Back home, to my own place, after six weeks staying with family all over ‘the old country, as I call the USA. I go to the basement storage – lovingly called the ‘cave’, as in wine cellar, here in Paris – to get my suitcases out. I had put them away while I rented my place to a young couple from Singapore for their end of year holidays. I needed to make space for them and I didn’t want anything stolen, so I emptied out my chests of draws and my closet as well as the fridge and freezer.

I have been slowly working on this unpacking project since I got home a couple days ago. It is one of my happiest projects in the world. It wasn’t until I was 55 years old that I really got a room of my own, a full 46 square meter apartment of my own as it turned out; and I’m still getting used to that fact, 5 years later. At first, I felt guilty “how is it that I get this wonderful safe cozy place all to myself, right here in the heart of the greatest city on earth?” But as they say ‘gratitude trumps guilt any day’…. now I just share when I can and count my blessings every day.  Somebody has to live here, in this building that was built for the builders of the Eiffel Tower, and it might as well be me. I take good care of it, and don’t make any trouble. Here, in this apartment, I am a real Parisienne, without needing to be French.

This morning I started unpacking the jewelry box that I brought up yesterday from the cave. I had given the box to my daughter years ago, but she doesn’t need it now and I do. Wouldn’t you know it – surprise surprise – almost every piece I unpack brings me back memories, some slap me in the face with an almost physical force. Thank God this is a mostly pleasant experience. First, I bring out a bottle of Shalimar perfume that I carefully wrapped in a scarf. The scarf was bought in Istanbul for next to nothing 20 years ago, but I love its orange, red and yellow on such a fly away silk, so I keep repairing its dainty weave and I keep wearing it.

 The Shalimar was originally a gift that I bought for my mother as she faded into Alzheimer’s. I had read that smells help memories stay alive….so I hunted around Paris and paid a lot of euros to bring this familiar perfume home to her in Boston. It had been her mother’s favorite. My sister had reminded me of the name – and when I found the original shop on rue St. Honoré the sales lady told me what good taste my grandmother must have had. She opened the tester for me to smell and I immediately cried, no time between nose and eyes. There was my Mimi again, the one I snuck into bed with after a bad dream, the one who let me sort and count her buttons from her sealed up candy tin almost every morning. (Maybe this practice was the humble source of my famed ‘mathematical genius’ after all.) Anyway, I don’t open the perfume this morning. Mom had appreciated the scent years ago, but given me right back the bottle because ‘I never go out anymore’. Today, I am on a mission to organize my home. I am home again, and I even have guests coming for dinner tomorrow.

Next, I hang my everyday earrings; the six pairs I brought to America this Christmas with me. One of them is broken. It is a tear-shaped, black enamel earring with tiny pink, orange and red flowers speckled on it, but it came off its gold ear hook. I can fix this, no big deal, but I need the right tool. Sure enough, there are some tweezers for plucking eyebrows that no longer do their job. I don’t even know for sure where I bought those earrings – oh yes, I think it was from a going out-of-business kiosk on Isle St. Louis fifteen years ago. They have been my ‘go to’ earrings for longer than I would like to admit. When I pull my hair into a ponytail, I need something to finish up the look, and to let people know that I did look in the mirror this morning. But the tweezers strongly bring back my aged mother, she almost certainly had Alzheimer’s long before they diagnosed it. I remember her politely asking me to borrow my tweezers while I was visiting because hers no longer worked. I happily gave them to her – though she said I shouldn’t ‘lose my good ones’. I told her that tweezers were really easy to get in France because I knew she couldn’t quite manage the level of self-care built into buying your own beauty products. She was too busy bickering with my stepfather. I worry that my relationships with men evolved from watching that marital power struggle into being too much bickering as well: my husband left me rather than put up with my bickering demands. I wonder if I can ever manage an equal relationship with a man into the future – I don’t have the fighting force my mother had, but I do have the same need for equal status. Still – the worst-case scenario is that I live alone the rest of my life, and that is a lot better than living with most men anyway.

Meanwhile, I have rigged up an earring hanger in my bathroom, next to the mirror, of which I am quite proud. I used a tiny coat hanger hanging from a screw sticking out of the tile wall, from this I have hung a sort of strong screen (used for climbing vines on old houses in Paris originally, I imagine). This hangs down about a foot, providing lots of holes for earrings. It is even pretty by itself. Today, I am slowly putting all my earrings onto my bathroom earring display unit. Next up, is a fancy emerald and gold pair that I hesitate to show. They are my only valuable jewelry. My ex-husband bought them for me from a place of guilt when we visited Bogota together. I’m sure he already knew that he no longer loved me, but he wouldn’t face that fact so he figured he should give me a gift as his happily married spouse of 30 years. The earrings are hard to put on and hard to take off – but I like them a lot. I guess I will keep them with all the others for now, at least until such time as I am out of money and need to pawn them.

