JamesSlusher.com

Progress is being made on the wall. It has a layer of paint on it now and I am going to trim out the door and the shelves once I get my miter saw back.

Manny Ramirez stopped by and said he loves it.

Ahh, my precious little witch.

BOO!!!

I have managed to get myself into as bad a mood as I can possibly be in. Sigh.

Somebody cheer me up.

Please.

Dear God, let them get this to the non-experimental stage.

Please, Please, Please.

5 days left until the election of our lives.

Quite frankly, I am a bit nervous.

The stakes, in my opinion, are so high that a loss on Tuesday could very well signal a descent into an Orwellian nightmare. It scares the bejeebers out of me.

I find it terrifying that a political party has gotten so good at media manipulation that it can convince millions of voters to vote against their overall self-interest because of one or two issues. And it is not the same issue(s) for all of these people. Let me give you an example.

My Mom (many apologies for singling you out, Mom) is an example of this. She will never make enough money for Bush’s economic policies to help her. Right now, her kids aren’t making enough money for Bush’s economic policies to help them (and one of them probably never will, you can guess which). Yet he has her vote.

She is an educator who has committed her life to educating as many people as want to learn. She has complained that the No Child Left Behind Act would be good if it were funded properly. Bush won’t fund it. Kerry has proposed funding it. But Bush still has her vote.

Mom doesn’t have a racially prejudiced bone in her body. She recognizes the inherently unfair racial playing field that America has created. Bush has been openly against affirmative action policies that would help more black Americans attend college. This affects not only a large portion of her students, but might ultimately affect her granddaughter. He has appointed many judges that have been viewed as “racially hostile”. He has refused to speak to the NAACP. Yet, Bush still has her vote.

I could go on and on about the Bush actions she disagrees with (or at least should if it were approached logically).

I think that it all comes down to two things with her. History and Religion. Historically, Slushers and Hubbles have been Republican. I think that is a bit misleading, because the Republicans that they were voting for did not promote the sort of behavior that the current Republicans condone. Second, she has sent me many forwarded e-mails that tout Bush’s religion. Which would be laudable, if genuine. But show me how Iraq promotes the Christian values I know. Show me how his domestic policies (which boil down to help the rich and maybe the middle class if it still helps the rich, oh and forget poor people) are influenced by the charities espoused by Jesus. Show me how his campaign of name calling, misconstruing and misleading are the noble endeavors of Christianity. It can’t be done. Yet still, Bush has her vote.

And there seem to be millions like her. And that is truly scary.

Congratulations to the Boston Red Sox on an incredible ALCS comeback and resounding sweep of the World Series. They deserve every bit of happiness they get out of it.

Watch this movie and then ponder this question: What is there to gain from my fear?

I got this from Boing Boing who got it from Lawgeek.

Seeing as how I probably bummed everyone out with my last post, let us move on to one of the things I am extremely happy about.

A clean baby is a wonderful thing. She was playing with her Dora beach doll and started using complete original sentences like, “Dora likes to swim” and “Dora likes the beach”. She is so smart and so beautiful. Just like her Momma.

Prior to January 29th, 2003, I wouldn’t have been able to name the worst day of my life. I had plenty of bad days, believe me. However, there was nothing so earth

shakingly bad that it would stand out as “the worst day of my life”. The 29th changed all that.

It was a Thursday and I was supposed to be working the last of my four day shifts. I had been having blood sugar problems for some time and I had been soldiering along to

the best of my ability, but that day I just felt like I couldn’t take it anymore. So I called in. I figured that I would just lie around and mope and feel like poo and sorry for

myself simultaneously. Preparing myself a big helping of pity stew, you might say.

Well I had been stewing in it for a couple of hours when the phone rang. An older gentleman on the phone asked for “Jimmy”. At first, I told him that he must have the

wrong number, as I didn’t recognize the voice. He mumbled something about this was the number he had gotten, so I asked “Jimmy who?”. “Jimmy Slusher”, was the reply.

I told him that I was James and asked how I could help him. He told me that he was Tommy Moxley (my Dad’s boss at Appliance Land). He asked if I could come over to Dad’s

house because they needed some “help with your Dad”. I said sure, I would be right there and we hung up.

