Observations on walking a dog

If "dawn" is "when the sun comes up," then it is not always darkest just before the dawn. There is a good hour of the sky lightening before dawn. It is darkest a long time before dawn, say midnight. This is not good news for people in difficulty. It may be a looooonnnng time before the sun shines on you.

The program on optimism and pessimism was enlighting in that it said optimists were more successful, they were elected to office, they were more popular, and generally held in high regard by the world. Pessimists had only one valuable quality. They were almost always right. No joke here. It was a science show. Darkest before dawn made me think of that.

When I was a child I read the funnies every day. That was a luxury that we had I guess. We took the daily paper. I never thought about how the newspaper influenced me. We were people who read the paper. As I walk the dog, I see the AJC (Atlanta Journal and Constitution), thrown in driveways, then there is the Peachtree Citizen (usually in the gutter), and the occasional Wall Street Journal. They are all bagged these days. [When I was a lad throwing papers from my bicycle at 5 a.m. we only bagged the papers when it rained. We were required to bag the papers when it was going to rain or it had just rained, and the bags cost the paper boys 1/2 a cent per bag. We made 1 cent for throwing a paper. So on rainey days we lost half our money. I had 100 papers, got up at 4:00 a.m. to throw them, waited at the drop in the cold and rain, had to go around to each house and collect the money for the papers (That was a great trick, the company sold the papers to the boys. We had to collect the bills. If someone wouldn't pay, which happened alot, the paper never lost money, the paper boys lost money. Cool huh?) and when it rained, we lost 50 cents of the dollar we could have made that day. But there were Sundays. On Sunday we made seven cents a paper. So in a good week I could make $13. I averaged about $40 a month for about 60 hours a month of work. But hey. I was rich. And in 13 months as a paperboy I saved $400. Tips. I forgot to add that some people gave tips for porching their paper every day, say an extra 15 cent a week. That was my mad money for icecream at lunch, or improvements on my bike. I had a second hand bike that had been hit by a car and the frame broken in two. But someone welded it back together and my dad bought if for me for $17. I got the paperboy baskets from the previous paperboy on my route for about $3. When I first started the route I was little that I had to load the papers into the bike with it standing up because I couldn't pick the bike up once it was loaded. I wobbled around the route with each toss threatening to knock me down. In fact when I did crash, I couldn't pick the bike back up again, so I'd stack the papers by the side of the road and go throw part of them and then ride back and pick up the rest. It was an adventure.] Back to today's papers. Who would know that the papers aren't news. Were they ever? Businessmen start papers and invest a lot of money to do so. The papers print the news that the businessmen want printed. It's no coincidence that the plastic bags used for the Wall Street Journal are Red. It is a red-state paper. And the Peachtree Citizen couldn't be any more of a rightwing conservative hack paper than it is. I refuse to look at it and view it as litter thrown in my yard each week. The AJC has some balance, but remember Georgia is a Red state. If the reporting were balanced, no one in Georgia would buy the AJC.