And I’ve caught it three times

Oh, I’ll get around to the Title in a moment but first. In the last couple days of modest posting the ideas for posts in my head have been piling up like cars on a freeway when a heavy fog obscures the view. Some of those thoughts were pent up during the last weeks of my campaign which ended one week ago as voters headed out to the polls to determine the make up of the new school board.

I campaigned hard enough and long enough not to blame myself for my defeat. If I was more politic (inoffensive) which a lot of people confuse with being diplomatic I might not have lost. But I can’t help myself. This blog is where I let almost everything hang out. I do keep my swearing to myself. It has been particularly aggravated of late by my French practice. When I make a mistake the umpteenth time on a complicated sentence in my Duolingo app I find it hard not to cuss out a lot of typewriter symbols #$&%#@(^^$##$!!!!! In earlier days that mostly erupted when I had to do some tedious handiwork around the house that I’d put off for ages.

Otherwise I’m pretty happy, relieved almost, about not having to fix the Duluth Schools from the twits at the News Tribune who couldn’t conceive that the best minds of Johnson Controls and the Duluth Schools Business office and a charming sociopathetic (type in “lies and Dixon” in the blog’s search engine) Superintendent wouldn’t anticipate that their demographic projections, tax plans and financing wouldn’t go as planned.

So, a young me who hoped for a congressional career has managed to accumulate a spotty record of getting elected to a small city’s school board. As I sat down last night for our last weekly rehearsal for the next DSSO Symphony concert my seatmate looked over to me and said he hadn’t realized I was one of the candidates for the school board. I joshed that I was like that dog that caught the car he was chasing and didn’t know what to do with it. Then I added that I had caught the car three times and never managed to figure out what to do with it.

So there’s your punchline. And here’s one…

…for the Tribune. Their editorial today. After endorsing David Kirby over me because of my excessive transparency (I told Duluth we’d been offered ten million for Central High School…..shame on me) Now they feel betrayed. Why? Because David has just threw cold water on the idea that keeping the rest of his school board colleagues in the dark was a big deal. And this, after the Trib’s editors made it clear that transparency was a “good” thing. Of course, as they note, they already knew David wasn’t all that perturbed about how perturbed some of his colleagues were with little things like not being told they had just approved the hiring of someone who was lucky not to have run over school kids while drunk on three occasions. Had I known about that in a closed meeting and blogged about it I suppose the Trib would have called me a goat for being too transparent.

I like David. And I don’t disagree with him that for the most part an honest fellow like he is won’t sneak around keeping his colleagues in the dark. David treated me very well after he replaced a bunch of wonderful former School District insiders who became super secretive jerks after they took over the School Board. Hey. Rudy Guilani used to be “America’s Mayor.” Sometimes there will be a Donald Trump in the mix. During such times no one will be able to trust anyone. But, the Trib got what the Trib wanted which, it turns out, is not what the Trib wanted.

And I’ve got another destination, whether I make it there or not. Another 31 years to age 100. I hope to remain lucid enough to add more pages to this blog or my writing “corpus.” I even have my eight loyal readers although not having the campaign to write about will put a dent in my blog readership. Although yesterday I got 6000 hits thanks to my putting the remembrance of Dick Gastler in the blog. And I got it from the Trib. You see. The Trib is important to our community and I can’t conceive of not subscribing to it.

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