At Facebook the deep engineers

At Facebook the deep engineers
shape all our views and our fears. 
Algorithms they use
to distort all the news;
Herr Goebbels would give them three cheers.

When looking for Life's answers

"Search the scriptures instead of the Internet"  Bonnie L. Oscarson.

When looking for Life's answers we so often turn away
from the very source of light and truth, and tend to stray
into the murky depths of cyber mountebanks who claim
to know just what is needed to win ev'ry type of game.

Embrace the word of God to find relief from daily care;
study out the meaning of those holy words in prayer.
You will find a solace that no Internet website
can give you with its graphics or its videos so trite.

The strength of Samson and the pluck of David do reside
in the sacred scriptures that we should keep at our side.
In that Awful Hour we will not be saved by clicks;
the scriptures only can deliver us from Satan's tricks!

Chapter 2. The Many Wives of Leonard Lundeen.

"Marriages are made in Heaven; but some of the parts get assembled in Hell."  Swede Johnson.
                                          **********************************

Tolstoy once said: "Every happy family is boring in the same way; every unhappy family is funny in a different way." That was Sol Tolstoy, by the way, who ran The Dime Store down on Como Avenue where I regularly stole penny candy and red plastic bottles of bubble blowing soap.

Hardened criminal that I was, I had little time to give heed to my step-brother Leonard's unhappy marital affairs while I was growing up. Leonard was 20 years older than me; he had the same mother as me, but not the same father. And that's all I knew about the matter until after my mom's funeral, when my older brother Billy filled me in on some of the sordid details about mom's first and very brief marriage.

Leonard was the fruit of that initial compressed affair, and he was a giant. He was over six foot by the time he was in tenth grade, according to Billy, and by the time he started eleventh grade at Edison High School he had not only whipped every bully in school, but a goodly portion of the male teaching staff and several truant officers who got cheeky with him. Believing his horizons were rather limited vis-a-vis education, he lied about his age and enlisted in the Marines.

All this happened before I was much of a sentient being, and so my exposure to him occurred when he was home on leave from wherever the Marines had him posted -- usually overseas in Germany, Korea, or Vietnam. I still fondly recall the cheap Black Forest cuckoo clock he brought me from one of his furloughs in Germany. I could never get it to work properly, so dismantled it and carried the cuckoo bellows around with me, using them as accompaniment while I whistled Laurel & Hardy's theme song to all and sundry.

I was a hateful child, that way. My sisters would not acknowledge their relationship to me in high school because of that peculiarity (among many others).

It seemed to me that Leonard had a different wife every time he came to visit us.

The first one I remember was a towering Aryan blonde who guzzled beer in a manner that impressed my dad -- no mean toper himself. She gave me many beery hugs the short time she was among us, and pestered Leonard constantly to buy her a dachshund.  

We called her Betty, although I don't believe that was her name.

 When it was time for Leonard to go back to Germany, we discovered that he intended to leave Betty behind, in her own apartment around the corner, for mom to take under her wing so she could become 'Americanized'.

I was there at the painful denouement of this miscalculation.

"You'll have to find someone else to babysit her!" mom said emphatically to Leonard. "I've got enough on my hands with these little marmots of my own!"

Dad was even more direct. He minced no words, right in front of Betty -- who assumed a wooden expression and attitude not unlike the little painted hoyden on my Black Forest cuckoo clock.

"You can't leave that Kraut broad here -- she'll be two-timing you before you can say 'pretzel'!" he declared.

And so Betty went back with Leonard to Germany. We never saw her again.

The next time Leonard came to visit the old homestead he had an American bride in tow. She was also tall, almost as tall as Leonard -- who by now was nearly 7 foot. When he went into our dinning room he had to duck in order to miss grazing the chrome and plexiglass chandelier that hovered over the dinner table like a B movie flying saucer.
 
Her name was Belle Ami, which, she told us, meant 'Good Pals'. She was from Little Rock, Arkansas, and had a drawl that could flavor gumbo.

She and my mother immediately hit it off like white phosphorus and oxygen.

I cannot quote any dialogue from memory, nor indeed make up anything using artistic license, because all I remember are enraged screams from the both of them, and a string of profanities on the part of Belle Ami that made my tender ears vibrate as if they were timpani during a performance of the 1812 Overture.

