The other day my dog, Vinko, and I ventured out to visit the local park on a day when they're not having a fireworks show.

It's not that they have a fireworks show more than once a year, it's just that's the only time I pay much attention to our park. It's located about halfway between the cabin and the Integratron, right off a paved road, and has everything you'd expect in a park.

There's an adjacent baseball diamond, a basketball court with one ten foot and one six foot basket, a barbecue (grilling) spot, some covered benches, a sandy play area, horseshoe pitch, and even a couple patches of grass. I have to admit the grassy areas surprised me, but didn't impress Vinko.

Because of its location here in the Morongo Basin, it has a couple Yucca (Joshua) trees, but no real tall ones. This one is about 1.5 meters tall (around four feet).

A rare type of cactus for this area reminds people this is a desert

And, before we left the play area ...

even got some visitors!

What Vinko found more interesting, however, was an artistic arrangement of boulders.

After doing all the exploring we could do, we left.

While everyone else has real problems and things to sort out, I'm wondering about my dog.

Here's the thing: Just about everywhere I take my dog with me. Leaving aside for the moment what that says about me and how pathetic that makes me sound, it's just how things are. While it's true that about the only places I go are to stores, I rarely do it alone.

Vinko, my dog, likes to ride in the Jeep, by which I  mean he has no choice in the matter but puts up with it. He doesn't stick his head out the window, doesn't smile or wag his tail in excitement or anything, but he sits quietly in the passenger seat and looks around or lays his head on the padded console. He doesn't complain, but probably enjoys the change of scenery.

This morning I have to take the Jeep in to see about getting rid of that pesky "check engine" light. The light isn't on now, of course, because it goes off after turning the Jeep on three times without being triggered again, but it still has me a bit worried if only because of how much it might take to get rid of it once and for all.

I've been able to do the Internet trick of turning the engine on and off three times (without starting it) to display the codes and, for the curious, the engine codes are P 2074 and P 0108. From what I can tell from looking those up, they're both related to some unexpected condition about manifold pressure. It might be just the sensor that's gone bad, or it might be more serious.

At the moment, the Jeep is running as good as ever, so I'm a little hopeful that if it can do that, the manifold itself or gaskets aren't totally hosed.

The error first showed up when I was running the air conditioner and climbing a mountain. The Jeep hesitated, acted as if it had an automatic transmission that went out of gear before finding the right one. The other time it happened, and the first time I took it in to be checked out, was in the same sort of situation, but this time on a much more gentle slope.

Then, last week, I got another, this time on a flat-ish road without the air conditioner on at all. So, I figured it wasn't the AC that was causing the problem but, looking back, it may have been that truck I passed. I downshifted to do that, ran the Jeep at a high RPM to get the speed necessary to pass, and later the error showed back up.

It took a day of driving around with the Jeep doing a lot of hesitating and having even less power than usual before the error went away. By that time I'd made today's appointment, and now it's time for me to take it into town and see if it will take all my Christmas money to get rid of the damn problem once and for all.

And this is where Vinko comes in.

Like I said, he almost always rides with me when I go anywhere. He's been to the dealer a few times with me so far for normal servicing, and the people there are "dog people" and don't mind. They sometimes give him treats, always make sure he has water, and scratch his ears.

He doesn't like hanging around in the waiting room much, there not being much for a dog to do on the linoleum floor, so we'll take walks around the lot and look at the cars for sale, disappoint the sales people, and stroll around.

Then, when the Jeep's all washed and ready, we drive back home and call it a day.

But today, it may take more than an hour to fix Jose. Once before, before Vinko, the car people drove me home when it would be a long time and picked me back up, but that was just me. I'm a little hesitant to put them through that trouble when I have a dog with me. Yes, he wouldn't have to come along for the return trip, but the driver might not like driving both me and my dog from the dealership back to Landers.

One of the reasons I take my dog with me everywhere is because, well, he expects it by now. If I don't take him with me, I have to leave him inside the cabin. Well, I could let him run around the property, but then I worry he'll run out the gate when I open it to get back in and into the street and get squashed.

Also, if I let him run around the lot, I'm always afraid of running over him myself.

So, I lock him indoors, which is both safer and easier.

I guess that's what I'll do today, but he won't like it. Not until I get back, anyway.

To accomplish my civic duty, Vinko & I drove offroad down a steep pass into a wash, across the desert, and over to Flamingo Heights to vote.

There's not much in Landers, not even a place to vote. I'm registered as a vote-by-mail guy, but rather than spending about $1 in postage to mail back the heavy cardboard vote-by-mail ballot, I chose to drive to the nearest polling location where I could drop it off, which happens to be in Flamingo Heights.

