The microwave occupies most of this particular counter. I've got to get some sugar and start the Borax mixture, for I'm seeing too many critters. The bowl with ruminants of milk water hasn't captured anything, and when I fix in another bowl what this was yesterday, my arm jerks and scatters flakes and milk. Am I getting "doddering"? I'm certainly not organized.

This morning I am running a mental tape of a train buff I encountered 30 years ago, just out of his teens, sneering he "didn't like commies and queers and you better know I'm super pro-military". Lately his name came up on a railfan board, full of men dreaming of unit trains bearing tea bags, as being turned down for a job by BNSF, general date unspecified, because he revealed he was a railfan.

It seems there were goofs in the Coast Guard and another stint for Southern Pacific, but, well, like too many people I'm intimidated by this general "politick". These are the blah kids who seemed to get the good local jobs through guile and cronies, who got all the approval from the elders by "laboring" on ground work that otherwise crowds out simple wonder and, well, conscience. Prime directive: beware of crossing them.

Why sometimes, like this kid did in 1981, they respond to one's use of a "pigmented" expression like "Say what?" or a compound sentence with a sharp "What?" Then a push button laugh passed on from hater to hater: "Maybe I'll beat you up."

Bowl of flakes restored and floor addressed, I sit down and open the editorial page of the "Times". Here is a letter concerned with the Republican debates: Social Security is a complex issue, hey just define it as a Ponzi Scheme and campaign to wipe it out: Simplify, vilify: Also global warming and economics. We need intelligence and dedication, he wrote.

The name of the letter writer was not a common one but it matched that of a saxophone player with whom I'm in a jazz band on Mondays. Every now and then our leader chuckles he likes Palin. Again, well trained. Challenge the notion musicians are all robotic liberals! Claim to be a minority, trample like . . .

Just when you think it's time to wrap up with a moral and/or crazier yet tangent: Before posting I set off for my indoor biking class, early for once, and I forgot the cleat shoes. Oh, had I turned off the coffee pot? I never turned if on! I had breakfast, skipped the coffee, didn't think about it until now. That may explain a few things. Jerks and enlightened ones, we know what our major preoccupations are.

Now I've posted, maybe we crank up the coffee.