Leonard was always cowed by mom -- even during her most pacific moments. So Belle Ami was bundled back off to Little Rock while Leonard finished his furlough with us as an imminent bachelor.

It was about two years before Leonard came calling again. This time he never made it past the front porch with his new bride.

She was Vietnamese, and mom would not, could not, let her in the house.

It was December, just before Christmas, and bitterly cold. But none of that mattered to mom, who kept muttering "Jamais dans ma maison!" in her hoarse French-Canadian.

She did not even open the door for them.

I felt so very sad for the two of them, especially the little wisp of a girl bundled up in woolen coats and sweaters leaning on Leonard's side. Luckily the cab they had come in was waiting for them (because, I guess, Leonard already knew what the outcome was likely to be), and so they trudged back down the white-rimed sidewalk and were driven away.

The very last wife Leonard brought around before lapsing into a sullen and permanent bachelorhood was Mormon.

To my mom, a staunch, Roman Catholic, this was almost as bad as the Vietnamese girl.

But since she was white and looked rather demure, she and Leonard were admitted into our cozy little home on 19th Avenue Southeast, and mom did her best not to overtly show her complete disdain of the LDS 'cult'.

Dad, on the other hand, had no use for people who didn't like to take a snort. He didn't bother to come home for the dinner the rest of us sat down to with Sally. She was bright and cheerful and seemed genuinely attached to Leonard, that poor biddable behemoth. She told us about growing up in Utah, how her farmer grandfather would 'tithe' a tenth of his cabbages and eggs and bacon to take to the Bishop's Storehouse. She looked and sounded perfectly normal, and I could see my mother visibly begin to soften towards her.

But she brought with her an evil-eyed little boy, about my age. His name was Snow. He came from a previous marriage ( a 'Temple' marriage, Snow emphasized to me, which meant nothing to me at the time) and had a chip on his shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore.

I hated him immediately, and he returned the compliment with interest. After dinner we went outside and instantly started throwing rocks at each other until one of the stone missiles inevitably went through a living room window. The blame for this dismal accident was firmly attached to me. I was sent to my room as Snow smirked. I would love to say it was his stone that broke the window, but at this late date I cannot recall which one of us actually did it. But I feel certain that morally he was more in the wrong than I was.


After this episode I did not see Leonard again for many years, after he had left the Marines with a solid pension and bought a house in Nordeast Minneapolis. This was just before I left to go to Florida to try my luck as a circus clown.


"Where's that Mormon wife of yours?" I asked him.

"She left me years ago" he said slowly. "She got my gun collection and sold it to some pawnshops.

"Damn those greedy Mormons" I thought to myself. "That's one crazy religion I'll never have anything to do with!"

For at the time I was troubled by angels I couldn't see and couldn't hear -- but wanted to, desperately. So I was looking for some kind of belief system beyond my mom's tepid Roman Catholicism.

The Editor

There once was an Editor brash
who made his reporter's teeth gnash;
This smug redactor
plowed like a tractor,
and turned their fine work into hash.

@lefse911 

A young man who lived down in Moab

A young man who lived down in Moab
considered the whole state was so drab,
that he grew quite pale
at all that was stale,
and now sits around just to grow flab. 

A vagabond and panhandler

Alma 8:19 -- And as he entered the city he was an hungered, and he said to a man: Will ye give to an humble servant of God something to eat?

A vagabond and panhandler is what I am today,
seeking to recover all the light that's gone astray.
But do I hunger for what's right, not gravy in a bowl?
Can I discover blessings that will always make me whole?
Alas, my hungers wander from the righteous to profane;
my resolve still wavers like a fickle weather vane.
Bread and honey feed me, Lord, and cunning milk dispense,
so of this catchy world I can at last make blessed sense! 

When bankers are sent off to school

When bankers are sent off to school,
there's only one paramount rule;
keep money inside
and only provide
enough for a small molecule.  

Chapter 1. Cousin Doris' Old-Fashioned Root Beer

"It ain't the truth, but it's close enough."  Swede Johnson.
                                           *******************************

Every family has them; distant, or not so distant, cousins that seem to spring up occasionally like mildew under the carpet.

Our family had Cousin Doris. She intruded on my childhood like a case of recurring measles.

She lived over in Northeast Minneapolis, or, as the denizens of the area itself called it, 'Nordeast'. She had an apartment on Central Avenue directly above a Latvian delicatessen. She worked at the Polovny Cabinet Works -- makers of fine coffins since 1898. Her job, as I understood it, was to steam clean the red velvet interiors of the expensive coffins about once a month, and to distribute moth balls where they might be needed.

