you be?”
There is no upper limit!  Some people are taking it as a challenge.

Even more proof that crime doesn’t pay.

Next time, take off the blinders
Derek Pierson tried to rob a convenience store.  He walked in, looked directly at the clerk and told her to ‘give the money up.’  What he didn’t notice was that a member of an armed robbery task force – wearing a shirt marked ‘Shreveport Police’ on the front and back, as well as ‘Police’ on the sleeves – was standing in an aisle ten feet away.

The agent, who had stopped by on a routine security check, pulled his gun and arrested Pierson without incident.  The officer described him as looking ‘like a deer caught in the headlights.’  I guess I picked the wrong place Pierson told police.

Talking trash
Minutes after getting a report of two men trying to break into parking meters, police began looking for suspects.  It wasn’t hard.  Witnesses said one wore an all-black outfit, while the other was dressed in a bathrobe.  Police located one likely suspect near the scene of the crime.

They began searching the neighborhood for the second suspect, when they were attracted to a garbage dumpster by the sound of a ringing cell phone.  When they lifted the lid of the bin, they found the second man inside.

Ignoring the rule of thumb
A robbery at a Git-N-Go Convenience Store in Des Moines was called off for lack of convincing theatrics.  ‘Well, I could tell he didn’t have a gun.’ said the clerk at the store.  ‘I knew it was his finger.  I could see his thumb sticking out of his coat pocket.’  The would-be robber, who acted tough and even inserted a harsh expletive in his demand for cash, wanted to argue.

‘It is a gun,’ he told the clerk.  ‘No it isn’t,’ the clerk replied.  The frustrated suspect left the store, but paused a moment in the parking lot, perhaps to go over in his mind the argument he’d just lost.

Thief tracking made easier
Kurt Husfeldt and two others were arrested in Lindenhurst, NY in possession of 14 stolen electronic devices that they apparently assumed were cell phones.  However, they were actually global positioning devices from a nearby municipal facility, and police just followed their signals to Husfeldt’s house.

Googled
A man was arrested in connection with a 2005 bank robbery, after leaving a trail of cyber-clues.  Police said that he was staying with a woman at the time of the robbery, and spent a great deal of time on her computer.  He borrowed her car the day of the robbery, and returned with a lot of cash, claiming he’d won it at a casino.

Police say that he walked into a Liberty Bank branch and handed the teller a note demanding money.  A week later, his woman friend contacted police, saying she recognized him from a surveillance photo on a newspaper website.  A police search of the computer revealed numerous searches concerning bank robberies, including one for the branch he hit, and another for ’How To Rob A Bank.’

Banks for telling me
A would-be robber in Austria, was arrested after he tried to hold up his local town hall, mistaking it for a bank.  Wearing a mask, and waving a toy gun the unemployed man burst into the town hall, and shouted, ‘Hold-up!  Hold-up!’  The building has a sign indicating that it has an ATM, on the outside wall.

He realized his mistake when a town employee explained to him where he was, and he then fled into the nearby woods.  He was arrested when he came back to pick up his motorbike, which he had parked outside the town hall.

😳   😆

Dirty Too Fibbing Friday

For a couple of weeks pensitivity101 gave us some unusual words to tantalise our fibbing expertise. This time she decided to turn it on its head and give us a list of familiar words to re-define.

1. What is a broom?
   

It’s what my grandson said when I first taught him to ride a motorcycle.  Broom!  Broom!

2. What is a doughnut?

It’s a method of attempted suicide, using the tight-assed car companies’ wheelbarrow-wheel excuse for a spare tire, because the bootstrap method doesn’t work.  Safety regulations say that you are supposed to travel only a maximum of 50 kilometers, at a maximum speed of 50 KmH, using one.
I’ve been on the Expressway, doing 115 Kmh in a 100KmH zone, and been passed like I was standing still by someone with one on a drive/steering wheel.  I don’t know how the drivers keep the car in a straight line, with it leaning toward me and the ditch.  I slow down, and give them lots of room.  When one of those things goes bad, it’ll take 3 or 4 other vehicles with it.  😳

3. What is a penny farthing?

It’s the change you’ll get for a pint of Porter, at the pub out Pensitivity’s way.  The civilized portion of the country had already gone decimal with their coinage, and was leaning toward the Euro, before the rational Brexit decision was made.  They don’t cotton to that Daylight Saving Time stuff out there.  Their clocks are always set at 1890.