I just hung up the other piece of jewelry that Lew had given me. It is a heavy copper necklace he bought for me when we first moved to Kenya, after 25 years of marriage. I love it! It is very fun and reminds me of my long-standing friendship with that man. The engagement and wedding rings that he had given me back in 1984 were more like gifts from his mother, who warmly welcomed me into their family, as the daughter she never had. They are here too, in a precious box I put away for my children.

I am almost done putting stuff and their memories away, but I still have a laundry bag in the cave. You know the type woven of cheap plastic and carried to and from the laundromat by poor students or immigrants? I have one with a bold Paris design on it. It tore along the seams almost immediately after I bought it, but I liked the artwork so much that I sewed it together again. Now the zipper has broken irreparably so I taped it shut down in my storage unit. It has done its time, and it has kept unknown treasures safe while I was away. I might actually throw it out this time I empty it, but maybe not.

Airplanes provide a perfect ‘in between realities’ break: I’m not home, I’m not on vacation, I’m not at work, I’m not with anybody, but I’m not alone. I’m not really anywhere, I’m somewhere else instead.

I was just flying over some rugged young mountains with snow gleaming from their eastern slopes. Now what I’m seeing out the little porthole windows of my row is almost perfectly flat. I see iced-over ponds and lots and lots of square lots: a grid of roads dividing square properties with square buildings on them. Luckily there are also crazy winding rivers slashing across the whole white scene. Maybe it just snowed. I have seen no human activity, just our grid system laid out like a good Roman would love. If not for the gnarly rivers this mid-winter, midwestern scene could practically be a huge pristine piece of graph paper, punctuated by a square building in the corner of every square lot.

I am flying from one Washington (the state) to the other Washington (the district) on my way back home to Europe. I look forward to getting back to my cozy home in Paris mostly because I want to unpack. I want to bring my wardrobe up from storage and I want to make a big pot of pea-soup to eat for the whole week.

But otherwise, I don’t know what I want to do. Seeing my son after several months, for the first time in a while the other day, he asked me what my plans henceforth will be. I truthfully told him that my plans ended that day, as I had shown up at my sister’s big party. It was fun…. we danced, we ate, I met cousins and old friends, and people told me how great my sister and I both are. Nothing not to like. But after that I have no plans.

Luckily, I have a small online job teaching Chinese French people to speak English. It amounts to a half dozen hours a week (though I spend more time preparing). The pay is not sustaining, but the human engagement is. So that is an anchor. I look forward to my morning walk with my friend every day, though it must be confessed that when she doesn’t bully me into getting up and warmly dressed every morning to meet her out on the city sideway, I simply don’t leave my 450 square feet. Sloth is in fact a deadly sin.

Nobody ever feels sorry for anybody who gets to live in Paris. And yet one can’t live on beautiful architecture alone. I am tempted to do so but I can’t. Even Netflix and wine aren’t enough to give my life purpose. Thank God I am healthy enough to need something else to get me up in the morning.

We in America have moved up from the daily struggle to survive (at least some of us have), now we want our communities to thrive as well (mind you – as herd animals – we probably always have wanted that). It hurts to see the homeless struggling.

Each of us acknowledges that it hurts to see them – some of us feel sorry for them, some of us feel angry at them, some of us feel shame from their existence or our own. Probably all of us want to help somehow – but we really don’t know how. Of course, our system is wrong to allow this poverty amidst plenty. Of course it is. But we don’t agree on what is needed to be done. Give them all jobs? Give them all homes? Ship them all off to somewhere ‘else’? Blame them, dread them, invite them into our own homes (can’t do that – it’s too scary!). And thus our fear thrives even if we don’t.

We hide in our jobs or our gated communities, our schools or our sports teams – if the Buffalo Bills win a football game I have a good day….Even while my neighbors freeze and the climate changes; even while our ‘democratically’ elected representative government lies to us on the regular, steals from us in order to line their personal country clubs’ pockets; until we lose our grip on what the truth even is, on what truly ‘represents’ us; on who the hell “we” are.

Its got to the point where ‘we’ hardly even exists. So we go to our jobs, collect our pay, believe we are sliding down the highway of life – but really we are losing our connections to life. Who am I, who are you? Where did ‘WE’ go? The Zulu language has a word “ubuntu” which I believe means “I am because we are because you are” ….We need a word like that in English.

I am now flying over clouds – those white puffy cushions that look like we should be able to stride through and over them as if they were a bouncy castle. And yet for all their soft rain-making obscure splendor – when you are in the midst of a cloud it just looks foggy and messes up your visibility. I’ve had a fabulous trip visiting my family all over this great big land… They are each doing well, and we still love each other – So I am one of the lucky Americans who really has a community (even though we mostly connect on Zoom). This means everything to me! And yet I am happy to be going back to my tiny little apartment in my big beautiful, anonymous city.

