After my somewhat veiled reference to a mysterious Mr. English, of whom I insinuated had first hand knowledge of alien life, I dropped off of my blog for a couple of weeks. Probably it was not a good idea for me to drop from blog-sight so suddenly, after leaving my many (92 to date) readers in suspense.

Perhaps fearing that I had been abducted by aliens and whisked away to that mysterious base that is purported to exist on the far side of the moon, Rita and J.L. called me the other night from the small northern Minnesota town that they have recently moved to, near the Canadian border.

“We’re getting ready for a Romney victory in November,” said Rita. She is six and a half months pregnant, and J.L., unemployed for the past year and a half is preparing to launch a website targeted at the parents of overachieving children.

“As soon as the results are in, we’re packing the Scion and heading for Yellowknife,” she said that to me with more than a little anxiety into her voice.

“My God,” I said to her. “Yellowknife!! Don’t you guys watch Ice Pilots on TWC? Yellowknife is the end of the planet. Go up there and  J.L. is pretty much cooked as far as job possibilities are concerned. No jobs for web designers in the NWT – maybe he can land a job as a rampie for Buffalo Airways, but that’s about all.”

“At least we’ll have decent healthcare,” she retorted.

“Didn’t you see the Boca video?” I asked. “You must have – it’s the one in which  Romney comes off looking like a real ass when he says he doesn’t care about all the people that aren’t paying federal income tax. He is trying to backpedal now because of the elderly people included in that cherry picked percentage – and all of the people who are working but because their allowed deductions and their lower incomes do not have to pay federal income tax. He just banged on the old Tea Party gong to make it look like all of these people were government freeloaders.”

“You think that’s going to be enough to make voters turn away from him?” Rita sounded scared.

“I think so,” I told her. “People don’t like to be called freeloaders. Especially when guys like Romney have played a big role in offshoring jobs and displacing workers.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Not everyone is an entrepreneur like J.L.”

“They’re not,” I said. “Let’s all just close our eyes and hope for the best.”

P.S. Back to Mr. English soon…

Last night Tulip called me from Tuluca Lake. It was a quarter till four in the morning  Florida  time and I knew that she was probably halfway through her second bottle of Fairbanks port. I wasn’t about to answer the phone (you have to know Tulip). Besides, I was sleeping. The next day I listened to her message:

“I thought you were writing a blog E.P.? Holy mother, I’m looking at this lame excuse you have for a website and I don’t see sh*t about nothin’ that went on at that Republican Convention last week. Don’t you know that Clint Eastwood was talking last night? Couldn’t you come up with something to say about that?”

Even though I haven’t seen her in almost six and a half years, I could picture Tulip – a porcelain coffee mug of Fairbanks in one hand, an American Spirit dangling from the left corner of her mouth and her white Chuck Taylor All Stars planted firmly on the coffee table that faced the tiniest television set that anyone in Southern California confesses to owning. If you didn’t know Tulip, you would never know that she’ been married twice to the biggest name in professional wrestling to ever come out of St. Joseph, Missouri.

The next day I called her. I called late in the day of course, and caught up with her at Paty’s Diner – no question about it,  the best place in Taluca Lake for lunch. Tulip was a little hung over and a little feisty, but what’s that among friends. The first thing that she asked me was what I thought of Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention the night before. I told her that I hadn’t really watched much of it and she asked me why.

“I was watching the Green Bay, Kansas City pre-season game,” I told her. After she berated me a bit, I came to realize that I had missed something important – on purpose, so I turned to the internet, and I watched Clint’s speech several times as penance for my football sins.

“You need to say something about that Clint Eastwood speech last night EP or forget about blogging.”

“You’re right,” I told her, so this is it:

Clint Eastwood is one of my favorite movie actors. I will watch his movies as long as I am alive to watch them. The “Bridges of Madison County” was filmed in my hometown in Iowa, and I have a special affection for his westerns. Yeah, I know that the line “make my day” came from his Dirty Harry days, but to me he will always be the Man With No Name. Ok…enough ass kissin’.

Mr. Eastwood is a life long Republican and makes no secret of that. He ran as a Republican for mayor of Carmel, California and has always backed Republican candidates, so I felt no particular surprise when Clint addressed the RNC. ( I thought that the backdrop used from the “Outlaw Josey Wales” was inappropriate considering the recent violence in Colorado, but what the heck.) I went online and listened to Clint’s speech twice.  I thought for an 82 year old actor he gave a great performance. And it was a performance – but I thought that Clint could have done a much classier act. The empty chair was a lame prop, and to put the POTUSA in it and lecture him was, well, frankly beneath the likes of Clint Eastwood.  You know, we have a lot of respect for the office of the President – Clint knows that – and then he messed up a couple of facts too, and when it comes to Afghanistan, we all know who decided to mix it up over there and it wasn’t Obama.

So I am over it with politics for now. Next week I am planning a piece on conspiracy theories surrounding the Apollo moon landings. Won’t that be a hoot. Bizarre just like the Republican National Convention.

By the way, Green Bay won 24 to 3 over KC.

This blog post is addressed to all of my faithful readers. You guys know who you are…, oh well what the heck : Rita and J.L; Tulip and Jason; Bev and Lisa – yes, all of you (at least half a dozen of you), who read my blog faithfully, this is a call to action.

When I started blogging back in March of 2012, I established a few ground rules for myself. Not many rules mind you, but just these four rules called, I never want to …

1. I never want to be called a Progressive. I might be one, but I will never call myself that. Call me a liberal any day. I like that much better because I sure as heck am not a conservative – do conservatives come up with watered down names for themselves?
2. I never want to curse in a blog post  (so far so good, but that could change).  I’m no holy-roller, but profanity detracts from  content.
3. I never want to write without readers.  If I don’t have people reading my blog then why write it? Thank God I have you six people, or I would have to take the site down.
4. I never want to write a blog linked to another person’s work. I don’t mean that I will not ever, ever, link. But I think a blog is supposed to be about my take on life, and my ideas – not someone else’s.

So, I am about to break rule number 4. Listen everyone; we are in the midst of a very important election here in the United States. It is important that we all become as informed as possible on the events that are bearing down upon us. A short while back, I came across this news item that I would like to share:

What has Obama Done…

Please read and if you want, pass it on to others.