I grabbed my keys and put on some shoes and headed for the truck. I was worried but not overly so, Dad had been sick for a few months and had a couple of broken ribs and

was heavily medicated. I was expecting that he needed to get up and go to the doctor or something and that they wanted me to do it. Or maybe the meds were making him

irritable or something. A couple of different scenarios played through my head as I drove. I thought maybe he had been unable to get up and had “had an accident” and that

Tommy didn’t want to clean him up or something. I wasn’t looking forward to that. I replayed the short conversation with Tommy in my head a couple of times and when I

got about 5 minutes away from my parent’s house another possibility occurred to me. That thought got quickly pushed out of my mind. It was unthinkable.

As you approach my parents house you go over a small hill and down to a T intersection. Their house is slightly off to the left and from the intersection you can see their

front yard and driveway. As I approached the stop sign I realized that there were police cars everywhere. My pulse quickened and I felt a mild panic set in.

Something was very, very wrong. The cop cars had the driveway blocked, so I pulled into the yard and got out and started to walk hurriedly up the driveway. A young

police officer met me about halfway and told me that it would be best if I stopped there. I can’t remember my exact words but I asked if my father was alright. The young

man’s face was studiously impassive and you could tell he didn’t know what to say. I blurted out, “Is he dead?”. The officer looked down at the ground and I had my answer. The unthinkable had happened.

I started to scream. At least that is as close as I can get to describing the sound I was making. It was an expression of a pain that there are no words for. It is a blinding, feral

pain that can’t be diluted or encompassed by words. I staggered around, blinded by my grief and wanting to just f***ing break something. I could feel the fabric of my world begin

to tear at the seams.

My screams alerted the coroner and Tommy to my presence and they came quickly down the driveway. Tommy offered me some murmurs of condolence and tried to

comfort me as best he could. Bill Evans, my parent’s next door neighbor came over and did the same. I was inconsolable. They did their best to bring me back around, asking

me about the baby and reminding me of who was going to need me to hold it together.

I had been kind of flailing around and Tommy managed to get his arms around me. At that point, Mr. Bill told me to remember that my dad was a good man and that only

he knew why he would do such a thing. Confused, I stopped struggling for a second and asked him what he meant by that. Before he could answer I asked another question.

“How did he die?”

“He shot himself with shotgun, Jimmy.”

That is when my heart broke. Forget my world tearing at the seams, it just got set on fire. Gone. I slumped against Tommy and screamed some more. That subsided into

huge racking sobs.

Eventually, I pulled it together enough to ask for a phone and someone handed me one. I called Marilyn and sobblingly told her what had happened. She wept with me. And

told me she would be right there.

I don’t really remember what happened between talking to her and her showing up. You think that you will remember every detail of something like that vividly for

eternity. Thankfully, that’s not true.

We decided that we needed to be the ones to tell my Mom. Marilyn drove me down to Mom’s work. I called them on the way and asked them to get a sub for her, saying that

my father had an accident and she would need to be out for the rest of the day. When we got there, I told her principal that Dad had died and that we needed a private place

to talk to Mom. He lead us into some office and we waited.

A few minutes later, I can hear Mom’s voice. She was asking, “What’s wrong, is it my husband?” Oh, God.

When she came into the office I was already standing and the second that our eyes met she knew. My heart broke again. Oh, Momma. I held her as she wept.

She started asking how and why and such. I told her we could talk about it at my house. We drove home and that’s when I told her it was a suicide. My heart broke a third

time.

Shortly after that I got in touch with my brother, Dave, and I was so exhausted I couldn’t do anything but blurt it out.

“Dad’s dead”.

Much sobbing, wailing and gnashing of teeth later, the day finally ended. Thank God. May there never be another like it.

UPDATE: I had to change the date to the 29th (I originally had it as the 30th). It is so sad that I got all melodramatic like that and then messed up the date.

I know this is a hateful remark, but I can’t help but find the possibility intriguing: I want the Sox to win one more and then lose 4 straight games. I want them to choke just like the Yanks. That would be great. Not that I don’t want them to win, because I don’t have a thing against them. That’s not really the point. The point is that it would make an awesome story.

The greatest comeback in baseball history followed by a tie for the worst collapse in baseball history. That would be great. And despite the conventional wisdom to the contrary, listening to grown men cry can be quite fun. Particularly when it is somebody else crying about a team I have no emotional ties to.