4. What is a blanket?

Also known as a wet blanket, he is the death of the party, present only because he’s some sports stud’s wing-man.  He’s the one who, while everyone else is enjoying a little booze, a little grass, and some AC/DC, is prattling endlessly about the cultural significance of carved Popsicle sticks.

5. What is a socket?

It’s a tag-line from the old Rowan and Martin Laugh-In TV program.  Would I lie to you (again)?  Don’t believe me??  Look here  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6HIzYXZzI0

6. What is tapestry?

It is/was Carole King’s 1971 album.  I was wrong. I thought it contained the song that she wrote while she was still volunteering at the blood donor clinic, You’re So Vein.

7. What is e-mail?

He/she/it/they are a member of the newly formed LGBTQ2S+, (A random group of symbols, almost as strange and meaningless as the name of Elon Musk’s 7^th son – X Ӕ A-12) unsure whether it is more blessed to give or to receive – perhaps a bit of both if the company is congenial.

8. What is a shower?
   

He’s a guy with an unbuttoned Mac, and a compulsion to display his shortcomings.

9. What is a sandbag?

A golfing groupie  😳  (See; Tiger Woods)

10. What is chocolate?

It is the delightful concoction that causes my tummy to get round, and the world go ‘round, but sadly, not my blood circulation system.  The plaque I want is like the one that the wife’s godmother got from the Queen, for turning 100, not the stuff that clogs my arteries.

Nothing In Prompticular

Just a little throwaway post from a day when I couldn’t convince the hamster in my head to get the wheel turning.

What language sounds the best?

Well, it won’t be any of the Asian languages.  The yin-yang, sing-song speakers of those, all sound like geese, or like they’ve all had COVID, or like geese that have had COVID.  African languages sound like they haven’t discovered vowels and consonants yet – just a bunch of boops and glottals, and clicks.  R2-D2 might be Kenyan.

With all its multiple modifying word-endings, Spanish sounds like you’re being attacked with a verbal sub-machinegun – great, if you’ve got all day to wait for it.  Latin is for medicine.  Italian is for lovers. German is for training dogs.  The Queen’s English is for pomp and circumstance.  Arabic is for phlegm.  Speakers sound as if they’re having an allergic reaction to dairy products…..CKHACKK!  😯

French is the language of diplomacy.  Of course, that just means that French speakers can ramble on for days – weeks – months – years, without ever actually saying anything.  French has some foolish constructions…. but the SOUND of it.  Oooooh!!!  If you doubt me, click to hear the Matrix Merovingian Curse.

What best describes your lifestyle – Sneakers, Dress Shoes, or Sandals?

None of the above.
My sneakers days are far behind me – and I called them ‘running shoes.’  The best I can accomplish now is a fast shuffle.  When I say that I’m approaching 75, I mean years of age, not miles per hour.  I’ve never been rich enough to be pretentious.  Even when I worked in an office, my footwear was clean and functional, but hardly worth calling ‘dress shoes.’

I may not do what I do on my feet at any great speed, but I feel I need something on them to protect and support.  Wearing sandals is just asking for foot injuries – and barely suppressed snickering and pointing.

I’d like a write-in vote – for boots.  As I explained in my Suave – Sophisticated post, I’ve worn good, solid, round-toed boots whenever socially allowable, for over half a century.  I’ll die with my boots on, and be buried in Boot Hill.

If your life were a book, what would the title be?

While I am reasonably intelligent, my social skills are somewhat lacking.  The Pink Panther, or Johnny English could star in my “Sophisticated” post, but I wouldn’t even get a speaking part.  If my life were a book, the title would probably be Dummies, For Dummies – and someone would have to explain it to me.

Oops!  It’s already out.  Can someone explain to me, why it’s already in print??  Did somebody see me coming…. AGAIN??!  😯   🙄

Fortunately for you, that’s all I have to say on these subjects.  There’ll be another Masochists Anonymous meeting here in a couple of days.  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me.

’21 A To Z Challenge – N

I AM THE LORD OF DARKNESS!

I COMMAND YOU TO READ AND HEED!

A scientific psychological study that I read on the Internet (So it must be true) says that people who stay up late are more creative, intelligent, and better at making decisions.

HOO – Doesn’t go to bed when the sun does??

HOO – Stays up all night, to greet it when it rises in the morning??

Ooh!  Ooh! Pick me!  Pick me!

The once, and future, perpetual

NIGHT-OWL

My night-owl sister and I were born to a pair of Protestant-work-ethic parents who rose each day before the dawn even cracked, like Medieval serfs.  My Mother would put my brother and me to bed at 8 PM, and wonder why I was still keeping him awake, telling stories and jokes, when they were ready to retire at 11.