Am I really willing to give up all my American scrappy ‘family first’ grind for the restrained, civilized, anonymous European safety net within its highly taxed legal system?

I seem to be.

I’m grateful for kippers and carrots.

Not my usual breakfast but a simple healthy change of pace.

I’m grateful for hot showers and clean tap water.

Think how we can drink safely from our kitchen sink!

I’m grateful for face creams and foot massages.

I’m grateful for yoga and qigong,

the 7-minute workout app and emotional freeing tapping techniques.

I’m grateful for my loves and my life, my friends and our civilization;

and even, sometimes the rule of law, in which all men are created equal!

Let’s be grateful also for our Hope – that one day

ALL women and girls and boys will be included in those ‘droits de l’hommes’

My daughter, Sadie, was denied the right to tell this story publicly – fear of defamation charges, I guess. So I will tell it from my perspective:

A bit of background first – her brother, Terry, had just scraped together 18,000 euros to start his plastic reclamation business on the Kenyan coast, despite the global pandemic, so Sadie took her recent master’s level education in political psychology and went down to help him launch.

Sadie had really thought that Simon was a business genius who also happened to be bi-polar when they got back in touch 15 years after her internship for his famous brother. Simon Wainaina promised to pay $50,000 if he was allowed in as a partner to this exciting eco-friendly business start-up that her brother (Terry) was opening in Malindi, so she invited her old boss to join Terry’s plastic recycling business. 

Flash forward two months to Tuesday the 15th of December: not insignificantly the deadline for Simon’s buy in! I was on my way home from getting my hair done for my trip back to the States for Christmas when I read the text from Terry saying “help Simon has gone insane again”… 

I called one of the ‘kids” in Kenya and heard that Simon had tried to kill Terry – like seriously waving a machete over his head – and had kicked them both out of their home and compound. “but Evie (a friend of Terry’s who had come down from Italy to do some photography work) is in the house” they panicked “and Mariana (their young Kenyan business partner) has her 16-year-old sister in there with them! God I’m so scared, we have nowhere to spend the night”. Simon’s famous musician brother Eric Wainaina had said he may be willing to pay for a hotel for them if they didn’t call the cops. “But we can’t leave those girls. What are we gonna do?” Terry worried.

It was decided that they would stay with their friend Jen – who is an American Psychologist who lives near them in Malindi.

I went to sleep hoping that this would just pass, and that Simon would work through his psychotic episode that night and leave the next morning.

But no!

The landlady for all four of them (Sadie, Terry, Mariana and Simon all lived together in a lovely villa that doubled as a factory) had called the police on Simon sometime early the next morning. This was supposed to mean that all was okay. Then I talked to Mariana and heard that she was still in the house with Simon and the two other girls, but that he was still violently psychotic.

While they got Evie, the German photographer, out of the house and safe to Jen’s house I called Simon. 

He sounded weirdly calm and avoidant of any deep discussion, chatting about Paris – then after a few minutes he told me that he was driving to the police station with these policemen so he handed his phone to them for me to talk to them. I was still under the mindset of getting Simon into a mental hospital so I’m afraid I told the policewoman, with whom he had put me onto the phone, that I didn’t trust the police. She asked why and I said that it was because too many of my friends had been killed by the police. She laughed and said that this was only in the USA (which is NOT true) and that “in Kenya we are all brothers” I said “Salaam Aleichem” to her and she and I discussed that it wasn’t so bad a criminal charge – what had happened – but that Simon just had to leave the house never to return.

They then all went to the police and I thought it was over now.

But no!

Simon Wainaina had stolen everyone’s passports and computers.

Meanwhile the police banished him from Malindi but he continued to send us crazy death threats and hate texts. The man was still clearly crazy and dangerous and had Terry, Sadie and Mariana’s passports and computers.

Evie left the country that day (on a ticket paid for by the business, she took the pictures she had taken) and all the others stayed in an unknown friends’ house (a safe house provided by the landlady’s insurance).

The next morning Simon came by the compound in his car; but nobody would let him inside the compound – luckily the guardien and his wife saw how nasty Simon had become. But he continued his hurling of abuse via text message – particularly to me because the others had blocked him. Luckily, I kept him engaged (from my safe distance in Paris) because when they showed the messages to the police, the police immediately sent a guard to watch the house all the next evening and night. Of course, the police needed backsheesh for this service. They were very friendly and reassuring though.

On Friday morning Simon showed up all bright and early as if nothing had happened. He moved all his stuff from his room – with police supervision (He had been locking all kinds of stuff in his room during his absence – all the valuables that he couldn’t fit in his car, like the wifi box) But Terry et al didn’t go into his locked room. (perhaps it would have been easier if they had just broken into ‘his room’ and put all his stuff out on the street like people do with spurned lovers). But second guessing after the fact doesn’t help anything.

