{"id":45432,"date":"2026-03-01T19:37:34","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T19:37:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/?p=45432"},"modified":"2026-03-02T17:16:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T17:16:06","slug":"the-hat-wearers-had-drunk-the-wine-of-arrogance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/?p=45432","title":{"rendered":"“The hat wearers had drunk the wine of arrogance”*"},"content":{"rendered":"

…and even had they gotten the message they probably wouldn’t hang up the phone**.<\/p>\n

Messages for another…mess.\u00a0 Like the ones the likes of Bibi, JD, or OLD and their ilk are<\/p>\n

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plummeting us all into but, hey, here in Benicia town life went on; even if it was still February<\/p>\n

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Spring seemed to be rearing its ugly head and me, whether out and<\/p>\n

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about [dump truck, dumpster***…] in the ’45, at lunch<\/p>\n

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or down along the shore,<\/p>\n

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my life continued to be Derailed by The Past, specifically deeper dives into those two Owyhee<\/p>\n

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trips in the Jeep in 1978 and 1979…the one with the walkout<\/p>\n

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and the next year – broken heart temporarily soldered back together – with the girlfriend<\/p>\n

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which ended with rolling the Willys on the Bay Bridge. Willys finito, sort of.<\/p>\n

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Anyways…distractions for sure and here,<\/p>\n

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greening up,<\/p>\n

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the hummingbird was, fennelly enuf, back<\/p>\n

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on the fennel stalk just like last year,<\/p>\n

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and the weather was just warm enough, during a week L. was away every day and mightily<\/p>\n

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distracted with the installation of her Library Show, to visit\u00a0Lucca<\/a> for the first time this<\/p>\n

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season****, a season that brought out the classics, the one below restored by a guy who’s still campaigning it on days like these many years since. 1931 Model A cabriolet a hey hey…<\/p>\n

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and a not bad 4Runner, either…<\/p>\n

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As the grasses greened I kept making it down to the harbor, celebrating the weekend with – their favorite – another Repuppetlican War<\/a> in the Middle East! Mary Geddry’s predicting that<\/p>\n

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if things don’t work out gasoline could shoot up to $3.50 a gallon<\/a> [a great savings if one happens to live around here where it continuously flits around the five dollar mark] but other repercussions may, however, be considerably worse. The wine of arrogance, indeed.<\/p>\n

*Ripped out of context from William Dalrymple’s “The Anarchy”<\/a><\/p>\n

**A rephrasing of Alan Watts’ “When you get the message, hang up the phone”.<\/p>\n

**The voluble lawyer in his shiny blue suit enthused as to how he’d had it wrapped in black so it wouldn’t look like a garbage bin but that didn’t seem to have worked IMHO.\u00a0 Better buy a Model 3 if you want all those fun features sans ridiculousness.<\/p>\n

***We wait until the warm weather to eat outside as it’s way – way – too loud for our old ears within.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…and even had they gotten the message they probably wouldn’t hang up the phone**. Messages for another…mess.\u00a0 Like the ones the likes of Bibi, JD, or OLD and their ilk are plummeting us all into but, hey, here in Benicia town life went on; even if it was still February Spring seemed to be rearing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45440,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45432"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45482,"href":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45432\/revisions\/45482"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikesmooreptgs.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}