Well I had a productive afternoon. I backed my Toyota pickup truck into my garage and cleaned it out. It had accumulated a lot of my personal junk in it over the last seven years. It’s all cleared out now, into the dumpster or into the closet in the garage. Many treasures.

Old Blue is going to a happy new home in the mountains this weekend. He’s always been a coastal truck, a beast of the arid shelf of level freeways and clean, salty onshore breezes. I truly hope he enjoys his new job and gives his new driver, my brother, many miles of service. I’ve been good about his oil changes; he should live to 200K, God willing.

It’s funny how we imbue such machines with personality … heart. Old Blue has a good heart. Many times, we’ve climbed hills, like the Grapevine south of Bakersfield. And when we got to the top, I’ve patted his dashboard and said, “good little truck.”

He always starts. Even when his starter was going out recently, he didn’t totally refuse to start. Just tried to get my attention. “No. … No … OK, I’ll start.” In over seven years, that was his only repair, besides a horn. Are you starting to catch on that I’m an extremely sentimental guy? But wait …

What I was thinking about the most as I was cleaning was the opportunities of life in the moment that we passed and drove by. I remember a few times, sitting on Old Blue’s tailgate, backed to the edge of the bluffs, watching the dolphins pass, and feeding bites of my sandwich to the dog. I would’ve had more of times like that, in retrospect. Wish I’d climbed into the back a couple of times, and listened to the rain on his shell. … Don’t it always seem to go?

It’s just a truck you say? No, it’s a metaphor for the way I live my life from day to day, regretting that as the sunset heads for Asia and I crawl into bed, I’ve lost opportunities for clear thoughts, quiet moments and the droplets of awareness that bead on the turtlewaxed skin of a mundane life.

When I left my last car, a Mercury, on the dealers lot after 10 years of hard miles, I didn’t write about her. Didn’t even look back. They probably shipped her to Mexico, since she couldn’t pass smog. And maybe I’m a little slightly wiser man. … Well, now I’ll be driving a white Jeep Cherokee. I’m looking forward to what he has to offer. We will go some places, see some things. I will have to learn his name.

You’ll be very pleased to know that the liberals won the culture war of the 20th century.

I had a feeling it would come down that way. The Right couldn’t score in the second half; the Liberals wouldn’t let go of the ball. But things got nasty in overtime, and smart money says it’s a different game when the Liberals play the Neocons.

The Liberals made the field damn near unplayable, pockmarked by chuckholes of moral and aesthetic relativism. Unable to take the moral high ground by means of subjective populism alone, the Liberals stuck to the swampy turf down the middle, and beat the Right with a short-thrown but incessant ground game. (Everybody gets some yardage, but nobody gets redeemed, and we’re all PC for the press.)

Basically, there was nothing defensive (read reactionary) players like Falwell could do against the mind-numbing one-two punch of Hollywood and the baby boom. The third quarter, dominated by Kennedy and King, devolved into a mind-numbing mess: The Right just stood there, while the Liberals brought in the second string, and sloppy points were scored by the likes of Stern and Flint. Ironically, it probably wouldn’t have played out that way, if the Right hadn’t given that klutz McCarthy the ball.

The Neocons are a different team. They play the middle too, and they play dirty. They’re perfecting an end run around the Constitution and the Truth. And they made a smooth move trading Morality for Fear. This leaves the Liberals virtually defenseless, because they lost all coaching and their best players in the last match. The Neocons can give up the Hail Mary in favor of the Avé Caesar, and fake us out with a dirty bomb.

Get your tickets. It’s gonna be a great show.

I’m miffed, annoyed, peeved. I can’t access my blog on blog-city. Their server is totally non-responsive. But I sure got to this one. I’m serious considering firing those guys. Aaargh.