They then went to the police with him and again I thought it was all over.

But NO 

Simon must have bribed the lovely Malindi police – or more probably just promised them huge bribes from Terry and Sadie. Simon was actually let loose with a finger wag, despite his attempts on my son’s live (and the terrorist hostage situation with three young women who were threatened violently all night)! Meanwhile perfectly innocent and innocuous Terry and Sadie were put behind bars! That’s Kenyan Justice for you – I would like to personally thank Mr. Owino of the Malindi tourist police! Good job!!! NOT! I don’t know know how you sleep at night sir. How much did your soul cost mr Wainaina to buy?

I didn’t hear from my kids for the whole next day and couldn’t even reach Mariana (who was pretty traumatized by her night of being held hostage while Simon verbally abused them all – Evie had really thought he would rape and kill each of the women in turn).

So, I got nervous enough to call Terry’s corporate lawyer in Nairobi. By this time it was Friday night of course. Thelma is an old family friend and young woman who was seeing her husband off at the time, for what could be forever. But she helped all she could from Nairobi and was very kind and competent. (in hindsight she was calling the Malindi police trying to bribe them to drop the charges like every normal Kenyan)

Somewhere around suppertime I got a text from Terry saying that they were behind bars, and that their phones were not allowed. “But a friend was helping bail them out.” I told Thelma and she got really upset: thinking – I presume – that she could bail them out for cheaper then this unknown ‘friend’. ‘What charges were they being held for?” I asked Terry “is being kidnapped and having your life threatened a crime in Kenya?” But it turns out that Simon had persuaded the police that Terry was operating under an expired visa. Not true – but he was starting a business on a tourist visa, while he worked with the Kenyan officials to get his work permit. The police were holding their foreign “guests” in hopes of pulling in big backsheesh (very like kidnapping in my books). But luckily T&S’s  ‘friend’ got them out for $400 bail and $100 bribe. This was five minutes before they would have been closed in for the night. All afternoon of course Terry was of course the only one in his well populated prison cell wearing a mask during the covid global pandemic. Sadie was alone in her woman’s cell so she sang to Terry and the other boys in jail.

Their friend really wanted to be mine friend too, after I had sent him $400 in cash he thought he had found a cash cow. Again I thought all was finally over – so I added him to my what’s app account and thought all was over.

Terry, Sadie, Mariana and her sister spent that night quietly in their home… though strangely police spent that night in their compound as well. This time no backsheesh was forthcoming in the morning however.

Still Not Yet over of course!

During our night Terry and Lew decided to hire an expensive Nairobi lawyer (of Simon’s tribe, which matters in Kenya, but a friend of the landlady’s) to hit them back….and to sue Simon for the $2000 that he had borrowed from Sadie over his two months of involvement. Clearly Simon had wanted to take over the company and was trying to steal it from Terry by kicking him out of the house and kidnapping the women folk rather than to just pay what he had promised to pay. Luckily the young Maasai landlady (26 and with a 13 year old daughter – Gladys was the widow of an old Italian man who had clearly bought her the house). She heard Simon refer to her as “his wife” by accident, during his psychotic ramblings. When Simon couldn’t scrape together his ‘buy in lump sum” He must have cracked wide open because he obviously got very violent and insane (So you could say that we were dealing with a lying thief who also happened to have a psychotic break with reality).

On Saturday Lew, Sadie and Terry worked things out with the lawyer so that Sunday was spent scraping money together to pay Benson Barongo – who seemed reasonable, even if he was charging full European prices. Our Kenyan friends were completely flabbergasted to hear how much we were paying this man. I emptied my French savings account but their dad had to come up with much more money. Still then was clearly not the time to hoard money.

Then Monday morning Sadie and Terry went to the police station and spent the day waiting for Benson while he talked behind closed doors to the police and the chief and the chief of police and most everybody else. Meanwhile, since I had called the British embassy on Friday night I hope and trust that our old friends from the commonwealth fulfilled their promise to call the Malindi police station as well. I hope Mr Owino had a lovely chat and got reminded of human rights as a global concept. But I have no idea if they did, and no way to find out.

Monday afternoon, after a night of peace and quiet at their lovely compound (now without police escort) Sadie and Terry each had to give testimony separately back at the police station and it took each of them a long time. Sadie also took this opportunity to file a separate lawsuit demanding the $2000 that Simon had “borrowed from her”. She says she would have let him off the hook for that if the landlady had not forwarded a screenshot showing that Simon was bragging to their Malindi colleagues and partners that T&S were behind bars. He was still working on stealing the business……

They went home late that night with their foreign passports but not their computers or Mariana’s passport.