As expected, once again I saw no trace of flamingos, not even plastic ones. Maybe I need to explore more thoroughly. What I did see is a part of the desert that looks remarkably the same as all the other parts of the desert up here, only this part has a different name.

I could have driven there all the way on paved roads, but thought, "what the hell" and decided to take a short cut which, like most shortcuts around here, was more direct but quite a bit slower. I'd never taken this particular road before, so it also had that going for it and was drawn on the map as a straight line, which effectively eliminates most chances of getting lost in the desert and dying.

I had a hunch, and was right, that it would mean driving up a small rise of ten degrees or so, but that's no problem for my little Jeep. The descent into the wash, however, was near one of its steeper parts, so after making sure that Vinko and I were both strapped in, we rode down what I'm guessing is a 45 degree slope into the bottom of the wash. Please note that I'm no good with numbers and am prone to exaggeration.

But not, I think, in this case.

Anyway, it was fun little ride and the polling place was at the community center, a pre-fab metal building that's a step or two up from a storage container and just like lots of other buildings up here. One of the poll workers made sure everything was fine and put my ballot in a box just for mail in ballots that weren't, and our brief meeting means that if I die, my last words spoken to a human being weren't "I like your toenails," which I said yesterday in town to a woman in a parking lot.

I'm not happy about this vote, and not just because I think I got a lot of the questions wrong. I always worry about that, but am far too opinionated to ever cast a perfect ballot. My difficulty this time is that it's increasingly hard to vote for someone because I like his or her name or previous occupation. That's served me well in the past, but there's a growing number of people I wouldn't want anywhere near an elected office and I don't know enough about most of the candidates.

To me, they're mostly names on a ballot running for some office I never knew existed.

One of my hard and fast rules is to stop reading anything on the Internet or listening to anyone on the radio or TV who uses the words regime or agenda. It may be harsh, but I've learned through experience that nothing that follows will be important or give me any insight to whatever they're talking about. It will all be blather, talking points, and just fuel for all of the people who are delighted to hear someone repeat things they've already decided are true.

In short, nothing new.

I left a lot of the ballot blank just because I don't like to reward people who think or act that way and, since I never heard anything these candidates say or write, I have no idea if they're one of those non-thinking morons who populate our current political scene.

I'd hate myself, even more than usual, if I voted for someone who wanted to destroy capitalism, throw all the bums out, turn my nation's beauty into profits for companies, or couldn't get his or her head over the stupid idea of impeaching our president.

So, I hope the people who are sane and see elected office as something other than a way to make themselves and their friends rich and who try to do more than pander to the least among us get elected.

My confidence in that is minimal.

They're making progress on my new electrical pole.

Some real world, city conventions, have made it to this part of the world unless, of course, they originated here. One of them is a long-time favorite of mine, the USA marking and subsequent writing on the streets. I don't why, but it always made me happy to see these markings.

If you look closely at the pole, you can see somebody's witten USA along its length, but that doesn't reflect any of the obnoxious, chauvinism such signs and banners usually provoke in me. No one is cheering or acting superior here, they're just asking for help.

I'm not sure, but I think USA stands for Underground Systems Alert. Before any digging related to construction type things takes place, the first thing that I know of that happens is somebody has to go out and paint USA on the street or sidewalk where the diggins is to take place. That, incidentally, is a job I think I could handle and one I might be pretty good at.

Within a couple days of that alarm going out, all the utility companies send someone out to mark up the area using a fairly simple (which means I can sorta understand them) system of abbreviations, symbols, arrows, number and the like. That's another job I've wanted for quite some time now.

Now, in the civilized world, just about everything is being placed underground, mostly, I guess, to make things look prettier and to frustrate birds. I think that's happening here, too, biut with a couple important differences.

The main one, of course, is the number of utilities that have to respond to the USA call. Back when I lived in the city, the water company had to show up and mark water mains and sewers, the telephone and cable companies had to indicate where (and how deep) they'd hidden things, the electrical company let the diggers know where not to dig so the electricity could keep flowing and those doing the digging could avoid being fried, and the gas company did the same to prevent ruptures of gas lines and reduce the liklihood of visually appealing fireballs on the local news.

Each company had its own color for marking, and by the time the process of showing where all the underground stuff is located, there was an attractive display of colors, letters, arrows, and so forth all over the street or sidewalk. I guess the area to be dug up dictated the boundaries or the marks, but all-in-all, you'd end up with a damn fine idea of what was where.

For those who've never seen it, as memory serves the electrical company used red, the gas company yellow, water was blue, and I don't remember what the telcos and cable companies used. I just know they all put their company's initials by the marks so there wouldn't be any confusion.