As a teen, I often watched Friday- and Saturday-night movies on TV (with the volume down) from 11:30 till 1:00 AM.  In the summer, when the beach bowling alley closed at 1 AM, I often drifted home – quietly – after 2.

When I was sixteen, instead of going home one Friday night, a bunch of us rowdies hiked a couple of miles up the riverbank, into the woods, made a campfire and some noise no-one could hear, cooked some hotdogs and soup made with river water.

I trekked back to the beach to have a swim as the sun came up, got home about 7 AM, and was frying some bacon and eggs when my Father got up.  7 AM??  He’d slept in!  He was so happy that I’d got up ‘at a reasonable hour, for once.’  He was a little shocked/perplexed when I told him that I just got home and was having a late snack.  I told him that I was going to bed, and for him to call me about 2 PM, and I would get up and mow the lawn.

I sometimes wonder if I was just born on the wrong side of the planet, but I think that, even if I lived in Japan or Malaysia, I’d still wind up haunting the dark shift.  It probably made it easier for me to work 3 to 11, and especially the 11 to 7 shifts that others had trouble with.  One young co-worker came in for each midnight shift with three king-cans of high-caffeine Jolt Cola to get him through the night.

I could get up early for the day-shifts, but it was the ‘not all cylinders firing yet’ early-morning inattention that caused me to nudge the rear bumper of a bus that was slowing, as I tried to pull in behind it on my motorcycle, to make a turn.  I broke my bike, my left shoulder, and my wallet.

I know that many of you are happy, breezy morning people.  (Curse your bright-eyed and bushy-tailed diurnal cycle.)   The son is following in my nocturnal, but low-traffic level, footsteps.  He is approaching twenty years straight, on the midnight shift.  Another generation of Dark Lords – I’m proud of him…. or I would be, if I could just find him in the darkness.

I have a sweet post scheduled for Wednesday.  I’ll have it published and ready to read, yesterday, before you get out of bed today.  I’ll see you (later in the day) then.   😎

Flash Fiction #254

PHOTO PROMPT © David Stewart

DREAMS UP IN SMOKE

Cheryl offered to help him with his writing.  A couple who worked at the newspaper dropped by each Friday, and they often discussed the craft.  “Join us.”

The husband said the first thing they did, was smoke dope.  “It frees the creativity.”  He silently demurred, not for moral or legal reasons, but from skepticism.  He’d be the abstaining benchmark.  “I’ll get a beer and catch up.”

A Cheech and Chong blunt got passed around…. around…. and around.  Potatoes, motorcycles, redhead in sales, socks with sandals…. Bright topics bubbled into the conversation – and were immediately forgotten.

There was no creativity here.

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

’20 A To Z Challenge – S

SUAVE
SOPHISTICATED
full of
SAVOIR FAIRE

None of these words apply to me.

I am just a small-town boy with a touch of autism, who has managed to read enough to know how the other half 95% lives, and how they expect me to act and behave.  If the wife hadn’t decided that I needed someone to civilize me, I probably wouldn’t be married.

I have managed to dine at a few somewhat upscale restaurants without embarrassing myself or my companions too badly, but I should not be let loose near anything labeled fête or gala.  I can’t even tell the difference between white ties and black ties, much less how to wear them, when, and where.

For a couple of years in high school I wore a string-, or bolo-tie to the few dances and parties that I attended – and didn’t wonder why the females wanted nothing to do with me.  In the first half of my working life, when I was a number of varieties of cube-drone, I wore clip-on ties.

One day, I stopped for a cooling beverage (or several) after work, at a place artistically nicknamed The Pit, which just happened to have entertainment which involved the removing of clothing.  I got a seat right up front – ‘cuz my eyes were weak.  One of the sluts strippers Exotic Dancers decided that she wanted to drag me up on the stage.  She grabbed my tie and pulled.  She ended up with it in one hand, and a bemused look on her face.  Of course, I had to burn the tie, by the time she was done with it.

My idea of “sophistication” is to order bottled beer that is opened at my table, rather than take my chances of being roofied by on-tap lager.  Don’t get me started about cocktails, or even ‘mixed drinks.’  If it’s any more complex than rye and cola, it’s outside my wheelhouse.