So it still wasn’t over yet.

December 22^nd, they were back at the police station to get Mariana’s passport, but they didn’t get their computers until New Year’s Eve. And I have irrefutable evidence that the police were using Terry’s computer to be online for a while during that weekend.

The reason the police gave for not returning the stolen property is that it turns out that Simon Wainaina had made up charges of cocaine trafficking that the police had taken seriously enough to hold the computers as evidence (without a permit) for two weeks

Of course the case was thrown out of court on the 5^th of January – so the Malindi police station owes Terry and Sadie Fulton $400….no payback yet Mr Owino or Eric Wainaina for the bail bribes to ‘their friend’ or the hostage situation that they endured.

So I can’t recommend investing on the Kenyan Coast unless you have the full weight of the British Raj or the Italian Mafia behind you. Moral behaviour and expectations will get you nowhere.

Somewhere there exists a picture of me the summer I turned 11 in front of a herd of longhorn. I was being run around, through and almost over by a stampede. Unlike Mufasa from the lion king, I survived to tell the tale by standing perfectly still. Also they were moving slowly, while my mother (or her boyfriend Oscar) took the snapshot. I’ve seen the old picture somewhere in their massive, though stuffed, house in Boston many years later. I looked scared. But at the time, my parents saw a great photo op.

The photo shows a tall skinny girl with long frizzy blond hair that was braided down my back. My terrified blue eyes topped off the American outfit of T-shirt and shorts which showed my skinny legs, but not my budding woman’s figure. I was just starting my adolescent growth spurt, so it shamed me greatly that people often took me for a boy since I didn’t have pierced ears. Girls always had pierced ears!

The day of the photo was a brutally hot day in Accra, Ghana under the fierce sun of 1972, but every day was brutally hot then, so that detail doesn’t narrow it down any. In fact, it was the sun that injured me that day not the longhorns. We often went for a walk around our colonial style Lagos university housing, along Crescent Avenue, with its royal palm trees bigger waving and bowing to the sun. In about 15 minutes I would go from being a “brooney”- meaning whitey – this term was shouted after me constantly as a term of endearment, abuse, and just random interest – to being a “brooney coco” – meaning “burnt whitey”.  My mom’s boyfriend, being a black American, didn’t think of sunblock (if it even existed at that time). And my mom, being in love, didn’t care. Soon, I learned, we all did, to only go out the first thing in the morning or late in the afternoon, when the sun was less lethal.

Come to think of it; I bet we were actually in Cape Coast the day of the stampede …. Why would a herd of longhorn steer pass by our little Accra cul-de-sac? Our street was called ‘the folly’ for some colonial reason, maybe because it didn’t go anywhere, so it would have been folly indeed to herd cattle there.  Instead, the cattle would have been being taken to market through the suburban university housing we stayed at for a month at the University of Cape Coast with our students from Buffalo, NY that summer. Or maybe the herdsmen, were just taking advantage of our green lawns in Cape Coast to fatten ‘the doggies’ up.

When the man at the back of the herd saw me, after the herd of steer – 50 strong – had passed, he had the same moment of panic that my mom had caught on my face in this picture. Being in trouble with broonies would not necessarily be a good idea in his mind. So soon after colonialism Africans were still scared of Europeans. Maybe they still are.

We all laughed to ease the tension and I never let myself cry. I was way too grown up for that after all. My little sister was really laughing hard – that remains her go to stress response to this day. And she was probably calling me stupid for getting caught out. She was turning 7 so she was too stupid to be afraid. I felt smart for having known to stand perfectly still – maybe my mom (who had done rodeos in her youth) told me to. Oscar said they had got a good picture. The longhorns and their cowboy just kept on going.

As I mature and learn more about the world, I am becoming more and more of a proud conspiracy theorist…

I have always known about not trusting the military industrial complex – Good old Ike Eisenhower warned us about that before I was even born. And one of my earliest memories is marching around city hall in Lafayette, Indiana with college students (who were all so tall that I was looking at their butts) chanting against the Vietnam war. So, yeah, early on I understood that capitalists would happily kill young men (not to mention entire rural villages) by making war in order to keep their markets alive and well. This was totally clear to me by the time I was 5 years old – though maybe because my dad was an economics professor. It seemed obvious, but without being the terrible conspiracy theory everyone talked about. To be a conspiracy I imagined a group of nasty warlords in a smoke-filled room laughing as they planned how to take over the world.

But since those days, I’ve learned a lot: for example even in our spoken language, the word ‘oriented’ originally meant ‘lined up to face the orient’ – read Jerusalem (or Mecca if you think about it). All the churches in France do this so that we pray to Jesus’ home. Talk about getting into our heads!!!! The origin of much or our patriarchy is literally in the words we use that encourage us to line up correctly!!! And yet I wouldn’t exactly call this a nefarious conspiracy.

