Old age isn’t for wimps!

I’m OK with the cantankerous old coot moniker. Cantankerous is fine. I sure don’t want to be just one of the herd. Even Coot has a raffish charm. It’s the ‘old’ that’s begging to bother me. Calling yourself old is fine so long as you can continue to exercise plausible deniability about the reality. So long as you can continue to deny that the old prune looking back at you in the mirror each morning is you. Even the best deniers eventually have to face the truth. And the truth comes in a way that you can’t avoid- pain. I stay away from mirrors these days but you can’t do much to deny that your joints hurt and moving hurts.

I’ve long been an enthusiastic advocate of exercise as a tool in the fight against getting old. It won’t stop the process but it can mitigate and delay. Unfortunately I’m an advocate but not always a practitioner. I’ve been slacking off. It seems easy enough in your head to take a few minutes several times a week to exercise. Actually exercising, however is harder. I’ve been doing more thinking about exercising in the recent months than actually doing it. Last week, however, I got back in the game with walking, sit ups and push-ups. Now I’m paying the price.

The relentless aging of my body has brought aching knees, loss of balance and an awkward clumsiness that I haven’t experienced since my growth spurt at 15. With my youthful optomism and energy long gone, none of these recent developments feels good. I can’t expect to ‘grow’ out of my awkwardness and pain has become my invisible friend. Still I believe that more exercise can help. I need to use my muscles, work my joints and be more active if I want to get back some of my grace and mobility. It’s not an option. So for the past week or so I’ve exercised and what do I get as a reward? Continue reading »

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

More Posts - Website - Twitter - Facebook

“My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.” Harry S. Truman

It’s less than a month until the election and I can’t wait until it is over. In California, elections are just like elections in China. It doesn’t really matter how you vote because the Democrats will win. Oh, you will find the occasional Republican but they are just eunuchs kept around just to keep us mindless sheep believing that they have a choice. The only Republicans you see these days are neutered and declawed house pets whose existence is tolerated only because they are powerless and evil. Those few Republicans don’t matter because Democrats run all the governments, government agencies and boards and wield the real power in the State.. California is insolvent, hamstrung by over regulation and irrational as a menopausal woman but since Republicans are universally regarded as dictatorial nut jobs who want to tell everybody else what to do, the good citizen’s of California continue to vote for the ‘nice’ Democrats as the state rushes over the proverbial fiscal cliff.

Nothing much can save California from it’s fate. Wave to us when we go down.

Still the election is annoying. But it’s not the politicians. We don’t get any Presidential campaign ads here because Hell will freeze over before a Republican candidate wins the state. The President only comes here to raise money from the glitterati. There is no need to campaign.  We do have a Senator running this year but she won’t deign to hold a debate with her challenger and she certainly doesn’t need to spend her money on advertising in one-party China—err California. In any other state, she would be in trouble. Heck, she’s 79. She probably can’t hold a thought in her head these days but in the Senate, it hardly matters. She is a grand party hack and we can look forward to seeing her drooling and nodding on C-Span for another six years. At least she used to matter unlike our other Senator who was never brighter than a concrete block.

But it’s not the elections.

So, it’s not the elections or the candidates that annoy in California. We are spared all that. No, the big annoyance in California is the initiatives. Initiatives are where the people (read big corporations and scions of corporate fat cats) create confusing and emotion-laden amendments to the State constitution. Initiatives have always been big in California but lately it seems that the only important decisions come from this process, not from our highly paid, full time legislature. These folks, who you wouldn’t hire to flip burgers can’t be bothered with making and keeping a budget. They have more important duties to perform- like deciding what our schools ought to teach, what our kids can eat at school and whether we can get plastic bags at the grocery store. They leave the fiscal matters to the voting public. This election we have eleven State measures for consideration- three of them tax increase measures.

Do they think we are stupid?  Hell yes they do.

To me it is ridiculous to even ask Californians to pay more taxes. We already have the highest taxes in the Country and what we get for those taxes is the most arrogant and abusive bureaucrats money can buy. More tax money will only make it worse and if all the money we pour down the rat hole of public education can’t raise the performance of our schools, why should we give them any more?

The other propositions are a mixed bag of feel good overload. They want to repeal the death penalty to mirror the reality of our failing judicial system that prevents us from effectively punishing bad guys. They want to water down three strikes and protect us from genetically engineered foods. I don’t so much mind voting on these measures as I do the criminal misrepresentation in the advertising. Tax increases will always go for schools in the ads whatever the measure actually says. It takes days of analysis to decipher the intent of each since both the for and against explanations are complete fabrications. I generally conclude that the safest action is to vote no. In most cases, it will keep things from getting worse.

Take Warning! California is doomed.

So that’s the election perspective from the land of fruits and nuts on the left coast. Californians still believe that the Golden State is an inspiration for the nation instead of a dead weight anchor and so we continue one-party rule, slow decline into third world status and squandering what is left of our money on idealistic foolishness like the bullet train. I still hope for signs of intelligent life among the voters here but I certainly won’t hold my breath. Unless the voters tell the politicians where to stick their tax increases, I won’t believe that California can come back. But then if the President is reelected, there won’t be anything to come back to. California will have led the way again.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

More Posts - Website - Twitter - Facebook