Day: July 10, 2021

Yesterday’s Car

Fandango12 Comments

For today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt, the prompt is “yesterday’s car.” All that I could think of for this prompt was my first car, a 1961 Chevy Corvair Monza, pretty much like the one pictured below.

When I was about 18, my parents handed down to me their 1961 Monza. I believe they gave it to me right about the same time that consumer advocate Ralph Nader first published his book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a book that basically condemned the Corvair as a death trap. Hmmm.

It really was a POS car. It was so bad that, because of its bronze color, my friends dubbed it the “golden garbage can.” But, given that it didn’t cost me anything, I did have some fond memories of yesterday’s car. As they say, you never forget your first car.

Hey, I know. Why don’t you take a minute to tell us about your first car?

Weekend Writing Prompt — Paperwork

Fandango9 Comments

“Did you complete all of the requisite paperwork?” the bank’s loan officer, Michelle, asked Larry.

“Yes, but why do you require all of that crap?” Larry asked, feinting naivety.

“You’re a smart guy, Larry,” Michelle said. “You know that extensive documentation is inevitable. Failure to be accurate in your disclosures would be a grave mistake.”

“But it’s such a hassle and so damn time consuming,” Larry said. “Don’t you have researchers on your team who can dig up all of that information? I bet if I were Donald Trump….”

Michelle interrupted him. “You’re on a slippery slope, Larry.”

(Exactly 98 words)

Written for Sammi Cox’s Weekend Writing Prompt, where the word his “requisite.”

Also for these daily prompts: Word of the Day Challenge (require), Your Daily Word Prompt (feint), The Daily Spur (inevitable), MMA Storytime (grave), and Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (slope).

SoCS — Lost Hope

Fandango16 Comments

For this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt from Linda G. Hill, we are asked to use the word “hope.”

I’ve lost hope in America, the country of my birth, the country on the behalf of which I served in the military, and the country I have lived in my entire life. I used to be very hopeful about America, but now I’m feeling rather hopeless.

What has caused me to lose hope in America? Well, let’s see. I have lost hope due to the fact that Americans own more guns than there are men, women, and children combined in America. Or the fact that there are more gun homicides and mass shootings in America than there are in any other country on the planet. And the fact that there is one particular political party that has no interest in addressing gun violence or even in enacting common sense gun laws.

I have lost hope because systemic racism and white supremacism still exists in this country — and is, in fact, on the rise — and there is one political party that won’t acknowledge that or is even willing to talk about it.

I have lost hope because one political party is doing everything it can to suppress the fundamental right of Americans to vote because the members of that party claim that there is massive voter fraud (despite no evidence to support that claim) and that political party’s voter suppression efforts are aimed directly at minority voters.

I have lost hope because eight months after Joe Biden decisively won the presidential election, there is one political party that has embraced Donald Trump’s Big Lie and is doing everything it can at the local, state, and federal levels to cast doubts upon the outcome of the American electoral process and the legitimacy of the duly elected president.

I have lost hope when I see members of one political party refusing to investigate an attempted insurrection in Washington, DC on January 6th and is coming up with all kinds of nonsensical reasons to claim that the first ever attempt to breach the U.S. Capitol Building in American history was no big deal.

I have lost hope because there is one political party, which claims to represent individual rights, and members of that party decided to make wearing face masks, maintaining social distancing, and getting vaccinated during a deadly pandemic a divisive political issue. And yet, when it comes to the individual rights of women to control their own reproductive health care, that same political party is promoting and enacting restrictive laws that make it nearly impossible for women to legally have an abortion.

I have lost hope because there is one political party that denies that climate change is a man-made “thing” that threatens the very existence of the future of human life and mocks the idea of going green into order to preserve our home for future generations.

And I have lost hope that, because of one political party, the America I have known and loved will soon no longer continue to exist.

Photo Credit: Derek R. Audette at shutterstock.com

P.S. I have also lost hope that I caught all of the typos, misspellings, and grammatically incorrect sentences in this post because it’s midnight as I’m writing this and I’m dead tired and when I try to proofread this post, my eyes are getting all blurry. Oh well. It is stream of consciousness, right?