The Dripping Faucet

The Dripping Faucet

No, I am not expanding my DIY repertoire from gardening and big household projects to routine handyman maintenance tips. I know what a washer is but I have no idea if new age faucets have the damn things. From the few Delta/Moen/Koehler ads I have seen that show the latest digital faucets with Alexa voice commands to “fill 17 milliliters of water, thank you”, I am presuming that even if I had learned all about faucets and washers, I would be out of date anyway by now. It’s like my motorcycles. I used to field strip my 50cc, 125cc, 250cc and even 650cc motorcycles in and about 1970, but fifty years later I don’t dare touch anything more than the gas filler cap on my BMW for fear that I will damage or disrupt the programming and will be faced with a silicon grease monkey telling me it will cost me $8,500 to fix what I just broke.

If I have any dripping faucets in this house I will let Handy Brad fix them, but I don’t think I do have any. If I break a faucet around here, it will likely be an outdoor hose bib. I already replaced one of those on the hose bib on the side of the house nearest the Cecil Garden. $100 cash, paid to a much-tattooed friend of Handy Brad’s and I am good to go for ten years at least, or so he tells me. There are many other types of faucets in my life rather than just the ones delivering the blood of life, water.

The other spigot that most often gets mentioned by everyone is the money spigot. There are lots of those spigots apparently since my accounts always seem to drip away even if I am not actively spending. After fifteen years I am used to Kim’s spending patterns and they really only hit me through American Express (our common go-to monthly spending platform) and an occasional cash withdrawal or, God-forbid, check to someone like the cleaning crew. As a side note, I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but the number of actual checks written these days is down to single digits per quarter. ACH drafts are more common, but I prefer the float provided by American Express. Something charged or paid through AMEX hits the account and accumulates until the 20th of the month (my statement date for some reason only AMEX knows), and then I have three more weeks to pay it, meaning I get something like six plus weeks of float. In the old days when there were non-zero interest rates, that meant something financial, but now its just somehow a feel-good that I call the Wimpy Effect of getting to pay Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Every few months I go on an AMEX rampage of going through my statement and flagging every charge I don’t recognize. Like everyone, I find the mini charges that go monthly to be the most annoying. So, I go to the trouble of trying to chase those down and cancel them only to find I can no longer download the Wall Street Journal article I want to grab because I am not paying for the premium service. So I sign up again and then notice that Dow Jones is hitting my account three times each month for different amount. When I finally get someone over there to answer the phone (everyone works globally 24X7 in the billing arena, but customer service works from 10-3 weekdays). We used to call those bankers’ hours, but now they are better called client service hours. No matter what I do, modern life has a tendency to find its way back into my AMEX account every few months as the drip, drip, drip of micro charges. I consider it a victory if ScoreSense does not charge me a monthly fee to tell me I am building up too big an AMEX balance and my credit rating has gone down a point accordingly. They fail to give any recognition to the fact that I have been a member, as they say, at AMEX since 1976 and have never once not paid my monthly bill in full. But I still have to pay ScoreSense to remind me I’m spending too much on nonsense like ScoreSense.

But those are the travails of life and those are not the spigot issues I am wanting to talk about today (even though I just did). What I want to talk about is our political process, and specifically the fundraising therefore. As best I can tell, the biggest winners in the current political divide of this nation are threefold. There are the ubiquitous cable news channels and the personalities, correspondents and pundits that make a tidy living off of keeping us all informed about the lunacy in Washington and elsewhere. How did we ever live without them? And to stream them live on any mobile device or stray household TV hooked up to the internet, you had better be current on your cable or internet provider and know the passwords to those accounts so you can log in.

Then there are the trusted sources. That’s right, the sources that go beyond the cable news networks that you are sure you will always trust to give you the truth. For me there are several. Most prominent among them has become National Geographic. Wow. Remember going into your grade school pal’s basement and finding the stacks of old National Geographic’s (always noticeable on the shelf due to that yellow color)? This was the magazine with the indigenous women’s breasts showing that you and your goofy friends giggled at. It was better than the lingerie section of the Montgomery Wards catalogue. Well, NatGeo has reinvented itself somewhere along the way and I now get both the magazine and the webmail from them daily. They have become a trusted source of news and information…delving into deeper content that I want to know more about. The same is true of the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Vanity Fair. Good work guys, not easy to remain relevant in the cluttered media market.

And finally, the biggest winner of them all is the political contributions industry. I would guess that fully 70% of my incoming email in all my email accounts (5 active ones) are requests for political contributions. The world has not had too much trouble figuring out that I am an avid liberal who wants desperately for Trump and his Republican enablers to fade into the sunset. I want our democratic values and system restored, so I have decided I can and should give money to blue candidates (and have regularly since 2016). The smart campaigns know that I will give more if I feel a personal connection, so no less than five democratic Congressmen/women or their wannabe contenders to that throne have called me directly to chat. The blue grapevine is strong and they’ve figured me out. Call me and you get $1,000. EMail me and be in a situation I view as critical (i.e. Amy McGrath in Kentucky or Harrison in South Carolina) and you get $250-500. Just hit me when the Trump news is particularly bad and I give at least $100 to anyone who catches my eye. This is the real drip, drip, drip of my life in 2020. I can’t stop giving money to support what I consider to be the battle against biggest and most important injustices of our time. I can’t wait for November 3rd, just so I can turn off my own personal dripping faucet.