Well, it was chill out on the patio with the first light rising under clear Sunday skies. The first Marlboro- one of the lighter ones that is as much a decorative time marker as a vice- helped set the ambiguous stage of this chaotic change of season.

Congress is back, though it is the new style that we don’t fully understand. The Internal Revenue System had closed out the first week after Labor Day announcing a major new income re-distribution plan for retirees like the Salts. It isn’t much money, but we don’t have as much of that as we used to. It seemed like things like that were restricted to the House of Representatives, the ones theoretically responsible to us every couple years, but apparently that is now the prerogative of someone in the Executive branch who works for someone who is mostly on vacation in Delaware.

That is part of the strange oddity of how things are working. The old parties are nor what they were. The Cowboy State Daily is our touchstone news compendium here in a town once dominated by the Washington Post’s blaring coverage, now owned by Amazon’s Mr. Bezos. Their coverage of the eddies and currents of the campaign was an interesting balance between the view east from Rawlins and across the River from here to Foggy Bottom.

You recall the Cheneys, right? The senior one was Vice President, an office in some discussion these days. We used to see him regularly in the little dark briefing room when he was SECDEF. Dick’s daughter Liz served as Wyoming’s sole Congressional Representative for 4 terms before being unseated in the last go-around. They are both apparently voting for VP Harris in the looming General contest in 57 days.

The announcement is either a bit of a surprise, or not one at all depending on which side of the big river that flows down the middle of the nation from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.

Directions are a big part of this Sunday morning. There is some east-west and north-south stuff in the messaging themes. A terror suspect named Mohammed Khan was busted just north of the headwaters for planning an attack on Brooklyn to commemorate the anniversary of the Hamas attack last October 7th on the Israeli music festival. That was the one that killed 1,200 and took a couple hundred hostages, some just executed last week. Target Brooklyn is where some of us lived and is- or was- home to around 7,000 Holocaust survivors. Khan is 20, and arrested in Ormstown, Quebec, about 12 miles north of the US Border.

So that was the lead-in to the north-south part of the morning. We used to be part of the interstate movement in America. Some of us grew up on I-75, interstate route that runs from Sault St. Marie in the northern Peninsula of Michigan down through Miami to the keys. There were cabins and family scattered along the way, so there were hundreds of hours spent on the white concrete and black asphalt of the roadway, and travel in passing and steady state lanes was one of those common states of being, tunes on low, a window partly open, pack on smokes and a cup of luke-warm coffee in the holders between the seats.

It would have been the setting yesterday if we were rolling south or north about halfway between the Motor City and Miami.

That story was stark. It was approaching dusk, a little after Happy Hour and time for a justified break in a travel day. Travel was moving a little faster than posted speed, as is usual in that part of the country. At least until the shooting started from a position in the trees near Exit 49.

Reports this morning were than 5 people were injured in an active shooter situation in the rural area of Laurel County, Kentucky. We know the area, and due to the location, had attended gatherings in nearby Beria, home of the Boone Tavern Hotel and the fine old college near there.

9 vehicles in both north and southbound lanes of the interstate were struck with 5 wounded and additional injuries reported from a resulting auto crash. The incident caused a shut down of the interstate for 3 hours, which can interfere with distance transiting if you have a reservation at the Motel 6 near London, KY.

The person of interest in the attack is a 32-year-old man named Joseph A. Couch, described as white, slight in build and “armed and dangerous.” He fired at cars from a wooded area near the interstate near the US-25 overpass 9 miles north of the city of London, KY.

So, there was that on the N-S, and on the E-W was news to go along with the Cheney’s voting endorsement from the Daily Cowboy about the big semi-truck crash on I-80 near Rawlins that shut the big east-west route down most of the day. Not a good one for interstate travel in any of the four popular prime directions

The Cheney politics ran into the same sort of dislocation, since earlier, a noted left-of-center but respect jurist named Alan Dershowitz said he was leaving his Party after being “disgusted” by the anti-Zionist/pro-Hamas sentiment at the recent DNC. He summed up some sentiment in the air when he said: “I am no longer a Democrat. I am an Independent.”

That summed up some of our opinions about the other big party, so that is what we are calling ourselves in a new sort of arrangement. We will see if the campaign goes along with things on the interstate, since the newest Big Debate is supposed to happen on Tuesday. There is some excitement about the details on that, but there are literally dozens of hours before we have to worry about it.

We expect the lanes may close on that thing before anyone gets hurt, though it is still a Debate matter under public discussion.

You can see the topics had some of us thirsty, and looking for something refreshing to take our minds off the campaign. Then were heard that the Japanese company that owns the uniquely American 7-Eleven convenience store alongside most of our highways just turned down a $38.5 billion buy-out offer from Canada’s Quebec-based company “Alimentation Couche-Tard.”

Our High-School French is now mangled with Spanglish, but in our recollection “couche-tard” means “those who go to bed late,” similar to our term “night owl.” Targeting is more difficult after dark for many snipers, so it is appropriate. But we have no idea where to stop for a twelve-pack if we are headed to Berea and might have to stop for a while on the road.

These days, planning and a certain level of alertness are helpful in travel, politics and suds.

We have thoughts about fashion to go with it, but the suds and duds thing has been done, you know?

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com