But as I have learned more about French I have been struck by: La mere (feminine noun) means mother, la mer means feminine sea, and Le mere (masculine noun) means mayor (so nowadays there are women who are politely called Madame Le Mere); the word slave comes from Slav (who were taken prisoner and enslaved around the birth of modern French), the Normans then brought this racist word over to English a mere millennium; further – to be terribly ‘gauche’ or ‘sinister’ means left-handed; and finally, in French, when something is a real mess it is called a ‘bordelle’ (and you can figure out what that means right?). But English isn’t much better: If I was gypped by being ripped off it implies that gypsies were behind the con; or when you say “its bedlam in there” you are bringing up the memory of a London based mental hospital officially named Bethlehem but locally pronounced bedlam – where they used to bate the ill patience to start ‘funny’ fights.

But is common language usage a conspiracy? As I get older I begin to think it is – thank God we in America now have a movement towards political correctness because we are stopping the more egregious errors we would make otherwise. [I remember my grandmother using the term ‘he jewed me down’ win I was very young – the look on my face stopped her cold and she corrected her error with an appropriate amount of shame). But here in Paris there are still pastries for sale in many a bakery publicly called a ‘Tête de négre’ – I won’t order them by name, If I wanted one (I hear they are delicious) I’d just point.

So, as I change my mental image of what exactly a conspiracy is – I now think we are completely surrounded by them. Do you remember how they made so much fun of those who didn’t trust fluoride in the water when we were growing up in the USA? Those crazies were called conspiracy theorists! But guess what – now the FDA has outlawed fluoride in drinking water at the federal level! Hmm, maybe we weren’t so paranoid after all.

And why are train tracks all different sizes all over the world? Because the British ‘narrow gauge’ trains were made in England to be sold to their colonies, as of course did the French rail industry; In America we made wider gauge to support our own local industry. Businesses run 100% on conspiracy so that they can ‘maintain monopoly profit’ as long as possible….That was taught to me, and anybody else who took an MBA, in business 101. Duh!

But we used to trust our governments to have our best interests at heart (after all they are elected ‘by the people for the people right’ hahahaha – rather than for the monopoly profits of our representatives’ friends). In my 58 year long lifetime this assumption has completely gone to hell in a handbasket. Of course, I imagine that the 1950s were a particularly egalitarian time in the USA (I honestly believe that, without the nefarious intervention of Joseph McCarthy into the 1950 we as a large land-owning and agrarian nation might have gone communist without having to deal with a Stalin). But that’s another blog brewing.

In the 1950 the military industrial complex scared us all shitless by telling us that communism was taking over the world and that we good hard-working Americans didn’t need any government help. We were told the lies and fed the poison that the private sector would see to our needs. Basic needs like going to see a doctor or continue your schooling or even to choosing our television programming would be decided by the market.

To this day, Britain and France both have government supported TV channels that provide mildly mediated content, cheap government universities and free healthcare for all. Kenya and the US don’t have these amenities so we – in these less civilized countries – have to put up with Fox News and the Christian TV channels, for our pains. Thank the founding fathers that the USA started more socialist than anywhere else because our primary education is truly free right on through age 16 (which was considered long enough 250 years ago). Kenya started their government involvement in education after McCarthy’s RED scare and their poor kids have to pay for any schooling they get. So of course charletons run most of their schools. Meanwhile in our once united states of America, many a democratic and/or republican congressperson has been voted into power because they promised NOT to provide free healthcare. That’s how brainwashed we are! I blame the media – and its nefarious conspiracy of ignorance.

In this case I totally imagine the smoke-filled room with evil warlords like Ruppert Murdoch, and his CIA, FBI and military industrial complex operatives trying to one up each other on how dumb they can keep us Americans.

When I was a kid, I thought there would be no more ignorant people by the time I was 50 years old. I thought the concept of ‘ignorant peasant’ would become anachronistic in the world by the 21^st century. My understanding was simply that we knew anyone could learn, and that TV was cheap and becoming available to everywhere, the world over – so obviously it would educate everyone.

Little did I know of the content conspiracy that was developing to keep the poor down. Now the smoke filled room includes: Google and Hollywood amorally increasing profitable by entertaining us with what they think we want to see – meaning rich people with 1^st world problems; Rupert Murdoch and his highly profitable telling “of lies, total lies and nothing but lies” in the name of news: and locally elected school boards all over the USA making sure that science is optional but God’s word is required reading so that we all have to give tithes to our local millionaire pastor. We are fucked. Now Americans have to depend on the comedy channel and late-night talk shows to give us our true knowledge. Oh and Russian capitalist oligarchs. OYVAY!  

