Verses from Today's Washington Post. ** University says a professor’s views are racist, sexist and homophobic — but it can’t fire him. ** Senate passes short-term spending bill, sending legislation to Trump hours ahead of shutdown deadline. ** Secret Service spent quarter of a million dollars at Trump’s properties in first five months of his term, records show.

@TheArtist_MBS

Tenure for professors is an academic right;

one for which great scholars have put up a goodly fight.

I'm not saying it is something that we ought to dump;

I just thank God it can't be applied to Donald Trump!

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@ericawerner

Unlike organizing ants,

Congress flies by seat of pants.

They can't pass a budget bill

bigger than a baby krill.

Even when their brains are clear,

they can't find their derriere. 

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@partlowj  @OConnellPostbiz  @Fahrenthold

Take, oh take, the presidency,

and go shake the money tree.

When you charge the going rate,

to visit Donald's real estate,

and rack up all those charges sweet

on Secret Service balance sheet,

even if he's kicked out now

he has milked the big cash cow.

Postcards to my President.

The sinister red balloon.

A sinister red balloon followed me home from school one day when I was a kid. It came right into the house with me, and floated up to the living room ceiling, rolling gently in the air currents. My mother didn't like it the minute she laid eyes on it.

"Get that thing out of the house, Timmy" she told me. "It's the wrong color red -- something's bad about that red color."

"S'not my balloon" I told her sullenly; she liked to blame me for everything in the world. "It just came along with me from school -- "

But before I could say anything else she exclaimed "Oh, my tuna fish gravy is burning!" and scuttled back into the kitchen, flapping her frilly apron in alarm. She turned up the radio to hide the smell.

Then my two sisters clambered onto the coffee table to grab the sinister red balloon, because they thought that would upset me. But they got blisters from handling it and went crying upstairs to put Ponds cold cream on their hands. Serves 'em right, is what I thought.

My big brother came home, with his dumb girlfriend, from high school, and tried to impress her by squeezing the sinister red balloon between his hands like a sponge to make it pop. But it wouldn't pop, no matter how hard he pushed his hands together. The balloon oozed out between his hands like a greasy red blob and floated back up to the ceiling. His dumb girlfriend looked at me like I was a plate full of thumb tacks and cottage cheese. 
"You should just shut up" she told me rudely. And I hadn't said anything. My older brother took her out into the garage so he could work on his crummy old car and they could make out in its musty leather backseat. 

Mom didn't wait for dad to come home for dinner. He always worked too late, and stopped at White Castle for a couple of sliders on his way home at night. After dinner mom got the broom and used the handle to prod the sinister red balloon out the front door. It floated slowly up into the branches of an elm tree and settled down for a long siege of our house.

It stayed lodged in the elm tree all winter. Even the banshee blizzards that came in February didn't move it or cause it to deflate. Snow piled up on top of it in a tight little cone, and icicles flowed down around its fist-shaped knot. That spring my friends and I started throwing rocks at it, to kill it, but we always missed. One of my rocks went far astray and broke a porch window at old Mrs. Henderson's house next door. Mom made me mow her lawn for free all summer long  to pay for the broken pane of glass. 

In July we went up to Lake Superior for two weeks on a family vacation. The beach was all slimy pebbles, and the water was too cold to stay in for long. The stove in our cabin emitted strings of black snaky smoke that wouldn't come off our hands and face unless we used a gritty pumice soap. I thought we were all cursed by some lake witch for disturbing her nearby cauldron or something, and made up my mind right then and there that there was no more happiness left in the world for me. 

When we got back home the sinister red balloon was gone. I thought that that would happiness to seep back into my life, but soon all the leaves on the elm turned a brownish yellow and dropped off. Then small branches snapped off in the slightest wind and cluttered up our yard with their brittle groveling. They were very hard to rake up with the rasping bamboo rake we had -- the bamboo tines snapped off like strands of uncooked spaghetti. And the tree began to stink -- dad said it was air pollution from the damn Purina feed plant down the road, but to me it smelled like fermented wood pulp; something I had once smelled at a newsprint factory on a field trip at school. The sinister red balloon had poisoned our elm tree as a final act of revenge before it lifted its siege.

That fall a man came to cut down the elm tree and used a chain saw to slice it up into logs for our fireplace. But our fireplace wasn't real -- there was no flue up the chimney, it was just a decorative brick gewgaw with a mantelpiece to place ceramic nondescripts on. So the logs were dumped helter-skelter in the backyard by the swing set to molder and turn ghostly gray. The pile sprouted lichen and moss and little club ferns, and housed a colony of voles that ate Mrs. Henderson's lapdog. Dad had them exterminated and then had my older brother load up the woodpile, log by log, into the back seat of his crummy old car to take down to the Mississippi to throw in the river. It took him six trips to get it all, and he lost his dumb girlfriend because she said his car was now full of nasty wood crickets that got in her hair. Turns out, though, he had a spare girlfriend waiting in the wings, and got her into the backseat of his car without missing a beat. She was a redhead, I remember, and gave me a packet of red birthday party balloons while smiling too wide, saying at the same time that she was from Duluth, on Lake Superior, and her cauldron was hungry for handsome little boys like me. I noticed all her teeth were pointy, just before I hit her in the face with my heavy leather baseball glove. 

