During the past seven days,
114 viewers looked in on Jack’s Potpourri.
The breakdown by country of these viewers included 60 from the United
States, 29 from Russia, 15 from Germany, 3 from Japan, 2 from Canada and one
each from China, Denmark, France, Latvia and Vietnam. Don’t ask me why we are getting so many
foreign hits. They usually result from
someone doing a Google Search and finding something having to do with their
search on this site.
Today’s postings
feature a short piece which appeared on www.politicaldrek.com
yesterday and a 2004 short story I have dug out of my archives. Let me know if you enjoy it.
*
* * * * *
January 4, 2012:
A
Day After Iowa - By the narrowest of margins, Mitt Romney edged
out Rick Santorum in the Iowa Republican caucus, with Ron Paul rounding out the
top three finishers. The problem for the likely Republican nominee, Mitt
Romney, is that over 70% of Republican voters, in poll after poll, prefer
someone else, someone more conservative, someone less likely to compromise
“conservative” values. Thus far, this 70% has been divided among several
candidates. One, Michelle Bachmann, dropped out today. Expect Rick
Perry to follow by the end of the month as well as Jon Huntsman. This
will leave those Republicans who just don’t like Romney with the choice, when
the pollster calls, of either Ron Paul, Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich.
A
thinking Republican conservative, and there are some, knows that Paul, Gingrich
and possibly Santorum are unelectable in a general election. Paul’s
ideology is anathema to most Americans and Newt Gingrich doesn’t have their
trust. Eventually, Gingrich will drop out. Paul will not, however,
and it is not inconceivable that he will run a third party libertarian
campaign. Santorum’s ideological fixation on family values and his
extreme anti-abortion posture hurt him, but his ideas are not written in stone
as are Paul’s.
The
first primary, or national poll, where Mitt Romney must run against only one
other candidate would prove whether more than 30% of the G.O.P will support
him. Unfortunately we may not get that opportunity, even after Perry and
Gingrich throw in the towel, leaving only Romney, Santorum and Paul in the
race, because the latter two are in it for the long haul.
Comparing
them in a three-way contest, via polls or primaries, however, it is likely that
Paul will get his solid 25% approval by Republicans and Romney his 30%, leaving
the rest of the conservatives supporting Rick Santorum with 45%. If,
despite these numbers, the convention still gives the nomination to Mitt Romney
as the only electable candidate, this will still leave 70% of the G,O.P.
unhappy, susceptible to a third party run by Ron Paul or perhaps just staying
home on Election Day.
The
Republicans can solve this problem in one of three ways. First, Mitt
Romney can suddenly become more conservative. This will not help him in
the general election but it will bolster his support in his own party.
This won’t happen. A more likely alternative would be for Romney to
choose a solidly conservative Vice-Presidential candidate such as Santorum or
even Michelle Bachmann to keep the conservatives from straying. A third
possibility would be a new candidate coming up at the last minute. I
doubt this will happen since the likes of Chris Christie or Mike Bloomberg lack
adequate conservative credentials. I predict the G.O.P. will nominate
Romney who will select Santorum as his running mate. Remember this.
You read it here on January 4.
* * * * *
Two
When Russ turned the corner,
making a right off of McKinley Avenue onto Oak Street, he blinked his eyes for
a second. Had he made the wrong
turn? The third house on the left was
where his house should have been, but it wasn’t there. The neighbors’ houses all were there alright,
but where his house should have been was a fenced-in brick structure. He pulled up in front of it and looked at the
sign on the fence. “Keep Out – City Water District Pumping Station Number Four
– Built 1999,” it read. Reaching for
his cell phone, he punched in his wife’s number several times, but each effort
was cut off by a metallic voice saying, “the number you dialed in not available
at this time.” Putting the phone down,
he slowly drove off, circling the block a few times. Everything was as it was when he had gone to
work that morning; all the trees and houses looked the same, but his house was
gone.
Deciding to drive back to
the center of town to his haberdashery shop, he thought he might sit down and
think it out. It probably was a dream
which he was in the midst of, or some kind of hallucination. There had to be an explanation.
When Russ got to the store,
or more correctly to where the store he had left twenty minutes earlier should
have been, it wasn’t there. Between the
Children’s Shoe Emporium and the Chiropractic office, where Russ’ Dapper Dan
Shop had stood for the past twenty years, was a Starbucks Coffee shop. It hadn’t been there a half an hour ago.
