This is how computers actually work. I swear that it is true. I know, I know… I have on occasion stretched the truth just a bit… like down the block and around the corner where I tied it around a lamp post. But in my defense, I write fiction. This is not fiction. This is a narrative of actual experiences that I managed to live through and learn from.
You see, as I was working on my writing, I underwent a plethora of computer malfunctions that made me really, really mad. I took my rubber stress ball and threw it at the far wall. It bounced back directly into my left temple, making me see stars, and then, apparently, summoning a genii. He was standing there grinning at me.
“How can I be of service, master?” he said with magical sparkles in his white teeth.
“Oh, I just wish I could see inside the computer to know why it does these terrible things to me every time I press a key.”
“Your wish is my command, master.” He poofed me in a pink and blue cloud of genii magic, and suddenly I was tiny and digital, able to walk inside my computer and take a look.”
“What makes you the most mad, master?” the genii, whose name I learned was Computus, asked me.
“When it deletes stuff for no apparent reason…” I began.
“Ahh! You need to see the Desert of the Deletion Dervishes.”
So he took me to a digital field of file flowers, where all the files that contained my best saved work were growing peacefully. There were all the maniacal digital dervishes on digital horses, busy slashing the stems of my file flowers with their digital scimitars.
“Aagh! No!” I cried. “Why are they deleting my stuff?”
“Oh, do not worry. They are focusing on the files you use most and deleting only those. They are very efficient in carrying out their orders.”
“And who gives them these orders?”
“Why you do, sir. When you give the computer orders from a drop down menu, you are rarely clicking on the order you intended to. And “Save” is close enough to “Delete” to make our work simple.”
“And why do I keep having new windows opening up randomly where I don’t want them to?”
“Ah, the Public Pool of Pop-up Peris! Let us go see that too!”
So he poofed me into a pit of electrical fire filled with electrical fire beings who were busy crafting evil pop-up windows to plague me.
“So, these creatures are filling my screen with ads for hemorrhoid creams and Asian dating sites?”
“Yes, and surveys about why you love President Trump and thought Obama was terrible.”
“And why when I click on the X’s to get rid of them, do two more appear?”
“Oh that’s simple. They purposefully make the X’s so tiny and the surrounding area so sensitive that if you don’t hit the exact center of the X precisely, then it knows you want to see two more ads chosen specifically for you by the mind-reading genii.”
“But the ads are always the opposite of what I actually want to see!”
“Well, of course they are. Computer genii are the kind made entirely of fire. We call them Efrits, and they are the most powerful evil jinn we have available.”
So then I awoke with a painful knot on my forehead and a new understanding of why this post was so difficult to write. The computer treats me so evilly because that is precisely what it was designed to do.
At long last, Robert Mueller Smurf began investigating the election hack by Gargamel and the subsequent obstruction of justice committed by Trumpy with the aid of Azrael, Gargamel’s very hungry cat. He revealed that Gargamel had secretly intercepted the ballot boxes and removed all the votes for Smurfette. Thus Trumpy won by a margin of one vote to nothing. Clumsy Smurf had been the only one stupid enough to vote for Trumpy.
Catch a Falling Star 
Blue Waves, Blue Birds, and Red Hope
My political opinions are worth about as much as the intestinal gas they are made of. That being said, at least I don’t light them on fire in the manner my conservative friends with Tea Party hemorrhoids do. Living in the Red State of Texas and being mildly liberal has forced me to listen to incessant streams of flaming insults and invective. It seems “liberal” is a bad word in Texas. We are apparently the primary cause of everything that’s wrong with the world. If you just have more conservative views, like having gleeful titter-fits over tax cuts for rich folks no matter how much they will hurt the working poor in the long run, then you are a good person, and Jesus loves you, and we forgive your three divorces, unpaid alimony and child support, and that Mexican-American you killed with your concealed carry because of the Stand-Your-Ground law.
But, my intestinal gas is bubbling after yesterday’s primary elections in Texas. Huffines lost the Republican primary to Paxton. Why is this significant, you may ask? Because the most corrupt and richest candidate did not win. Texas tradition is totally upended. And while both of them campaigned with lots of mud and bad words (yes, they actually called each other “liberals”), one of them is against both higher property taxes and reduced funding of education (which is the primary cause of higher property taxes). Paxton at least sounds like she is for spending more money on public education (heresy to the traditional Republican view of education). So there are signs of change in the Republican landscape.
And it appears that things are changing color in the reddest of Red States. Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat, solidified his chances in November by becoming the Democratic Party victor in the primary. And so far his small-donor contributions have come in waves, giving him a fund-raising lead over the Republican Party’s most hated lizard-man Senator. There is a feeling of a rising blue tide coming to sweep away Republican anchor stakes like Cruz and Pete Sessions. Democrats may actually win despite Republican cheating through voter suppression, gerrymandering, and corrupt dark money.
But the point of this whole long intestinal-gas-fueled display of political insight is not that I want the Red State of Texas to turn completely blue. I think that too many liberals is just as much of a problem and a breeding ground for corruption as too many conservatives. The biggest problem has been that the blue donkeys and the red elephants haven’t done much but hate each other and call each other names for too long.
We need two sides to have a decent debate that can hammer out the kind of decently balanced solutions that solves problems for everybody. Texas Republicans have been in complete control for too long. They ignore problems like equitable school funding, racial problems in law enforcement, and income inequality. They give all their attention to smoothing the way for corporations and money-making interests. As long as the rich guys are happy, the world is good for Republicans. We need to balance the Republicans again with more moderate policies and beliefs. If you look at the political platform of the Republican Eisenhower Presidency and compare that to the Democratic Obama Presidency, you can see that they are very much the same. I think the chaos that the current Presidency has brought to the Republican Party has already produced some hopeful signs of the reversal of some of their most hostile and heartless positions. The high priests of greed and corruption that have taken over the Republicans since Nixon are beginning to experience rebellion among their acolytes. Republican pundits, thinkers, and operatives whom I actually respect are turning away from Trumpism and denouncing it in the mass media. Some of them have even left the party.
But I am not hoping for the death of the Republican Party. I am hoping for a fundamental change in who they are and what they support. I think recent election results are strengthening that hope. We need them to renounce their Gordon Gecko religion of “Greed is good!” We need them to turn away from the corruption, anger, and intractable stupidity of the Tea Party. We need decent moderate Republicans to return to prominence once again.
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