The Twilight Zone

Hi All!

Disclaimer: If I am ever legally found certifiable (again) this might be Exhibit A. Therefore, I disclaim the following story as a tall tale worthy of the drunken gibberish of James Frey.

It is all a pigment of my emancipation, or shall I say, exasperation. Exultation?

By the way, even I don't take liberty with sentence structure, capital letters, weird punctuation and dangling metaphors as that fraud...

He wrote a good lie and I confess to being envious and reveling in his disgrace, even though his big fat windy book got a huge sales boost from the "bad" publicity.

Unfortunately, I was only broken into 497,001 little pieces and haven't put them all back together yet. If he was as screwed up as me he couldn't have crapped a tedious 432 page tome out of his nether region.

He , to say the least, exaggerated. A Million Little Pieces? Gimme a break (so to speak) -- I have lived his fact and fiction and then some -- Most of it, anyway.

Most of it, anyway (I did that on purpose). It is true that I have flown on Commercial Airlines after an overpriced Drink or Two at the Lindbergh Bar and the one time I lucked into a First Class upgrade I kept 'em coming like fellow besotted genius Orson Welles.

I didn't Barf and Bleed all over the Stewardesses and Fellow Travelers.

That only happened at Home and in the Hospital and in Bathrooms (I have a deep respect for the poor underpaid hard working illegals who have had to mop up my edgy, creative Worthy of a National Endowment for for the Arts Grant, redecorating jobs. The Toilet can be quite difficult to find at times. Walls, Floors, Waste Baskets -- much easier to hit under the circumstances than that Tiny Porcelain Throne.)

Seriously, you'd be amazed at how much projectile blood and guts can spew out of orifices if you really work at getting to that state. Much worse than anything you'd see on ER.

What was my story? Oh Yeah, sorry about that preface. It just "Came Out." (Get it? Sometimes I just Kill Myself - better to crack myself up with a bad pun than to drive around hunting for a well-constructed bridge abutment).

Get to the POINT! Perhaps this should now be a separate blogentry. This story is totally unrelated, but if you're James Frey, you can make millions by throwing Strunk and White into the recycling bin.

If you read all my posts you are about to find out what I referenced in my pre-dawn missive today.

Here's the setup. I have spent much time with my daughter in the past several days. We shared her Confirmation retreat on Friday, Confirmation and lunch at Fern's on Saturday, Latin High Mass and brunch on Sunday, a trip to Cretin-Derham for high school entry exam on Monday.

Apropos of what?

At as close to 4:00am as it gets, I was startled out of a deep sleep by a demonic scream and a cry for help. I jumped out of bed and went to my daughter's room, only to find her comfortably asleep, no disturbed covers, no pillow askew.

Assuming I had had my own bad dream, I sat on the bed and stroked her hair. A faint smile formed on her lips as I whispered that everything was OK.

I was so wired that I couldn't get back to sleep. Handy for reading e-mail and writing a blogentry (copyright reserved for that Freyish word). Oh, and being awake to make a decent, healthy ham/egg/hash/pepper scramble breakfast for my toaster pastry/sugary oatmeal dependents. They hated it, naturally. Ah well, I tried. Doctored Veggie beef and barley tonight and they are gonna eat it and like it, gosh darn anaway!

My wife got up at 5 and we woke the kids at 6:30. After breakfast, they lay down again for awhile before getting ready for school.

I had related my tale to my wife. She went to Catie's room laid down with her, asking her if she slept ok.

Catie immediately reacted with the story that she had a nightmare about fighting in the Cuban Civil War (?) and that she was out of ammo and was being chased and shot at. Suddenly, just in the nick of time, Dad came to save her and brought her home to her bed.

Wowza.

Totally truthful, which of course, is much more real and strange than Fiction. If I had my life to do over again, I'd prefer to use my imagination. But sometimes reality is comforting.

Cheers!

Heads Up for Bloggers

Hi All!

Had trouble sleeping--Fox put on "American Idol" in place of "House" and it messed up my perfect Tuesday routine. Besides, I awakened at 4:00am to a demonic scream which sent me rushing to my daughter's bedroom. More soon.

So I will lazily post a link to a MUST READ from todays WSJ.

Oh, and Yosty has a piece in there today!

Cheers!

Revelation?

Hi All!

On Friday, I joined my precious youngest, Catherine, 13, in an all-day retreat at our parish, Saint Agnes, in preparation for her confirmation. Mass, Lectures, Confession and praying the Rosary.

I started to slightly feel the intense Faith that I had in childhood.

On Saturday, Catie was Confirmed at the packed Cathedral by Archbishop Harry Flynn. Saint Agnes had 118 Confirmands. They shared the sacred ceremony with 22 young black kids from Saint Peter Claver.

It was an amazingly inspirational service.

When I approached the Archbishop, I felt a sudden compulsion to take his right hand, kneel and kiss his ring. It was totally unplanned. Archbishop Flynn took my shoulders and said, "Thank You."

Sunday, we went to the 10:00 Saint Agnes High Mass and enjoyed a Gounot Mass that was transfixing. The crescendos of the orchestral and choral musicians sent chills through my spine.

Monday I drove to my parents' house.

