And away we go.........

My "black sky" theory evolved from the run-up to the Iraq War and the 2004 presidential elections. From the lies about Saddam's WMDs, to the waste and mismanagement of the so-called Iraq reconstruction, to the hundreds of tons of missing explosives taken from the al-QaQaa explosives depot, to the wholesale disenfranchisement of African-American voters which I witnessed first-hand as an Election Protection volunteer in Columbus, Ohio, to the Jeff Gannon debacle, to freakin' Katrina, to Abramoff, to Alito to Tinker to Evans to Chance......

So many targets they blacken the sky. The media, complicit in its intentional ignorance. The political system, awash in K Street cash, pandering to the Christopithecus element.

Basta! Enough!

There's more to life than politics. It's all about the balance. Time spent agonizing over a pre-primary poll in UT-2 or ID-3 is time pissed away, time that could have been spent in any one of a million better ways.

So I'm taking that time, and I'm finding treasure. Pure fucking gold.

At Christmas, I built my wife a mantle for our hearth. I spent that time measuring, and calculating the angle of the bevel cuts, and sanding and staining. My mind was fully engaged in my task. That beady-eyed little pimp of a President never intruded upon my consciousness. It was bliss.

Trout season is coming up. I got the new Cabela's catalog today. There's a nice fire in the woodstove. Our Wren has a month-old litter of eight Labrador Retriever puppies chattering away in the whelping box. There's a Cary Grant movie on the tube. (Father Goose, if you must know.) The Steelers are in the Super Bowl this Sunday.

Not bad. Not too fucking bad at all......