February | 2020 | Michael S. Moore

“I don’t need no fun, little girl, but I sure could use some pills”*

January 28th we arrived in Benicia for the first time in the decade only, in my case, to leave seven days later accompanied by National Propaganda Radio’s obsessively repetitive parsing

of the previous evening’s heady package of exaggerations and made-for-TV mini-dramas until they breathlessly broke for live coverage of the Senate’s live Ceremony of Democratic Humiliations at which point, crossing Sierra Valley, I checked out to listen to Tuareg music

until the California washboard became too rough for CDs, leaving the Majority to vote en bloc to exonerate their adored fuckwit in the willed absence of evidence…any evidence. Neither trial

nor due process necessary. While they had their fun I pulled over at Sand Pass

for a belated minimal lunch and then pushed on up the desert to low skies at Wall Spring

but Thursday was clear and bright. 22 degrees and warming, all fine although

during watercolors the news revealed yet another new low bar for the Sore Winners Party when their Leader devoted a meandering hour of “celebration” to lash out, insult and discredit [as best he can and is best at] any and everyone who’d doubted his “perfect phone call” which until convinced otherwise I don’t doubt was a perfectly laid trap to force the House into their doomed Impeachment inquiry…but even then the chickenshit Reppupetlicans still lacked the balls to allow their own rigged game to play out. Well, whatever works…

“The rules have changed and we don’t have to abide by the new ones either.”**

Caravaggio’s rules of chiaroscuro still hold, however,

and the ’82 still fired up, getting right to work after some minor fussing with the battery leads

as did, not needing her leads fussed with, the 11 1/2 year old dog…and that Martin Senour “Ultra-Cadmium”? Thirty four years on the desert and still…yellow. Probably be illegal now.