An ambulance rushed by and headed down Vadnais Boulevard, an awesome road that borders Lake Vadnais, owned by Saint Paul Water Department thus is off-limits to any kind of cabin, house or watercraft, thus is a fir-lined urban Northwoods pristine site.

The speedo on my Scorpio don't work. I am extremely familiar with the hills and curves of the road, having driven it hundreds of times.

It is notorious speed trap. I chased the ambulance. An undercover SUV with a deputy sheriff u-turned and pulled me over. 49 in a 35.

I was expecting to go to jail for 2 years, which an arrest would have cost me, being on probation.

The young deputy came back to my car with my drivers license, after an eternal 5 minutes, and let me go.

Don't know if my excuse worked but I immediately confessed that I knew the limit was 35 but I was chasing an ambulance out of simple human curiosity. Without the speedo working, I showed definite shock when told I was going 49.

I went to Mass three days in a row. I made a rare confession. I prayed the Rosary. I kissed the Archbishop's Ring.

I am thinking hard about what it all means. But I've got an idea....

Cheers!

PK

Guest Writer

Hi All!

Not sure I'm over the rough stretch, but to tide you over, here is something I swiped from Ann Coulter which is worth a read:

Cheers!

'Chocolate City' Sprinkled With Nuts

by Ann Coulter
Posted Jan 18, 2006

So Hillary Clinton thinks the House of Representatives is being "run like a plantation." And, she added, "you know what I'm talking about."

First of all: Think about what a weird coincidence it is that Hillary would have made these remarks in a black church in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day. What are the odds? Did she even know it was a holiday? Bravely spoken, Senator. I haven't been this surprised since finding out Hollywood likes a movie about gay cowboys.

As Hillary explained, the House "has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard."

Yes, that's what was really missing on plantations during the slavery era: the opportunity to present a contrary view. Gosh, if only the slaves had been allowed to call for cloture votes. What a difference that would have made!

Madam Hillary also said the Bush administration "will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country." While Hillary is certainly qualified to comment on what the all-time worst presidential administrations were, having had firsthand experience in one of them, I think she might want to avoid the phrase "go down in history."

All I can say is: It's a good thing we had a stealth candidate like Harriet Miers to tiptoe past these powerful, scary Democrats! Sorry if that sounds churlish, but after Judge Samuel Alito's magnificent performance last week, I think Republicans can stop being afraid of their shadows when it comes to our judicial nominees.

Ever since Bork, Republicans have been terrified of nominating candidates with something in their background that might possibly suggest the nominee did not get down on his knees (another phrase Hillary should avoid) and thank God for Roe v. Wade every night. That's how we ended up with mediocrities like David Hackett Souter and Anthony "Third Choice" Kennedy on the Supreme Court.

Besides being stunningly qualified, the characteristics of the current stellar Supreme Court nominee include these:

His mother immediately told the press, "Of course he's against abortion."

He had expressed support for the Reagan administration's positions on abortion in a 1985 memo.

He refused to accede to the Democrats' endless browbeating and tell them that Roe was "settled law."

And the Democrats couldn't lay a finger on him. Sam Alito marks the final purging of the Bork experience.

All the Democrats could do was scream about his inactive membership -- back in the '70s -- in CAP, Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which had a magazine called Prospect, which once ran an article, apparently satirical, complaining about Princeton admitting co-eds. In my mind, the only potentially disqualifying aspect of Alito's record was that he wasn't a more active member of CAP, a group opposed to quotas, set-asides and the lowering of academic standards at Princeton.

Then this week, we found out Sen. Teddy Kennedy still belongs to an organization that doesn't admit women. Oh -- also, he killed a girl.

I'm fairly certain I've mentioned that before -- I don't recall, Mr. Chairman -- but I don't understand why everyone doesn't mention it every time Senator Drunkennedy has the audacity to talk about how "troubled" and "concerned" he is about this or that nominee. I bet Mary Jo was "troubled" and "concerned" about the senator leaving her in trapped in a car under water while he went back to the hotel to create an alibi.

It's not as if Democrats can say: OK, OK! The man paid a price! Let it go! He didn't pay a price. The Kopechne family paid a price. Kennedy weaved away scot-free.

But the Democrats are "troubled" about Sam Alito's membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton 30 years ago. If they're "concerned" about lifetime appointments for people with memberships in "troubling" organizations, wait until they hear about Bob Byrd! (Former Kleagle, Ku Klux Klan.)

They're a rotten bunch, these Democrats, and I'm happy to see an end to their reign of terror.

Now that Zell Miller is out of office, the only office-holding Democrat I like anymore is Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans. I had never heard of him until Hurricane Katrina, but after his "gaffe" this week, he's my favorite Democrat. I like a politician who casually spouts off insanely politically incorrect remarks in front of large audiences and TV cameras.

Nagin cheerfully told a crowd gathered for a Martin Luther King Day celebration that New Orleans would soon be "Chocolate City" again. I don't know who's supposed to be offended by that. I'm not. Perhaps all the white mayors who know they couldn't have said it. True, life's unfair. Oh well.

When it comes to choice-of-word crimes, I'd prefer detente to mutually assured destruction. Lead us off the chocolate plantation, Mayor Nagin!

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