I’ve long since given up the bolo ties but, despite their connotation and connection to County-Western Music – which I abhor – I continue to wear, what other people call ‘Cowboy boots’, through almost 53 years of marriage.  What I wear is not what others might refer to as ‘Biker boots’ either, although they served to protect my lower legs for 25 years, when I rode an assortment of rice-burner motorcycles.

It’s too bad I wasn’t born rich, instead of so God-damned handsome.  Maybe one of the Hilton or Astor families might have polished me a little bit.  More likely, I’d have just wound up like Billy Carter, the embarrassment to President Jimmy Carter.  We could have had a few beers together, only…. Despite endorsing Billy Beer, in private, he drank Pabst.

Stop back in a couple of days, and I’ll have another story about old guys sitting around, drinking beer, and taking over the world.  I’ll lay in some local, micro-brew dark ale that we can share.   😀

WOW #63

Someone is always trying to control you.  It has been going on for millennia.  I recently came upon an even-rarer-than-usual word which proves it.

ATHANATICS

The use of the word is so uncommon, that it is almost impossible to find in a dictionary or search engine.  The concept has been around for as long as there have been alpha-males who want to inflict their views on others.  The term seems to have arisen about 400 AD, based on Athanasius of Alexandria.

As the Bishop of Alexandria, he used social, political, and religious power to eliminate heresy, and enforce his beliefs about Christian Orthodoxy.  The definitional value is to create an ideal world, although your definition of “ideal” probably greatly differs from whoever seizes the right to impose theirs.  Athanasius’ idea of ideal, was blind obedience, uniformity and conformity – no free thinking allowed.

In Poul Anderson’s World Without Stars, the antithantic prevents age and disease but memories must be artificially edited. In Anderson’s The Boat Of A Million Years, eight mutant immortals survive through history until the athanatics are developed.

In Larry Niven’s Known Space future history, ‘Boosterspice’ extends life indefinitely, and protectors, who have eaten “tree of life,” live until killed.

1970, Nigel Calder, Technopolis: Social Control of the Uses of Science, Simon and Schuster

If only a minority of the athanatic technologies summarized in this book comes to practical fruition in humans — and some of them are mutually contradictory — there will be plenty of moral, legal and political issues to perplex us.

England is perhaps the most athanatic country in the world.  “The Wild” has almost completely been eliminated.  There are still stands of (hardwood) forests, but they are open and welcoming, with paths, trails, tiny roads, and bridges over streams.  It is almost impossible to get lost, in any dangerous sense.

In the developed world, science and technology have done much to make life ideal, but the more we are protected from harm, the more freedom and control of our lives, we lose.  When motorized vehicles were new, they were cumbersome things that required training and knowledge, care and control, to safely operate.  Many attained all of these, but quick and handy transportation meant that far more did not.

In 1906, there were only 8 motor-cars in the entire city of Cincinnati, yet somehow, two of them managed to crash, head-on, into each other.  Soon came control – the requirement for driving licenses, speed limits, stop signs and traffic lights.

Early cars had manual transmissions.  Drivers had to understand gears and clutches.  I very much liked the feel of controlling a ‘standard’.  I did so until cars with gearshifts became so rare that buyers had to pay a premium for them.  All of my motorcycles had gearshifts.  Now, even many motorcycles are equipped with automatic transmissions.  It just takes away the fun, the thrill, of doing it yourself.  I was recently passed by a large motorcycle with its radio blaring, so that the rider could hear it over the wind noise.  I was almost surprised that the rider didn’t have Wi-Fi direct to built-in earphones in his helmet.

The flying cars that we have been promised for almost a century have failed to emerge, because technology has not advanced far enough.  We’ve seen what destruction and chaos inattentive fools can create in two dimensions.  I hate to imagine what they might accomplish in three dimensions.

AI, and self-driving cars are almost perfected.  When that is accomplished, we might move on to individual, self-flying cars.  They might satisfy the general population, who just want to get from place to place.  For archaic fools like me, who still want the feel of doing something, AI is a smothering pillow.  I want to control what my vehicle is doing.  With self-drivers, I can’t start, stop or steer.  I can’t drive 10 MPH over the speed limit if I’m foolishly late.  Even if I could override the controls, the manufacturer put in a black box that will tell Big Brother, and my insurance company, if I did.

The world continues to be safer, tamer, more ‘ideal,’ but, more and more, we end up swaddled in Amazon bubble wrap, protected, but divorced from reality and any chance of adventure.  This may be acceptable to a large percentage of the population, but we still need some who dare, who search, who triumph.  The New World was not discovered or conquered by a boatload of chartered accountants.