Getting out of his car, Russ
cautiously walked along the sidewalk. He
looked into the shoe store and the Starbucks, but didn’t recognize any of the
help there. The Chiropractic office was
closed. Finally, he went into the
Starbucks and quietly asked the girl behind the counter, “Miss, do you know of
any men’s clothing store around here?”
“No sir,” she replied. “There’s a couple out at the mall but I don’t
think there are any in town.”
A woman, seated at a table,
looked up at him. “Mister, she’s too
young to remember, but there used to be one right here, about five years ago,
right where this Starbucks is.”
“Thank you,” Russ said and
walked back to his car. This dream, he
thought, had gone on long enough. He had
to do something. He thought about going
to the police but decided on the Emergency Room of the hospital instead.
“Yes, sir,” the nurse at the
Emergency Room addressed him. “Can I
help you”?
He didn’t know quite how to
explain what his problem was, but he blurted it out as best he could.
“Miss, I need to see a
doctor. I seem to be living in a dream
or hallucinating, or something, but since I went to work this morning, my house
has disappeared, my store has disappeared, and I seem to have lost five or six
years of my life.”
“Have you been drinking or
using drugs,”? the nurse asked.
“Neither,” he
responded. An idea struck him. While he might be hallucinating, the nurse
wasn’t. “Here,” he said, taking his
wallet out of his pocket. Please call my
wife. I couldn’t reach her on my cell phone, but maybe you can.”
The nurse examined the
identification in the wallet, took his phone number and dialed it. She turned away from him so he could not
hear the conversation. When she got off of the phone, she turned to Russ,
looking at him peculiarly, and said, “I spoke to your wife and she didn’t quite
understand what I was talking about. It
seems you were sitting at the table at the very moment I called, eating
dinner. I asked to speak to you, and you
got on the phone. The voice sounded just
like yours, incidentally, and you were a little annoyed about being disturbed,
since you had just gotten home from a hard day at work. Is this some kind of joke, or something”?
“No it isn’t, but where did
whomever you spoke to say he worked,” Russ asked.
“At his store, Dapper
Dan’s. Incidentally, I know the store
pretty well. I bought my husband and my
father their Father’s Day gifts there the other day. It’s a nice store.”
Russ held his head in his
hands. He was getting a headache. Could it be that his body had split into two
separate, but identical people, about five years ago, and one, the one eating
dinner with his wife at that very moment, was continuing to lead a normal
existence, but the other, himself, had been put into some sort of state of
suspension, where he had remained until earlier that afternoon, when through
some cosmic mistake, he had come back to a world where he did not belong, and
would not belong, until his other self no longer existed. That could be the only explanation. This was the stuff, he thought, that science
fiction was made of, but it was happening to him. He couldn’t tell the nurse about it, of course.
If he did, she would think he was crazy and he would never have the opportunity
to replace his other self and resume a normal life.
His quickly-devised plan was
to murder his other self, dispose of the body, and resume his rightful life
with his wife and business. How to do
it, however, was another question, however, since he couldn’t get to the house
or the store. They existed, alright, but
in a world of which he was no longer a component. But the nurse, he thought, might be a bridge
between both worlds, just as she had been over the telephone.
“Miss, I feel a lot better,
so if you don’t mind, I’ll leave now.
But, could you do me one favor?
Ask the man you just spoke to on the phone to stop by the Emergency
Room. When he does, just give him these. Russ took some photographs of his family from
his wallet. Tell them they were turned
in to the Hospital’s “Lost and Found” desk.”
The nurse, eager to get rid
of Russ, who appeared to be just another of the many screwballs who wander into
Emergency Rooms, quickly assented.
* * *
The next evening, Russ saw
his other self striding up to the Emergency Room entrance. He was crouching behind some thick hedges
where he had positioned himself for the entire day with a loaded pistol in his
hand. A few minutes later, as his other
self left, Russ aimed and squeezed the trigger.
The silencer on the gun muffled the shot. He quickly dragged the body into the bushes
and to his car. He drove off and
disposed of the body in a quarry where it probably never would be found. He then drove home.
This time, when Russ turned
the corner, making a right off of McKinley Avenue onto Oak Street, his house
was there, right where it was supposed to be, and his wife was on the porch
waving at him. She had no way of
knowing that he was a murderer, or was he?
Jack Lippman
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