Here where I live I expect this to be a much simpler process, mostly because half those things don't exist where I live: There's no sewer to worry about and no gas lines. As far as my cabin is concerned, while there was once a telephone line, there isn't any more. There's never been any cable for television, so water and electricity is about it. And, of those two, the electrical company is the one doing the work so I don't know if they have to mark their own stuff or not.

Anyway, this morning to fulfill their obligations and give Vinko something to get upset about, some guy drove up here and wrote No H2O on the sand just outside the fence between the pole and the dirt road. He did it in blue, so that's gotta be official.

It's also kinda funny, in a desert sort of way. Yes, there is no water. It's the desert and also why we call it that.

I'm not sure if the other companies have to show up just to let the electrical company know that they have nothing to do with this property or not, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it. What I (and Vinko) will be delighted to see is our new electrical pole stuck in the ground and the wires moved to it, something I'm sure will be done by some sub-contractor.

No, I don't have any say in the size, shape, or design of the new pole. My thinking is that it would be silly of me to even offer a suggestion or express a preference. I suspect the best I can hope for is whoever puts it up reciting William Mulholland's immortal words upon completion of the aqueduct that brought water to Los Angeles from the Owens river, "There it is. Take it."

Note that I, along with Mulholland, only mean Los Angeles in the legal sense. He didn't bring water to the part of the city where everyone lived, wanted it, and voted for it, no, he was far too clever for that. Instead, what happened is that the nearby San Fernando Valley was annexed and the water dumped there. And, yes, those fortunate enough to purchase huge lots of wasteland miles away from city center were surprisingly quite well off when the water started flowing. I think the movie Chinatown touches on this, but is worth watching just for Jack Nicholson and one of my favorite lines of all time that he gave to some rich bastard -- "How much better can you eat?"

So, yeah. I have some writing on some of the sand I own, but while discouraging and obvious on its face, it portends great things (as long as you consider a new pole something great)!

Opinions are of two types, but I'm not sure which one is the default.

When I was going to school I heard one of those pithy sayings that I maybe wrote down but don't remember very well. It was one of those elitist things that either made me feel better about myself, which is unlikely, or inspired me, which also isn't likely. All that I do remember about it is it saying that for the classes of students (undergrad, those with a graduate degree, and those who've earned a doctorate), each was qualified to have a level of opinion on a subject. I think those with a doctorate were entitled to hold a theory on something, but I don't remember the others. Someone may or may not have been able to hold an opinion, but I don't recall what level of study would give you that.

So, that's pretty useless since I'm only guessing you need a bachelor's degree for one, a master's for the next one up the chain, and a doctorate for the highest, but I don't remember if there was anything for people without college degrees or what the earned levels were.

Fortunately, that's not the point.

All I do remember is that at one level you were allowed to have an opinion, Now, that might be considered very snobby, but we do use the same word for two very different things. Opinions, without qualification are contrasted with either informed opinions or uninformed ones. When you hear someone talk about an uninformed opinion you can be pretty sure that they mean opinion to be an informed one. By the same token, when someone talks about informed opinions, plain old opinions are implied to be of the uninformed variety.

There's nothing wrong with that, but I'm going to try and be my usual anal self in the future and avoid using the word opinion to mean the uninformed ones. We all say that we have opinions about everything, but what I think we have, instead, is simply reactions. Those can come from our guts (or lizard brains) or from years of study. From now on, I hope to restrict the word opinion to the more elevated ones and understand that what most people mean by opinion is just a reaction to something.

There's nothing judgemental in that, nothing that discounts anything. We're all, every day, confronted by hundreds, thousands of things that we've never studied but maybe, at best, just heard about. To all of those, I have a reaction. I think an informed opinion (an opinion) is something much more rare and entails knowing the plusses and minuses, the pros and cons, and often not having even reached a decision on the matter.

But that's just like my opinion, man.

There's a guy running for office up here whose campaign reminded me of something I've been thinking about.

Over the past couple presidential elections a whole bunch of people have been talking about the US debt and deficit spending, often mentioning saddling the grandkids with repaying all the money we've borrowed to pay for things they don't think we should be spending money on. Their very simple fix, of course, is to stop spending money on things they think is wasteful (which is damn near everything).

That sounds pretty good on the surface, and I'm sure there's lots of money that can be saved, but it got me to thinking.

This candidate guy boasts that he was mayor of some town and managed to balance its budget and maybe even saved some money. Considering how easily statistics, especially economic ones, can be manipulated, I'm sure there's some way he can be telling the truth about that. I've also noticed, now that he's no longer mayor, that his town is doing a lot of road repair, putting in traffic islands, generally fixing things up.