This story is so true that I'm starting to forget it; that's why I've written it down and had it printed in the company newsletter several times. 

A long string of railroad cars.

I was driving through Indiana thirty years ago when a long string of railroad cars, barely creaking along and scarred with black and red graffiti, delayed my journey on a dusty blacktop road as I waited for them to pass slowly by.
Roadside weeds embraced the ditches on either side of me near the tracks; they were filled with vibrant, pulsating insects that responded with crude joy to the heavy Indiana summer sun. Milkweed pods gaped at me. Thistles bristled. An empty, rusted can of Cento peeled tomatoes still retained its bright yellow and red label, which lifted me, elevated my spirits for a moment on my spiritless quest.
There were no other cars on the blacktop road -- it's like they knew about this wall of train cars that would block their path for an hour, and drove down some other road that had a viaduct or bridge or something. How could they know about it, and not me? I started to sweat lonely salt dew and drank a warm black bottle of Pepsi. I threw the empty glass bottle down into the ditch next to the empty Cento peeled tomatoes can. My momentary afflatus evaporated as the train cars groaned on their steel wheels. I could turn around and go find some way around the long string of train cars, but it might take many hours of driving on derelict blacktop roads that buckled like a walnut shell. And the queue of train cars might follow me, no matter how hard I tried to avoid them. Blocking my path, peeling time from me like it was my own skin in a torture chamber. So I decided to stay put and face my uninteresting fate. I turned off the engine. I sat. I puffed out my cheeks and let my lips flap like an idiot baby. At least I wouldn't starve; I had a full pack of Wrigley's Doublemint Gum.

Then another car pulled up on the other side of the long string of train cars. So . . . there was still life left on Planet Earth after all! I felt an insane longing to yell at the other driver, encouraging him not to give up and leave, but to stick it out with me -- we'd see this thing through together, eventually meet up, shake hands, maybe embrace, and make a date to meet back at this exact same spot a year later to celebrate our narrow escape from the pointless, dragging, wait. I could just make out the other driver through the heat haze, dust, and gaps as the train cars glacially rolled by. He got out to look up and down the long line of train cars, then got back in his car, backed up, and drove away. I was bereft once more.

I thought of boyhood summers in Minnesota, of cleaning and oiling my bicycle chain; sitting on the exposed front porch, covered in an old blanket, drenched and shivering as a thunderstorm passed overhead. Each summer day as a boy I was filled to the brim with something pagan and sensual -- now as a man I was stupidly waiting on an obscure road for empty railroad cars to pass me by, booming hollowly and laughing at me as they trailed away into the Indiana murk. 

The caboose appeared so suddenly that I barely registered the man on its rear platform, in bib overalls and smoking a pipe, who waved at me. At last I was free to go. There was nothing stopping me now. I started the car, drove over the bumpy tracks, and sped off past the ceaseless rows of dull green corn on either side of me. I would live out this day, not as a boy again, not as a carefree happy child of summer, but as a man who promised himself a chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes with gravy at a modest diner with neon signs buzzing in the twilight somewhere further down this strange yet now consoling blacktop road. I had survived a severe bout of introspection, and lived to tell the aimless tale . . . 

Postcards to my President.

My meditation on him shall be sweet.

My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the Lord.
Psalm 104:34. 

When I step aside from all my addled paths today,

to ponder on thy goodness and to bow my head and pray,

I hope my meditations can discover newer ways

to celebrate thy mercy and thy loving kindness praise.

Wellspring of the Cosmos, thou Creator all Divine;

help me understand thy great dominion so benign!

May all thy precepts honeyed be to my poor intellect,

and may my faith in thee run boundless and unchecked!

Thou shalt not be forgotten.

 I have formed thee; thou art my servant: O Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten of me.
Isaiah 44:21

Mountains may vanish and rivers dry out;

the Lord remains constant in plenty or drought.

Man in his hubris may towers build high,

may think he can find place beyond God's kindly eye.

But He forgets not those who serve Him in peace,

or those who are praying for some needed surcease.

Long before memory started on Earth,

the Lord knew each soul and its fabulous worth.

He forgets nothing, and no one at all;

He's cradled us all long before Adam's fall.

Postcards to the President.

A wooden box of sand.

