An Interesting Evening in the Eastern Orange County Mountains.

Last night I visited a friend here in the Canyon. Actually it was in one of our side canyons. The canyon is named Wildcat Canyon and is of some local historical interest. My friend is a talented beer brewer. So I went over and sat at his bar which is built on the canyon wall under a grove of blue agave which are quite large and protect his bar from being trashed by small rocks dislodged from the canyon wall by various wild critters walking along paths on the canyon wall.

It was a nice spring night and the air was a little crisp and the beer wonderful. We sat and we talked about stuff. He's a geologist and we talked about yesterday's 8.3 quake off the eastern coast of Russia not far from the Aleutian Islands. Remember Sarah Palin talking about how she was qualified foreign policy-wise to be president because she could see Russia from her front porch in Alaska or some nonsense like that? It is interesting that quake which the USGS calls a 'severe' quake has yet to be even mentioned by the US media. I guess it wasn't important enough for our media to comment on or report to us. After all it happened in the land of our Mortalist Enemy (ca 1948-1982) so it couldn't possibly be of interest to us. Even though our leaders and their leaders were committed to the mutual destruction of our peoples. I would like to thank the Media for deciding for us what would be of interest to us as a people.

Anyhow one thing led to another and soon we were treating our various ills with a little bit of a small innocent plant banned in the early decades of the last century by Congress at the behest of the then newly legalized liquor industry. Somethings in our system never change and Congress apparently still only acts at the behest of moneyed interests who open their checkbooks to members of congress, much to the chagrin of those of us who really wish for a Congress more open to actually working for the benefit of those who with our hard-earned money pay their basic compensation and pay for their Cadillac medical plans and their overly generous retirement benefits. These are the same guys who have voted no fewer than 37 times to repeal what they derisively call Obamacare in order to deny non members of Congress decent medical care at affordable prices. As to who pays for Congress' non-basic compensation I will leave that to your own imagination, but please don't be surprised when you discover the answer to that.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, or more correctly at the hillside bar in Wildcat Canyon he and I (along with his wife who had by that time joined us) began to notice something odd and unusual. On his bar my friend has a small lamp made from a 'dead soldier' or more commonly called an empty half gallon-sized bottle of Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey. The lamp has a small conically shaped green lampshade on it. At the top of the lampshade his wife noticed some small winged member of the genus Bug. This poor fellow was repeatedly walking along the top of the lampshade and making circle after circle heading lord only knows where. Sometimes the bug would slip off the side of the top edge of the shade but would quickly recover and head on to wherever it thought it was headed. We watched him probably for an hour engage in this up to then fruitless exercise. At one point my friend decided it might be helpful to the bug's endeavor if it were to walk through a cloud or two of exhaled smoke. So that was arranged. The bug made a couple more trips through the clouds and slipped off a few more times but always recovered and continued on its sisiphistic journey around its small world. It continued to fall, recover and head on. Suddenly it fell again and clung to the side of the shade. It clung there for awhile and then apparently had some sort of epiphany and realized that for the last hour or so it had been headed in the wrong direction! So it climbed back up the rim of its world and began walking in the opposite direction. We continued to observe its progress until it got a bit too nippy to be outside and adjourned our meeting. I have no idea if the bug made it to wherever it was going with such determination. I hope it did. I hope we helped it a bit on its journey. It was indeed a most interesting  fun Friday evening in the eastern Orange County mountains.