This morning before my walk in front of Eileen’s house began, there was a large flock of small parrots in a tree above me.

 

I walked in front of Eileen’s for an hour (6,465 steps) from 7:05 to 8:05.  As soon as I arrived, I encountered a flock of small parrots in a tree and filmed them for about a minute.

 

The phone camera was on telephoto so the image isn’t great but the bird chatter is fun, anyway.  There must have been 20 birds in the flock. It was the largest “close up” flock I’ve seen since moving here in September last year. Very exciting for me!  I will walk at that time tomorrow again and see if that tree is a common morning resting/preening spot for them. I’d love to get better images.

 

Finally heard back from Jackie

 

She said she only got one of my earlier emails, and that something has come in for me from MPI that is marked Time Sensitive.  I emailed back to ask her to open it and see what it’s all about and to photocopy it and email it to me if it’s something I have to deal with.

 

It could be their bi-annual “proof of life” form to have notarized so I continue to get my puny (but vital!) pension and annuity payments from the Motion Picture Industry. Lisa has been informed, too, in case she needs to pick it up and bring it with her when she flies down.

 

She gave me Dennis’s email address so I can ask him if he can (and if he will, if he can) do my tax return this year. I emailed him yesterday but haven’t heard back from him yet. It’s the weekend, so I didn’t expect an immediate reply.

 

She’s Upset with Me

 

She’s bent out of shape that I have, in the past, written what she deems (or what some of her friends deem) “hateful” blog post comments about her.

 

Since I don’t hate her, that is absolutely a mischaracterization. 

 

The only person I can say I hate is T-Wrecks, whom she reveres, and she identifies  so with him, it’s entirely possible that any “hateful” things I have said about him strike her as personal affronts. And I guess that makes sense, given the depth of the cult that so many MAGA folks are still in, even now (which is mind boggling to me!!!).

 

But I want to make it crystal clear, here and now, that I do not hate — and never have hated — my little sister.  She has at times infuriated, frustrated, and deeply distressed me — see how, two paragraphs hence as just one example — but that’s typical in many families.

 

I have almost nothing in common with Jackie other than blood, but I treat her as transparently as I treat every other human being within my orbit. (Being neurodiverse, my honesty/truthfulness can and sometimes does come across as undiplomatic or too pointed/transparent, as explained in earlier posts.)  (Example: “That’s/You’re delusional” is not hateful; it is solely diagnostic to my mind. It is the right word in precisely the right spot.)

 

I have kept Jackie at arm’s length since hearing her say — sometime between his first and second term — that she’d hire Trump to work in her bank branch (when she was employed) and that she’d let him babysit her granddaughters. Those were bridges waaaayyyy too far for me, and allowed me to realize how far down the rabbit hole she has gone.

 

(This was years after “grab ’em by the p–y,”  and Howard Stern’s interview with Ivanka and him stating that he was a “sexual predator” and both of them grinning and apparently nodding in agreement as Trump responded, “That’s true,” and his comment about an adolescent girl on an escalator .)

 

So, yes, our ethics and morals do not align, and she is self-admittedly “a bad man picker”.  She studies the Bible  nearly every night, but I’m the better adherent, although I no longer believe Jesus was any more divine than any other human being. He was enlightened, a sage, a very good man, but he was as much a child of God as you and I are, if by God you mean the LOVE/UNITY energy that emanates from people of goodwill.

 

You can call me, I suppose, an irreligious “red letter Christian.”  I think Jesus was a truly wonderful human being, and I try to live according to the same vibration, ethics and values (which mirror my own, or I wouldn’t be drawn to them or to him as a role model). (I simply don’t know why Jackie is attracted to Jesus/God, since her present terrestrial/incarnated role model is a 34-count convicted felon, an adjudicated sexual predator, a January 6th insurrectionist fomentor (and pardoner!), and a January 7th Renee Nicole Good ICE murderer’s defender, extoller and champion.)  (The various videos taken from every available angle, document that the incident was a broad daylight assassination and that the “defense” that Trump, Vance and Noem put up within an hour was fabricated, believing that the truth would never come out — except TA DAAA — people were filming every second that went down, including the murderer himself, who felt his video would exonerate his actions. Nope!)

 

Is It Hateful to Point This Out?

 

Certainly it isn’t flattering, or kind, to point out hypocracy or cases of “magical thinking” or “orchestrated delusion” but we’re in a battle for the soul of democracy and the time for silent suffering, bench sitting and dissension has long since vanished.

 

So, maybe I’ll ask her to actually read the earlier posts — the ones she says other friends have read and reportedly called “hateful” — and have her point out spots where she thinks I misrepresented her stance on topics, or where I appear to her to “hate” her. I certainly never intended to telegraph hatred toward her at all.

 

I did share — along the same lines — of what thousands of others have shared in their social media posts about their  families’ political dischord and discontent. It’s pretty much a shared communal experience for a lot of families these days, so my posts have been mostly “me, too” commentariesabout similar shared experiences.

 

Candor and Transparency aren’t hateful. 

They’re instructive — and potentially even transformational.

 

Jackie (Sadly) Has Always Called Herself “Stupid”

 

I’ve always shut her down — in every case — whenever she has said it in front of me.

 

Jackie is not stupid.  She has learning challenges; she is not curious, an eager reader, and she wasn’t a stellar student.  (ADHD can do that to a person.) But she is far from stupid.

 

What she is, is ignorant.  (The core term is “ignore”.)  She ignores her eyes, ears, and even  her own sensibilities, ethics and survival instincts when it comes to political realities or critical situations. Her information gathering is always 100% within far right, evangelical/Christian Nationalist/White Male Supremacy parameters.

 

She has no close friends who are black, brown, Native American or in any other way “different” than she is.

 

She denies that transgender is a thing, despite having me as a sibling. She says she prays for me to become the loving person I used to be and to return to Christ.  (It’s utterly bizarre!)

 

I’ve always said that LGBTQIA+ people like me were created by God, too (if the God that so many people think exists actually does and that he never makes mistakes) and that maybe, just maybe, the reality of our existence isn’t a lesson for US to repent but is instead a lesson for those who think we’re violating God’s inerrant blueprint for human beings.

 

So, given her limited exposure to limiting belief ONLY, of course I can understand why she believes what she does. This insight makes it pretty darned impossible for me to hate HER. I readily and truly hate the sources she consults, the bigoted/xenophobic/misogynist/white male supremacist people that she believes, because they are  feeding her what amounts to disinformation on steroids. They are there to divide people and to cause cause us to fear and to want to hurt each other — which is the  polar opposite of what Jesus and other enlightened beings wanted.

 

Jesus wanted to free us from fear, bigotry, misogny and nationalism. He wanted us to get along! He wasn’t looking to start a religion. He was looking to instill (and encourage) kind hearts and goodwill.

 

But that seems to be lost on the Far right evangelical crowd.

 

And it’s a crying shame.

Jackie, Kris (horse) and Laurel

during our childhood years

 

See what T-Wrecks has undone?

Everything he touches turns to shit.