A wooden box of sand sat in my attic for 36 years. It was there when I bought the house, and was too heavy and possibly messy for me to move by myself, so I just left it there. I never mentioned it to anybody. Why would I? Sand is pretty inoffensive and static. You don't bother it, it won't bother you. It never decayed or spoiled, and you don't need a license to have it. It's not listed on the stock exchange. It's silent and has no smell. Sand will never be a hot button issue. I wish more things, and more people, were like sand.

I rented a wife and three children to live in the house with me for the first ten years, but it didn't work out. They complained about the linoleum in the kitchen and wanted to get a cat. So I exchanged them at the Rent-A-Center for a seat on the local Zoning Board. I found this much more fulfilling and interesting. We would discuss parking lots and mixed use designations late into the night. As the years went by we became more and more powerful, until at last we wrenched control of the entire city from the mayor and city council. We changed the name of the city to Buttigieg and raised the sales tax on food and clothing to fifteen percent. There were complaints, naturally, but we had the police scatter thumbtacks in the front yards of those who whined too much, and that soon did the trick. And when the Governor called out the National Guard to have us arrested on charges of bribery and extortion, we had the fire department use their water canons to disperse the troops until most of them fled in terror and were swept away in the Mississippi at flood tide. We captured the survivors and put them to work painting white lines down the middle of residential streets. The Governor didn't bother us again.

During all this upheaval I sometimes went up into the attic to check on my wooden box of sand. It never changed. Once I saw a tiny red spider mite try to cross it, but halfway across it turned back and died before it could return to safety. That was interesting.

I was certain the other members of the zoning board would never let me retire and lead a peaceful life -- I knew too much. So I planned very carefully, and when the time came I secretly let in a contingent of the National Guard to take them all away to the dungeons in the Governor's Mansion. For my civic service the Governor appointed me Head Ranger at Drumlins State Park. I had my house, wooden box of sand and all, moved off its foundations and transported by semi to the Park, where it was moored next to the Ice Age National Scientific Reserve. All at government expense. Then I went fishing.

There are a fascinating variety of fish to be caught in the lakes and rivers of the Upper Midwest. The small mouth tench is a ferocious fighter when caught on a hook; it often dials 911, but since it has no larynx it can't say anything. Cooked in butter it tastes like the island of Sappho. The blue sterlet has a peculiar mating call, something like a cross between a rusty Ferris wheel and a leaky garden hose. You can lure it into your net by simply whistling any show tune that was composed prior to 1957. The twisted muskellunge prefers shallow thinking, where it can be caught with either a dinky or a flandellete. 

Things were going along swimmingly for me, as the years piled up and my canvas trousers eventually took on the permanent odor and flecked scales of a fish market. And my wooden box of sand became even more precious to me. I would gaze at if for hours, as the sun from the dusty octagonal attic window burnished it like old bronze. But then one of my fellow members from the old zoning board escaped his fetters in the dungeons of the Governor's Mansion and came hunting me, for revenge. When I saw Zinkfelt standing in my kitchen, wild-eyed and in fetid rags, I knew the jig was up. He had a metal spatula in his hand. In a panic, I ran up the stairs to the attic, with Zinkfelt right behind me. 

We faced off across the wooden box of sand.

"It's grit" he said to me, with a hollow voice.

"What's that?" I asked him.

"Your box -- it's full of grit" he replied.

"You mean sand" I told him.

"I know the difference between sand and grit" said Zinkfelt. "We were fed sand for breakfast in the dungeons, and grit for lunch and dinner. You got a box of grit there."

With unnatural strength I lifted up the deceitful wooden box and hurled it through the octagonal window. It landed with a thick crash on a shoal of geodes. Then Zinkfelt and I went out to dinner, but didn't leave a very big tip because the crab Rangoon was too chewy.

Verses from Stories in Today's Washington Post. A radio host criticized Trump on the air. He was fired mid-show, he says. An NFL fan promised to live on his bar’s roof until his team won. He’s been there five weeks. A stay-at-home mom’s work is worthy of respect — including from herself.

@D_Hawk

A radio host, indiscreet,

suggested that Trump was a cheat.

His boss pulled the plug

on this naive mug --

his broadcast career is mincemeat.

**********************

@Raggs_No_Riches

A fanatical fan on the roof

of his fav'rite bar needs some proof

 that his own home team

has won on the beam,

or else he is staying aloof . . . 

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@carolynhax

My mother was a stay-at-home,

she took no outside jobs;

of course with three kids in the home

she did the work of squads.

The washer and the dryer

 were kept going day and night;

her kitchen never seemed to close,

 to feed our appetite.

She was no slave; she ruled the roost.

Her word was iron law.

If dad tracked in a bit of mud,

he really got it raw.

I think her self respect was high;

she took great pride and joy

in spinaching and churching

her too wayward little boy.

I hope wherever she may be,

she hears my acclamation --

and knows because of her alone

I'm seeking medication . . .