Did the hard thing today and it turned out easy! - A few political rants

Since submitting my latest Patch.com article, I realized I could do a little desktop cleaning.

A month ago I realized it was time to write another Guest Column for the Doylestown-based Intelligencer. I was loath to do so for many reasons, chief among them it's a lot of hard work.

I requested permission from the Intell this morning, got it, and finished the fourth and final draft two minutes ago.

The byline should read: by Ruth Z Deming and three bowls of organic peanuts. You are what you eat, after all.

I made reference to something that took place at our New Directions' meeting last nite. Called up a family member and got her permish to write about their situation.

Joy!



You see, it finally occurred to me - this is hysterical! how could I have not known before - that our terrible mental health system will never change.

I did try w/my attempt to introduce the OpenAccess system of scheduling to Creekwood Mental Health Center. That's so depressed people will not die while waiting for an appointment, as happened w/ our Justin Hawkes.

I visited his mom this morning.

I was hoping that when I drove by, after depositing funds from last nite's meeting at my bank, that she'd be out gardening.

She was!

We talked a long time. I didn't take notes.

My editor gives me 700 words max. Ya know what my word count is?

700 exactly. Hey, it was hard shaving everything down.

What I'd like to see - and I put this briefly into my guest column - is a central authoritative Bipolar Foundation - Schizophrenia Foundation - etc - similar to the one-size-fits-all Diabetes Association and Heart Association w/ universally acknowledged policies and procedures, like take meds, get therapy and make lifestyle changes.

And for godssakes try therapy first before you medicate the hell out of us.

I started reading Scott my article.

It'll never happen, he agreed, about a better mental health system.

But why, I asked.

You know why, he said. People don't wanna associate with people w/mental illness, tho half the people at SEPTA are on psych meds, he said.

They'll always be wackos or psychos, he said.

How dyou like your wacko girlfriend, I laffed.

He had actually come to fetch me for our afternoon nap.

He slept very well. I watched two hours' worth of Rockford Files with a smiling, charming James Garner.

Hey, I just read in the Times that Michelle is in South Africa with her mom and the girls. They love her in Africa, where she is the same woman she was before becoming First Lady, truly interested in bettering the lives of the poor.

What if she, like Scott and me, despises Obama's policies and, defying convention, divorces him when his presidency is over.

She's now wearing clothing from J. Crew. I bot one of their pullovers at Impact Thrift in Hatboro.



China is completing the largest and fastest rail line in the world.

What is America doing about our car-infested roads where the traffic increases every year.

Has Obama ever heard of mass transit?

Another dismal failure of this president.

Last nite the great Margaret Fitzpatrick spoke at our group. Title of her presentation, which was up on a big screen was, Staying physically fit throughout the lifespan, or something like that. I couldn't believe it was me who thot of the title. As I've said before, a part of me feels 7 years old.

Do YOU ever feel like a small child inside?

I told Margaret, who is indeed my physical therapist, that altho my sciatica is excruciating, I keep moving. In fact I have the same motto as the mail carriers.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

This is commonly misidentified as the creed of our mail carriers, but actually it is just the inscription found on the General Post Office in New York City at 8th Avenue and 33rd Street.

Here's how the official Web site of the U.S. Postal Service describes the origin of the inscription.

This inscription was supplied by William Mitchell Kendall of the firm of McKim, Mead & White, the architects who designed the New York General Post Office. Kendall said the sentence appears in the works of Herodotus and describes the expedition of the Greeks against the Persians under Cyrus, about 500 B.C. The Persians operated a system of mounted postal couriers, and the sentence describes the fidelity with which their work was done. Professor George H. Palmer of Harvard University supplied the translation, which he considered the most poetical of about seven translations from the Greek.

from
InfoPlease.com



Let's get back to the Rockford Files w/Jim Garner, b. in 1928. He's 83 yrs old and married to the same woman he met at an Adlai Stevenson convention.

I think I've advanced and instead of being 7 yrs old inside, I'm now a teenager in love with Garner. Bet I can check out his show Maverick, one of those old Warner Bros westerns I used to watch back in Cleveland.

Each nite before I go to bed, my baby, I ... oops, that's an old song. What I do, tho, is go out on my back porch and watch the fireflies.

All earthly cares and arm-chair quarterbacking disappear, as I watch the tiny lights flicker on and off, on and off, and I marvel at the ingenuity of these little critters and the intensity of their short lives.