as april brakes to a grinding halt i find myself exhausted. i smile a little that i survived my birthday, yet the pope didn't. it's a victory to still be here. to. do some lawn work. to breathe the stiff midwestern wind bringing the warm weather back and blowing the flowers around.

it is, in fact, quite green out. with a new mind to tending to lawns, i look at them wondering if they need someone to cut them. my wife is determined to let ours grow, at least for the month of may, as in no-mow-may, which is done to let everything pollinate and ultimately give a more energetic ecosystem. so at my own home i watch growling a little as i am really more into tending them, not so much for the neighbor's approval, but just because i have a lawn and can make it look however i want.

now that i do a few lawns as a business, i might get sensitive about how my own looks, but there are many areas where i've had to just say, well, that's my wife's department, not really mine. if she wants to let it grow, it's better to let it grow even while i try to get a lawn-mowing business going that will give work to a group of well-meaning but precarious kids with scant means of support. i've decided, on that front, it's all about money - i need to find out how to put money into their pockets, or else ultimately it will come out of mine anyway. they have no way to feed themselves; i can't watch them starve; the last effort i could make, as we ourselves go hurtling into bankruptcy, is to provide them with the basics so that they can get through these times without committing crimes and going to jail.

on that score, every dollar i put in their pocket, every meal i feed them, is one more day of victory, because they don't go out and commit crimes just for the heck of it. they would, if they had to, but so far, they've been lucky, and have found people like me to feed them. i sat in my car watching one kid mowing this guy's lawn. money in his pocket, and i feel like i've made the world a little lighter.

we are fostering a seven-year-old, now eight, and. it seems like temporary is turning into permanent. thus these septagenarians (?) could be fostering this young lady for ten years, since nobody else is stepping up to the plate. She's very lively and assertive. we've enjoyed it and are also enjoying, in general, the changes it has brought to our lives. the other day she was dancing in our kitchen, and i couldn't help it, i danced too. which brings me to the other thing i've been saying: i'm a little like elon, i have somewhere north of twelve kids, depending on how you count, yet the family is still a bit dysfunctional. the difference is mine aren't all biological, and, i'm not a geek going around putting a wrecking ball to the government.

my last shift is to deal with night-meds and a twenty-year-old who has a somewhat out-of-whack sleep schedule, not sure if he's even awake, and my deadline (9:30-10) approaches. will somehow have to take those out to him one way or the other.

and it's very much spring out there. i drive around with windows open, smelling the new grasses and listening to the sounds of the night. a lot of it is along that one road that connects knoxville and galesburg. in knoxville they call it the galesburg road. not sure what we call it, maybe just one-fifty.

got sent out on a dash to the railroad's "hump yard" which though only three miles from town is still in a world of its own. dusty gravel, crossings, even its own tunnel, but i got stuck at a train which had to be at least four miles long, and wasn't going very fast. it was going, though, and that's not always true, so i guess i was lucky. got to see a wide range of graffiti all up and down the line, and saw it up close slow motion, quite a show.

the dash set me back, though. in the dash world if you lose thirty minutes of lunch-hour traffic you lose everything, even though as i was on time-pay they paid me for that time. the good thing about time-pay of course is that it is insurance for those times when this happens, when some slow train just simply prevents you from getting where you're going. though it was bad from the dash perspective, it was good in that i've been considering making a movie out of train graffiti and galesburg, so i had some time to think about it. way out there, there wasn't any way i could have gone around it anyway. i was either going to give that poor railroad guy his lunch, or i wasn't. i just did it. i'm a little miffed now, of course. but it'll all work out.

on my birthday i vow, first of all, to not let anything bother me. i'll do the stuff i usually do, work, drive kids around, go shopping, whatever people want, but if they try to make me mad i won't get mad. i'll shrug and blow it off. it's not worth getting mad.

well a few things came by to test my patience, but by and large i passed. of all my kids i heard from about half, but then some are very busy and some are step-kids, or both. it's ok, i can handle it if they don't check in, maybe they'll be there on father's day. after all i'm a lot like elon that way, more than twelve, but somewhat dysfunctional. only in my case most of them aren't even biological.

i have a cousin who started in on me. her problem was that she is about to end it all. well that could set me back a little (see rule number one at the top), but i texted her down off the cliff. she like me has kids and grandkids, but they're cutting her out, not having anything to do with her, and that's killing her. i can understand that. but our conversation veered over to her book about my uncle which is really somewhat bizarre. my uncle himself, i dearly loved, a kind of interesting character who most of the time i knew him lived way out in the desert of nevada or utah. there's some reason he was on the lam, she likes to say, and what would i know? her book is about that. she wants to tell me about it but only in person.

but i'm resisting going down to new mexico; it's too hard, too far. just this month i've been enjoying this: seventy aprils i've seen, and the ten i saw down in texas and new mexico were drier than heck. at least up here, you have real live rain, and green grass, and all that. birds, for as long as they last, of course i guess they had a few too. but mostly they had sagebrush in april. a few clouds to tease you but not a drop of rain. so i'm not in a hurry to relive that.

