Indigestion

I took a day off to deal with a heap of deferred maintenance in my house. Before I began - which was/is, as usual, a series of false starts before I got/get into it - I went out for some breakfast at a local place. There was only one other patron in there and two family members who own and run the place. I ordered an omelette with spinach, tomato and feta with a side of bacon and coffee. The food arrived quickly. The portions were generous. And it all tasted very good. I was thinking about the work I had in front of me and not paying much attention to the people around me. 

The television was droning on and on. The dour older gentleman down the counter belched unconsciously a couple of times. The owner flirted on the telephone with her sweetheart. I ate, not exactly joyfully, but pleasantly enough. I had that feeling you get, however, that these people knew each other well and that I was the obvious stranger. There's a sort of insular silence that goes with that, which I've felt many times before in this place that I sleep. 

And then I started hearing about Hunter Biden, and $100,000 dollar trust funds, and pornography on his lap top, and that he's a perverted degenerate who slept with his own brother's wife and made sex tapes of it. It dawned on me kind of slowly. Was this some sort of breaking news? Then I realized it was Fox "News" and the same old saw of bullshit rehashed and developed again and again. I couldn't believe it was still going on. 

I think it was owner's mother who said kind of dimly, "You see? All them other countries said the trump family was corrupt. It's really the Biden family that's the corrupt ones."

"Yep," the frequent belcher said with a particular kind of certainty and disgusted resignation. 

I had an immediate internal reaction. I think I sighed or muttered Jesus Christ under my breath. I was on another planet all of a sudden. What was I going to do about it?

The incessant drip-drip poisoning in the background of the half-empty-fully-unconscious-half-of-the-American-psyche.