How strange. I just read this without realizing that I already read it. I got the end and was about to press on the clappy thing when I noticed that it was filled in already. That’s my “senior” sieve brain for you!

It’s a great little story, so I had to give it a few more claps. I bailed someone out like that, I remember, when I was young, younger, whatever, but it was because I was in a hurry and the amount that the “senior” needed was trifling. You did it out of goodness, I did it out of selfishness.

Why do I keep putting quotes around “‘senior?’” I’m old now and I hate “senior.” I guess I’m just channeling my father, of blessed memory. I can still hear him saying, “I’m not a senior citizen. I’m an old man! I’m proud of being an old man! Being an old man means I didn’t do the kind of dumb-ass things that get you killed! Or that I quit doing them, like with smoking and drinking!” He lived to be 86.

I often wonder what he would have thought of Donald Trump. I grew up listening to him heap scorn and ridicule on various right-wing politicians, columnists, and relatives. Yet we argued vociferously when I joined the anti-war movement in the sixties. He didn’t seem to realize that I was merely a chip off the old block. But then he always defended the bombing of Hiroshima, “We were in a fucking war!” I don’t remember if he voted for Reagan, but I remember him saying, once the Regan presidency was a done deal, “He’s such a nice guy, ya gotta like him,” or something like that. Later he said of Newt Gingrich, “He’s pro-science, you gotta give him that.” To which I replied that he was pro-science in the sense that Stalin was pro-science, and we were off to the races again. He even tried to defend The Bell Curve.

How did I get to this shit? Sorry, just me wool gathering, working my way through my current bout of writer’s block.