then in the riding circus, i'm giving boys rides around town, but they miss the rides. i go wait, they're not there. you trying to make me mad? i refuse. it's not going to bother me. you can do the usual, you can make me wait a half an hour, i won't get mad.

the pope didn't make it, didn't survive the birthday. i am a kind of expert on april 21s, and know who else was born on that day; the big three are queen elizabeth, john muir and jim morrison. but there are a few others. a few people i know have april 21 birthdays.

we have just switched over from aries to taurus. from the pioneer to the settler. from early spring to full-on spring with the hot just around the corner. i'm ok with it. i'm happy here, and wouldn't want to change anything except maybe the freeloaders.

on the deportation front it's looking a lot more like auschwitz. he wants them out of our site. he doesn't care if they are legal citizens or if they are innocent of crimes. he wants to be able to use photoshop evidence if he feels like it. he wants all brown people, no matter what. actually he wants lgbtq also, but especially dissenters. you don't like his regime, he wants you in el salvador. where nobody can see you. where they can kill you with impunity.

it's surprising how many people stand up for him. it's like nazi germany in that way too. it's probably the same 45% of americans who stood up for him in every way since he arrived on the scene. nothing will change their minds. racism is their main motivation and he's the one who will make america white again. but when everything he does is blatantly illegal they have to go to great lengths to justify what he's doing.

the demo in galesburg was again well attended and is documented on the pop art site. i saw lots of good signs. nazism and fascism pop up often. ukraine and canada made appearances. the constitution came up several times. one of my favorite signs pointed out that he ruins everything he touches. another suggested that trump was playing golf with the rep congressmen's balls. i asked around until i got a general estimate of 300-350, which is more than 1% of galesburg's population. there are plenty of us out there. of the cars honking, it was more like 95% in favor than the 50% of last time. maybe it was because his supporters have gone silent.

my hopes lie with the dollar and the treasury bonds, which underlie the whole economy. as they sink to dangerous lows it makes it harder for the government to keep functioning as it is. his doge idea hasn't really saved money, but rather cost money, as they had to rehire most everyone and spend millions in court explaining how they could break the law so often.

i swore to keep my vitriol off the social media but i find that impossible. the spectre of fascism is like a blinding searchlight coming from the darkness and making it clear that something has to be done. just talking doesn't seem to be enough.

meanwhile it's spring - a gentle rain, green grass, easter eggs hidden in the yard, an eight-year-old getting up and ready to search, birds singing, he is risen, and the christians are out killing people.

the sun is going down on a very spring=like friday night. my job from about three on is to drive teens around. they are pretty much dysfunctional in getting license & car yet still have all the needs of modern teens. i enjoy driving even the driving i do for a part-time job so things could be worse. i struggle to keep up on the car.

my wife is out of town for the weekend. my opportunity to do some writing, but i'm occupied driving, and also eating and shopping, not to mention working. i should be marketing my books more; got the wind taken out of my sails when the country went fascist, and all the good things came tumbling down. firebombs aimed at museums, concerts, galleries, anything the "woke" might enjoy. the purpose being, i guess, to run us out of here. but where would we go? canada? he's about to annex that. it would "make america a bully again."

enough of that; i'll try to keep it out of here. this blog is about the road, the stuff on the side of it, the spring popping out in the fields near it. i shall not get railroaded into bitterness.

i will however have to find a different direction for my writing. stories about the gentle ways of americans, etc., or about history of education, immigrants and pioneers, they have no place in the modern world.

a cousin keeps calling me, and she just called. it's that she saw an owl today, like a spirit tugging on her, and she was convinced that our cousin died. now the problem is, it's very possible, and it's also possible that it would have happened without me necessarily hearing about it. i'm a little out of the loop, not maybe as much as she is, as most of the eleven cousins won't talk to her at all, but it's not like they get right on the phone and talk to me either. and in fact the two who did talk, including my sister, no longer talk as much. it's like things are falling apart at the end. some could die and we wouldn't even know. that's a widespread family of eleven cousins, just kind of dis-assembling into the mist.

might go to another rally tomorrow. last week i went to one, the hands off rally, and it felt good. one has to make one's voice heard. even a silent protest, or, i just stand there with a sign like a mime, that's good enough. i don't have to get acquainted with all the spies in the crowd.

we used to live in a world where those of us on the left were watched pretty carefully. we didn't always know who, but we knew that if we got out there and demonstrated enough, people knew it. peoplle knew and kept track. they didn't necessarily bring charges, or make our life difficult, or haul us off to guantanamo, or disappear us, but they knew we were out there. it was their job to know. it was their job even to find out which of us were into more serious trouble, in terms of causing real damage to the status quo. i guess they thought, if you're just out there carrying a sign, you're the least of our problems. it was more the people who were blowing up buildings and such. like the tesla vandals are today, maybe.

i myself feel too old to go down that way. i just want to live out my last decade in peace.