Reflecting on the Cranky Model-T

I never saw an old crank car,

and such a thing I thought I'd never see.

Then yesterday I spied one from afar--

in Lowe's big parking lot, a bright red Model T.

It surely was not driven here, I thought,

this rickety, hundred-year-old machine.

And yet its metallic gleaming my attention caught--

't'was such a curious cherry red dream.


I looked at that crank on the front. I mean,

I'm wond'ring is this an old cranky car, or what?

Such a sight seemed strange to me, as if I were in a dream--

Maybe next I'll see Henry Ford, or Orville and Wilbur, or even old King Tut.


As it turned out, and I learned later, t'was no dream.

This curious machine is driven by a fellow I work with at Lowe's.

His classic car's been in the family since 1915.

They've always taken care, so that old Ford just goes and goes.


I asked Alan later, does he use that crank to make the old car start.

He said the crank would start it, just as smooth as can be.

But his uncle who owned it when a car was just a motor'd cart,

had installed a starter in his old Model-T.

To think that folks starting their Ford back in 1915

did fire up their motors with a steel handle-cranky,

is like stroking a smart-phone screen, now in 2016,

to crank up some driving directions. So swanky!


Glass half-Full

Cranked-up times

Poor ole uncle sam; all strung out on crack and heroin. Or, excuse me, I'm thinking of somebody else, some loser squatting in the abandoned house down the street.
Uncle sam is junked up with those other habits, the acceptable ones--credit crank and mainline oil.
The politicians all have their two different camps for rehab strategies:

Liberals want to keep the methadonish greenback mainline flowing freely, with that rubbery Fed strapped around uncle sam's arm so everybody rich and poor high and low has a little jingle to keep their jangle pump primed up, and they want to keep the oil price high with energy taxes to discourage consumption and theoretially get us weaned off the middle east fossilized mainline, which is so politically unstable these days due to widespread outbreak of democratic frenzy, rendering the Gulfs unpredictable, liable to be cut off at any time and you know we'd really be up shiite creek then. But it'll be a sunni day in hell before we ever achieve energy independence. Nice thought though.

Conservatives want to cut the hell out of credit by going cold turkey with fiscal responsibility, which they mistakenly think the "American people," couch potatoes all, want. They talk big about slashing budgets, but know it can never really happen thanks to the credit-cranked old new deal and all the neo-deals since then. On the other side of the pump, they wanna keep energy prices low so everybody can drive to work at the jobs they don't have any more or are working parttime, gotta keep them gas tanks filled up, and if the Ahabs the Arabs get to be upstarts with their ole OPEC tricks we'll send the boys over there to whip em in line and teach em a thing or two about democracy.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Dick and Jane are starting to figure out they better make the best with what they got. What will you do today to make the world a better place for you and yours?

Glass Chimera