Book Review #19

Paradox Bound

It is no paradox that I like to read stories about paradoxes. Oh, wait – I already published that, here.

Are you folks ready for some social and political commentary and satire?? Well, seat belt in. Here we go.

The book – Paradox Bound

The author – Peter Clines

The review – IN THE BEGINNING, was the United States of America. The founding fathers had a dream, a dream of what they had created, a dream of what it could be, a dream of what they wanted it to be. They wanted their dream to be real, solid, physical. Being (mostly) good Christians, they prayed to the Egyptian god Ptah.

Ptah’s father was an older, greater god. Ptah was a carpenter. He died, and came back to life after three days. Maybe they never noticed the difference – or the similarities. Ptah created a real, physical dream for them. It was stored in a safe place…. then one day, the dream was gone – Lost? Stolen? Went to North Korea with some crazy basketball player and forgot to come back?

Most Americans didn’t notice, or didn’t care, but there were many who did care, and they became the Searchers. 48 men had been created with no faces, only plastic Halloween masks. The faceless men’s mission had been to protect the Dream, but when it disappeared, they only protected their own existence. Their greatest strength was “Certainty.” They knew everything around them. They mined the almost 250 years of records of the entire United States. They hunted down and killed any Searcher who might re-establish the old status quo. These faceless bookkeepers were The Bureaucrats.

Is any of this roman a clé beginning to feel familiar? As a Canadian, it took me a few chapters.

Since this entire story is about the United States, there is no “Time” Travel, only about 250 years of History Travel. Like the Back To The Future movies, a vehicle is required. No speed is needed, only the ability to navigate the slick spaces on the roads and trails of America, to slide from one period or era, to another. Travel up-time beyond 2036 is impossible. If The Dream is not recovered and re-installed by then, American history will unravel, and the world will exist without all the wonderful things it has created.

Older vehicles were preferred, because they were stronger, and simpler, able to be repaired with a hammer, pliers and some string, if they broke down. Horse and wagons were mentioned, but usually early 20^th century technology was chosen. The author mentions an Indian motorcycle, and apparently John Henry was a real person, riding the rails in a train he assembled himself.

The writer seems to love classic automobiles. He has different characters riding around in a 1929 Ford Model A Business Coupe, a 1940 Cadillac Sixty Special in factory Oxblood Maroon, a 1953 Hudson Hornet, a 1958 Edsel Corsair, a 1961 Ford Fairlane, a 1967 Chevrolet Impala, a 1969 Ford Mustang, a 1970 Dodge Lancer, a 1975 Dodge Dart Sport, and a 1978 Chrysler Newport. Without specific dates, he also mentions ‘tail-finned‘ Cadillacs, which would be from about 1953 to 1960.

Since Ptah’s spell only covers the USA, all vehicles must be “American steel.” As an ex-autoworker, I know of American workers, assembling cars in the U.S. with parts produced in Canada, made from German or Pakistani steel. I guess when they cross the border, and get paid for with greenbacks; they become “American.”

Our hero and heroine are the ones driving the ’29 Model A. The author doesn’t know as much about old cars as he lets on. At one point, they make a run for the car. She whips open the passenger door, and “slides across the rumble seat.” I had a mental image of Starsky (or was it Hutch?) sliding across a smooth hood. You don’t do that with a rumble seat! There’s a large, protruding, steel T-handle that could ruin your whole weekend.

There’s the T-Handle that you wouldn’t”t want to slide across.

This car had the ‘rumble seat’ removed, so that the space could be used as a small trunk.

After a few more pages, he began to use the terms ‘bench seat’ and ‘rumble seat’ interchangeably. (Click above) A rumble seat is exterior to the small, enclosed passenger compartment of a coupe. It’s like a small trunk, set on the sloping rear deck, that opens to an exposed, upholstered, double seat.

It must be confusing for the History Travelers, to have the paradox of speaking to a person that they have never met, yet who has known them for years of their time-line – to speak to someone they’ve watched die – to observe the same occurrence from two – or three – different perspectives – and get it.

The ultimate paradox was that, since the Searchers had been trying to find the American Dream through 250 years of history, chronologically, the Dream hid itself, in 1963, so that they could all achieve their dream of locating it. It was never really ‘lost.’

I liked Cline’s The Fold novel last year, about parallel time-lines. Despite its ‘Made In America’ plot line, I really liked this one too. I rate it two cheeseburgers. I’d give it three, but I’m trying to lose some weight again (still). 🌯 Tell me what you’re reading.