Of course, governments have their conspiracies as well – but they have to (by law) tell us about it them, though. They call it ‘public education’ when they aren’t calling it propaganda.

A final conspiracy I will share with anyone who cares is the chemical ‘contrails’ that lots of folks in California told me about a couple years ago. I was polite but felt like laughing because of course ‘condensation comes out of the backsides of airplanes when they burn fossil fuels up near the Ozone and greenhouse gas layer. …. “its just steam” from all our frenetic traveling all over the globe (granted made possible by the obvious conspiracy – on the part of the Saudi’s to keep oil prices down – and thus ‘to boost growth’ I have thought. Nope! Now days they DO put chemicals in the atmosphere on hot summer days to stop the suns rays from reaching us – here in Paris anyway. I know this for a fact from a friend who works for the Upper Saxony government. So maybe I should be more careful who we laugh at.

It’s not like Jeffrey Epstein killed himself after all.

Bottom Line as I approach death – I do not at all trust the pharmaceutical hospital industry at all. Keep me away from mainstream medicine’s conspiracy to keep us alive and addicted to medicines forever.

Sure you can

The truly most blessed 1% of humans on this planet are NOT the richest 7 million people out there – Not by any stretch of the imagination. That 1%’s monetary wealth makes them no better then the rest of us.

According to some gurus I have met on-line recently People like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are no better off than any of those among us who have our health; who have love in our lives and who have a comfortable and safe home. ‘Yes’ these gurus insist ‘You can have it all – BUT you have to SHARE IT ALL’

I don’t imagine that this command literally means that we have to rip our last cloak in half to give it to that cold man we pass who has no coat like St. Martin did; though realistically that might well be “What Jesus would Do”.

But in this latter-day capitalist hellscape that the oligarchs are pushing “effin bad”. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aRor905cCw ) the call to truly “Share” certainly doesn’t mean “what little I can get away with” like Boris, Donald, Vlad and Lindsey have been modeling either!

Given all the bling of our wild-west ‘dog-eat-dog’ free market system that we Americans grew up with…..Each of us has spent our lives stepping over homeless people everyday (unless we can afford to hide in our gated communities). This eats away at ones soul. NO doubt! We all know this to be true. As it happens 32 years ago I let my son hug each homeless person we met while he learned to walk in Philly’s city center. At the time our streets were ‘littered with’ Vietnam Vets who were totally loving and kind to my toddler. Today I am extremely proud of the heart and soul that still radiate from his healthy body – but He and I both suffer from ‘boundary problems’.

“Boundary Problems”? I’ve always had trouble with that term. I am lucky enough to be partly African in spirit and we have a term from the Zulu that we all use – Ubunta. It literally means ‘I am because We are because You are’ How beautiful is that? And how uncapitalist! Here the moto is “I am what I do” – OYVAY world! Give me boundary problems any day of the week – over the existential horror of being fully equated to your place on the capitalist totem pole.

So back to ‘I can have everything I want because the Universe wants me too’. Nice idea! And I’m pretty sure the Universe does what me to do what I would have to do to have everything I want. Because I want to end human poverty and degradation on earth? Seriously! Remember “Let’s make poverty History”? Remember how rich Bono got advertising that? I don’t really have much against Bono himself — except that he wasn’t noticing that Gaia Mother Earth can’t maintain 7 billion people at Bono’s level of consumption. Simple closed set mathematics.

We do have enough food for the people who populate this earth now – we could even provide them with beauty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWkVcaAGCi0 plentifully – if we weren’t so busy pushing the poor (who we hate because we are so scared of joining them) down with all the ugliness we can muster. But those richest 80 people on earth Cannot Be Allowed to be as rich as the poorest 3.5 billion people on this planet put together!

So for me to ‘have it all’ and be as fulfilled as those gurus promise – I may have to MAKE those poor little rich souls ‘Share it all‘. But to cut them some slack however those little greedy-boots (as we used to call kids in kindergarten who didn’t share) Could never TRULY ‘buy and sell’ half the earth’s population. Since each God-given Human has there own intrinsic value – that is a ridiculous – read “capitalistic” -concept…And Yet remember “I have a dream that each man will be judged not by the color of his skin but rather by the contents of his character ……(sic) – nor by the contents of his bank account either, for that matter”. Capitalism has deeply failed us!

The USA is becoming a nation of ‘homo-economicus’ earthlings. We seem to believe that we are as valuable as our cars or cell phones. Poor US!

I wish I could say that Kenya is better about intrinsic human value but alas no such luck: Thanks in part to American Televangalists and their ‘wealth ministry’ – Kenyans are starting to really believe that if you love Jesus enough you will be able to buy a Mercedes Benz. Of course the way you prove that you love God enough is by paying tithes to your pastor so that he can buy his own private jet.

Somehow the Universe is lost in this equation – as we rape mother earth to prove that Jesus loves us.

