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2003-01-28 - 4:48 p.m. I had to walk around the corner to go to the video store. The last of the trees was disappearing into the wood chippers. A day for gloomy thoughts.
I don't think I'll watch the State of the Union address. I don't see anything edifying in watching a drunk, brain-damaged person attempt to repeat the words that someone is whispering into his ear receiver. It was sad enough watching Reagan, who suffered from unacknowledged Alzheimer's for so many years and obviously thought he was doing publicity for a renewed motion picture career. They say that the Tele-Prompter writers for Reagan had to start adding, "Hello," at the beginning of his talks, or he wouldn't remember even that much. It's strange how Alzheimer's takes the reasoning powers and the memory first because I don't think anyone doubted that there was a time in his life when Reagan was capable of reading; he had been an actor and needed to learn scripts, after all. My mother's mother was able to fake it for quite a few years by leaving notes to herself. When I was a teen-ager, I just thought that she was odd or completely self-involved. Of course none of us knew then what was happening to her brain. Shhh! We are not supposed to notice the drunkenness and the slurred words, although the choking on the pretzel gave the game away. I've already seen the picture of the recent dye job he got in honor of the occasion. Hmmm. Bill Clinton was a bad man and a bad president because he got a nice haircut. But a cheap dye job is OK, I guess. While I'm mature enough to realize that anyone over 45 who doesn't dye is at least a bit streaky, and a person of over 55 would be fully grey without having some work done, I think a man of his means might be able to spring for a nice, natural job with some highlights or something. The photograph I saw makes it look like a cheap all-one-color drugstore job -- fine for someone like Peachfront who prefers to avoid the public eye but perhaps a bit mingy for the so-called leader of the formerly free world!
All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford
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