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This is not to replace my regular once every 24 hours blog, I’ll write another tonight, but I wanted to write this down and didn’t know where else to park it.  I have often thought that maybe I should write multiple  blog entries per day and drop the 250 word minimum, but this is not that, this is just random.

I like smoking marijuana,  I like it a lot, and feel the benefits so far outweigh the negatives that I imagine I will be a pothead until the end of  my days, but there are times when I run out at a moment when I am financially a bit short, and so there will be gaps of a few days, or a few weeks, before I can resupply.  I am in one of those valley periods now, Day 3 to be specific.
There is one positive aspect of NOT smoking pot which I’ve noticed, which is that I remember my dreams better, and that’s what this is about.

The last dream I had before waking up, I was pulling a couple  of weeds out of a dirt bed, a narrow bed, like right in front of a house, and the roots were quite deep and one of them shrieked as I yanked it from the ground and I woke up.  Before that, I had been on a bus, but I was a woman.  I was a woman who looked a lot like  Sigourney Weaver, in fact, I guess it was a dream about Sigourney Weaver except in dreams, we play all the characters, and it was definitely me inside Sigourney’s  head, which I never thought of now until writing this but that would  make me like the Alien character in Alien, and I  was bitching about where they’d placed the  bus stop, far, far beyond where I needed to go so I had to walk back.  Before that, there were two houses, and  I  was very  surprised to see that the person in the other house had exactly the same name as me, but it wasn’t my name, the name was a 3 part name and the middle name was more like a last name and it was unusual enough that two people, across the street from each other, was almost an impossible coincidence and after I woke up I started realizing all the implications and combinations and possibilities for multilingual puns, super cops, ancient greeks and “miracle mouse” for whatever that’s worth and before that I was a soldier trudging through a swamp until Helena approached me and I thought “what is she  doing here when I am not even me?”  so I started walking like a zombie to be funny and suddenly I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt which was flapping in the breeze and laughing because I just think I’m the funniest damn guy in the world, but how that led to the two houses, and how the two houses led to the overreaching bus, or how the bus led to the stubborn  weeds, I have no idea.  No idea at all.

As we move deeper and deeper into summer, I will have more and more days like today, with basically nothing to do.
Before I took Isabel to school today, I made a list of things to do, putting lots of little, easy to accomplish and routine tasks on it such as ‘feed the rabbit’ and ‘take out the garbage and recyclables’ so that way I knew I would get some things done and have some satisfying check marks on the list by the end of the day.

And, it worked.  Didn’t get much of the important stuff accomplished, though.  I’ve started reading homeland by Corey Doctorow, an author a friend recommended to me.  As a wannabe writer I find it a bit frustrating that I cannot quite put my finger on what makes a good writer, but this Corey  Doctorow guy is definitely one.  The story moves on, and each sentence, each scene, flows into the next one and you want to keep on reading.

So, when I went to pick up Isabel at 1:30 and she asked if she could stay and play in the park with her friends for a couple of hours I  wasn’t bothered at taking the Metro home, having about 45 minutes there and then taking the Metro back, because I had a book to read.

Sam got home from his school trip at about 6 so everybody is at home all together at the same time, at least for a couple of days, so that’s nice.  He gets his report card tomorrow, which might not be so nice.  We will see.

It is, of course, a personal,family tragedy, but most of the family is dead and one member of the family is responsible, so I’m going to go ahead and comment.  My condolences to the father, who apparently is completely innocent of murdering his children, although who knows what the whole argument was about in the first place.

The story is:  A lady down in Texas (I’m not going to bother with  names since I just  want to write this and not even flip screens to look at the  article again, and don’t want to link to it, either) murdered her two daughters (22  and 17) and then police shot her  when she wouldn’t put her gun down.

She was a regular poster on facebook.  Photos of her daughters with captions saying how much she loved them and all, bible quote memes,  and, of course, gun nut memes.  I get quite a few of those.  I’ve got a nephew, a brother-in-law, and a couple of friends from high school who post stupid shit like that, bragging about their firepower and making absolutely absurd analogies.  I’m quite certain that the vast majority of people who post stupid shit like that will never kill their  children and if all they are guilty of is posting stupid shit like that, I can live  with it.

That’s not my  point  for  tonight.  My point is how  weird it is that now that this mother has killed her daughters, we can look back at all her sweet, loving posts and have a starting point for the psychological public post-mortem which inevitably follows an event like this.  We no longer have to relay just on newspaper accounts.

It’s a new world.

I am disappointed, once  again, in the main stream media.  They are supposed to love the salacious details, to know what makes people buy newspapers.  Yet, here is a case with all the fixings -bizarre death, UN hotshot, New York mansion, corruption scandal, Chinese billionaire, about to testify – and the story seems to be getting  much less play than all that warrants.

John Ashe (August 20, 1954- June 22, 2016)

Picture the scene: ex-UN president, on trial for taking bribes, dies while lifting weights in his mansion.  It’s like the opening scene of every bad cop show there is.  All the guys standing around in their suits with their notepads, saying “Yup, no sign of a struggle.  Sure looks like an accident to me.”  And then our hero, whether it’s Sherlock or Monk or McGarrett or Columbo says “Wait a minute.  That picture on the wall over there has been moved.  Obviously, this man was killed by a left handed albino over 6 feet tall.”

Now, I’m not saying for  sure it wasn’t an accident but, when somebody’s scheduled to testify, there are generally people who don’t want them to testify, and when we are talking about cases involving millions of dollars, lengthy jail terms and worse, loss of influence, some of those people just might  be willing to have somebody killed.

And I’m not saying we can link this to Hillary Clinton.  She obviously hasn’t killed even  10 percent of the people the right  wingers claim she has and, so far, I haven’t seen any more connection between her and this guy except that they are both wealthy, powerful, corrupt people and one of his co-defendants, billionaire Ng Lap Seng, visited the  White House 10 times between 1994 and 1996.  Once or twice might be diplomatic dinners and photo ops.  10 times is business.

So, maybe it was an accident.  Maybe  John Ashe dropped the barbell on his neck.  It happens.  But a bit of investigation is warranted.  Just to cover all the bases.

I suppose I could have written about this a couple  of days  ago.  For one thing, though, I was just stunned by the result  and didn’t quite know what to say.  I’d thought it was going to be like the Scottish referendum.  People say one thing when they’re with their mates down at the pub, and do something entirely different when they’re stone cold sober.  But, the Brits surprised me.  They stepped into their voting booths stone cold sober (well, maybe not all of them) and  voted to self -destruct.  Secondly, as a non-British person, I figured my blogified opinion of it did not deserve as much attention as anything written by, say, an actual British person.  Thirdly, I figured I could maybe give it a couple of days, to see what other people are saying and sort through what I think about it myself.  Here are a few of my thoughts.

1.  It still might not actually happen.  That was a hell of a morning after reaction, from all around.  From those voting remain, who accused (accurately, I’m afraid) everybody else of being stupid or crazy, to the rather hysterical videos of people saying “Well, I didn’t  actually know  it counted,” all the way up to whatsisname Farage, who was saying “Oh, we never actually meant we were going to use the money to fund the NHS.”  It’s as if he felt he could make any promise he wanted, because he didn’t actually expect to win.
   Also, it was a non-binding referendum, so the government isn’t actually obliged to go through with it.  Expect some face-saving measure and watch them try to make this go away.  (if the face saving  measure  is a 2nd referendum, it could be a mistake)
2. David Cameron resigned, I suppose  that’s a good thing.
3. I sure hope the Czech Republic doesn’t follow suit.