So Bottom Line – Long Live Extinction Rebellion – I will be in Texas in early December. Seriously Who wants to do some radical sharing! Send Every gas guzzling car to Nairobi, and give every American an Electric Car – this would cost Much Less than our Military Industrial Complex I pretty sure.

Random question: Why do all those who live in Arizona and California – where it never rains – use energy guzzling laundry dryers, while we in rainy London and Paris put our clothes on the line to dry in our tiny pied-a-terres?

Living as a housewife in Paris for more than ten years – I got used to using the fold-able clothes-racks which you find in every little apartment in this city. At first I used to hang some big clothes – like sheets – out the window on sunny days; but that is frowned upon as not properly classy in this center of all things bourgeois.

It turns out that the cool kids take their duvet covers to be washed, dried and pressed at the ‘pressing’ (dry cleaner) around the corner. Now-a-days yuppie single men do the same thing with their suit shirts. Over course – lower down on the social ladder there are still laundry mats in most neighborhoods that come equipped with huge but expensive driers – you use them if you want to dry your sheets. Otherwise you take your wet laundry back home with you and hang it on your clothes-rack, your shower curtain bar and all around your apartment so that it can dry over the next few days while you are at work.

Back when we had five people living at home and after more than ten years in town, I finally bought a cloths dryer. I put it in the ‘buanderie’ with which our ‘belle epoque’ apartment was still equipped. This is the old fashioned room in which the bourgeoise got their laundry done – probably back before washing machines. When the beautiful blanchisseuse (or perhaps your elderly cousin who was widowed and ‘taking in laundry’ to pay her rent) would come over and wash your corsets by hand – to be hung in the buanderie. The buanderie always had a clothes line that could be pulled up when she left – so as to get the clothes out of harms way – near the very high ceiling. After the short ‘bonne’ (or maid) had pinned all the clothes carefully onto the eye length clothesline, she would carefully lift it with a pully so that the ropes themselves were up in the rafters and the clothes could hang down unmolested.

Our updated pad no longer had the retractable clothes line and it was considerably easier for me to buy and put in a dryer than repair the mechanical clothes drying techniques of days of yore. And it was convenient – if expensive.

But California – Really! You have zero percent humidity and at least 250 days of sunshine a year….Why not dry your clothes the natural way? They smell so nice, don’t they, without having to add the perfumed fabric softener? Oh no – I remember the diesel fumes! Sorry we in California can’t trust our neighbors to hang our clothes in our yards after all anyway. It will all be stolen right?

Still I soon learned that the dryer wears out your clothes much faster than hanging them on the line! Many bourgeois French people spend an hour every Sunday ironing everything – including their lacy underwear. I have never gotten into that (having once been an ‘au pair’ who was required to do that when I first came to Paris) Ironing now triggers me a bit – and I have decided that I can live with crispy cloths the first time I put them on after washing). I knew a fellow professor at a business school I later taught who only ironed his T-shirts. So that is a whole – other – fashion statement. They iron their T-shirts in Kenya too, and they look much ‘smarter’ that way. Still I don’t, I have my own lines in the sand.

Now I am in a 47 meter squared apartment – big by Paris standards – so I have my laundry machine under my stove, no washing machine, a microwave/convection oven and no dryer. That foldable clothes dryer comes in handy indeed.

As an American Refugee to France I am lucky enough to have landed on my feet in this civilized city and I plan to make the most of my new home.

I have tried many different careers over the years – but was never able to fit my family’s needs in on top of anything terribly interesting. Still I have been paying close attention to the way of the world now for 58 years and I finally have enough ‘me time’ to put my thoughts out there. Here Goes Nothing.

Why do this?

• Because I have long suspected myself having lots of interesting ideas. I have started about 7 books in my day – but my mild ADD doesn’t help any. I watched my mother let her brilliant thoughts rot in her Alzheimer brain instead of finding the discipline to share them….and I’ll be damned if I go the same way. So this is Random Ramblings. But at least I find it very interesting.
• I have friends all over the world and I would love to chat over tea with each of you for ‘my golden years’ – but that is unrealistic – so I can at least share “mes pensees’ this way. And hopefully some of you will find the time to write back to me……Maybe.

• The world is quite effed up these days – and while I have tried to invest in politics for my whole life (well before I was old enough to vote I picketed against the Vietnam War in Lafayette Indiana. Then at about 9 years old I went door to door for McGovern against Nixon. And I have always been puzzled at how otherwise nice people could vote for evil war lords like Ronald Reagan and W. Now with the advent of Trump I cannot talk about politics any more. Evil lives – in the White House and on Capital Hill and I am outta there! Safe in France.
• I am a pretty militant feminist – but I am trying to learn to forgive people their foibles ‘and some of my best friends are men’. So I

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