She was dumpy and her drab dresses always reeked of rancid garlic. She was the only member of the Torkildson clan to ever have a snub nose -- everyone else sported beaks of varying lengths and sharpness. Her moon face was permanently wreathed in a buck-toothed smile reminiscent of Mortimer Snerd.

The reason we disliked her so much was because she always insisted on being HELPFUL.

My mother had her over for Sunday dinner once every two months, and Cousin Doris was so grateful for this bit of kindness that she always looked for ways and means to help our family out -- with resulting calamities that shook our belief in a just God.

One particular summer Sunday when she graced our table she decided that we should have a batch of good, old-fashioned root beer -- the kind her mother used to make back in South Dakota.
She claimed the ingredients were cheap and handy, and the process was easy enough so that a blind simpleton could put up a dozen bottles in under an hour.

My mother tried to explain that at the moment we were plumb out of blind simpletons -- there were none to be had at any price -- but Cousin Doris was not to be put off.

The very next day she brought over all the equipment and ingredients and set to work, while my mother retired to the back yard with a brown bottle of something she told me was 'stress medicine', but which smelled awfully like my dad's breath when he came home late on a Saturday night.
Amazingly enough, Cousin Doris was true to her word, and the bottles were filled and capped within an hour. She then washed up and cleaned the kitchen to a spotless glare.

The bottles were lined up along the basement steps to 'work' for a week or two.

"Don't mind if they gurgle a bit at night" she told us cheerfully as she left. "That's just the yeast workin'."

The yeast turned out to have nuclear properties.

A few nights later the whole Torkildson household was rudely thrown out of their beds by a series of gushing explosions that emanated from the basement steps.

You guessed it; every single bottle of Cousin Doris' root beer had detonated like a sugary land mine.

And yours truly was deputized to clean up the bubbling mess toot suite by parents who obviously relished crushing a young boy's dreams of undisturbed repose.

Two months later, like clockwork, my mother had Cousin Doris over for Sunday dinner. As we sat down to pot roast, potato rolls, three-bean salad, and corn harvested straight from a Green Giant can, she asked brightly how we liked the home-made root beer.

"You'll never find anything like it in a store!" she exclaimed as we collectively scowled at her.

"It was explosive" my dad said shortly, as he jabbed the pot roast viciously with his fork.

"It does have a tang, don't it?" Doris replied. "Myself, I think there's a bit of alcohol formed."

That would explain the quasi-hangover I had the next morning, after inhaling the fumes while cleaning up the basement steps.

Nothing more was said about the volatile root beer as the dinner proceeded in sullen silence.

Afterwards, as Cousin Doris helped my mother with the dishes in the kitchen I could hear her telling my mother that pickling fish was a cinch, if the fish were fresh-caught. And since little Timmy liked going fishing all the time, she would be happy to help my mother put up a big crock of pickled crappie or sunfish . . .

At this point I sped out the front door as if my keister were ablaze.

Mostly because I didn't like to hear my mother swear.

The Perfect Woman

"My beloved brethren, may I remind you, if there were a perfect woman, do you really think she would be that interested in you?"  Dieter F. Uchtdorf. 

Marriage is a blessed state, but perfect it is not.

Sometimes it will blow real cold, and sometimes very hot.

Like a team of oxen yoked together throughout life,

the man must pull as much (or more) as his faithful wife.

No superheroes ever tied the knot, is what I think;

Each couple must work very hard to keep things half in sync.

The hurdles and the landmines multiply as time goes by --

and marriages that make it still contain some hue and cry.

So don't look for perfection in your ever-lovin' spouse,

and remember romance never built a sturdy house!  

Sweet, Sweet Sunday

Sunday is a point of rest within the weary week,
wherein we ought to cease to fret or think or even speak.
Turn off your phone; unplug your tab; and shun the DVD.
Let the peaceful murmurs of the universe just be.
No need to hike vast mountains or trudge through dank forest break;
rest upon a simple chair and all your cares forsake.
Ease your mind to pleasant corners where sweet zephyrs blow;
release the tensions and the stress, and blissful peace follow.
And if you're blessed with children, then this lotus you may pluck --

Forget about the quiet, pal, because you're out of luck!