Which leads me to my problem.

It looks to me as if instead of saddling future generations with debt, we can stop spending money and saddle them, instead, with future spending. It's sort of like putting off borrowing money to get your car fixed or a water heater replaced and, instead, letting your kids inherit something that needs repairs in order to work.

To put it simply, the money's got to be spent either now or later. Not spending the money now doesn't seem to me to be saving your kids anything at all and pretty much just puts them in the position of borrowing the money.

I'm not sure there's a great deal of real difference between inheriting debt and inheriting expenses.

Not spending the money now doesn't mean that it will never have to be spent is my point. Worse, any good feeling we might get from not giving our kids a bill might be short lived if they look at what we give them as being a piece of junk that will cost them a fortune to keep running.

I'm no economist and never even studied economics, but I hear that interest rates for borrowing are very low right now. As someone who inherited a distressed property (and admittedly let it get worse), I'm fairly confident in saying there's no easy way out of the situation.

Also, I'm not gonna vote for the guy.

Since I’m typing this on a computer, odds are it’s legible. I’m fairly confident it makes sense, too, so that’s a plus, but whether or not it expresses my thoughts accurately is another thing entirely.

And that, as they say, is the rub.

When I was in my twenties I first started hearing from people that I didn’t talk like everyone else, and I took some pride in that. Maybe even too much. Maybe part of it is a family thing since I also heard that my younger sister, who’s still older than me, and I talked alike. But I hoped it was something more than that.

In my schooling I was forced to learn to be specific and clear in my thoughts and how I presented them. That took time and effort, but I ended up thinking that it was something I was good at, unlike many sports, life outside of school, or having any idea what to do with my emotions. I could, when I made the effort, be specfic about things, could replace the way we commonly used speech with less ambiguous words and phrasing, and, I thought, let people know exactly what I was thinking.

I may or may not have been right then, but I’ve I don’t think it’s true any more.

Since that was one of the very few things I’ve ever been proud of, it only makes sense that it’s been removed. I never had much in the way of looks, maybe some boyhood cuteness in my face, but never the type of body that anyone gave more than a first glance at. And, then, only if they had to.

I wasn’t a great student, so I never really thought of myself as all that bright, but I was pretty sure I had a way of thinking that wasn’t ordinary. Just for the sake of argument, I called it “conceptual,” feeling that I was more comfortable thinking in terms of concepts instead of their individual instances, and being far more interested in the ideas of things than their concrete examples.

But that’s not the point, which is good because I doubt it’s very clear. Let’s just say, for example, that I’m more intrigued by talking about the proper role of government (which has no definite answer) than I am about arguing about whether or not our current U.S. president is a dictatorial, tyrannical, socialist Muslim communist or not, at least until they define what the hell it is they mean by all those adjectives.

Anyway, later in life I took up writing the usual kind of things: short stories and tried my hand at a couple novels. I enjoyed it immensely and for awhile, thought I was pretty good at it. When I had something I wanted to say, I thought I had the ability to say it and, more importantly, to let others know what I thinking without getting all confused.

It turns out, if I ever could do that, I can’t any more.

Without much in the way of physical attraction (I liked Edison’s comment along the lines of being concerned with his body only as a way of carrying his brain around), all I had was what was between my ears and behind my eyeballs. I’ve always been eager to be liked and developed a pretty good sense of humor. Sometimes I could actually be really funny, and I enjoyed that. Other times, pretty much no matter the subject, I liked to think that I could add something to the conversation, if only some tangentially related point.

Now, when you think in terms of concepts, you can relate concepts more than what is being talked about so that when people are talking about 1987 Ford pickups, it’s as easy to jump to boats, which also move people around on the planet, as the 1986 pickup. Everyone can do this, and does, but it was very comfortable for me.

None of which matters.

The one thing I was most proud of has been taken, perhaps because of my age and declining mental acuity. Instead of speaking or writing with clarity, everyone gets confused at what I say and this hurts me more than it should. I often have bad dreams where I end up yelling in an effort to be understood, but I feel no one gets what I’m trying to say.

I’m not sure what I should do about this. Yeah, it hurts to see myself as not as capable any more, to be less than I always thought I was. I never prepared for this and am worried that I may never be understood. I still want to be liked, but now I may have lost my best weapon in that fight.

I feel like just giving up. It’s too much to learn all over again, if I ever did know it, and to end up being so completely misunderstood should be a lesson. When all I ever had was words, when those fail me, I’m not sure where to turn.