NoJoMo 8

 Today I heard the news on the radio repeat the story several times of a big bust involving a child sex trafficking ring. I have to admit that I have usually dismissed the stories of human trafficking as coming from the too fevered imaginations of some very paranoid people. I have a customer who claims that he knows of a shop in our little town where women are forced into the sex trade. I have no way of knowing if he is right about this or not. So today, I hear on the news that they have rounded up a some criminals…..on further goggling of the story I see it is the same story I heard several years ago. It was a raid that found 27 illegally smuggled Mexican women who were forced into prostitution. It is back in the news today because the two agents responsible are being honored and the two men caught were found guilty.

The story again makes me furious that someone could do this. The worst of it is that they were mostly minor girls. I find it repulsive that anyone would want to have sex with a child. Repulsive. I guess I am the last person on Earth to know anything about porn or porn addictions. Having seen what extramarital sex did to others’ marriages I decided long ago it was not for me. Didn’t I have enough bad habits with smoking and nail-biting when I was a teen? Why try for sex too?

I reported to the city of Decatur today that there is a hole in the ground under a sidewalk at an abandoned house. I don’t know where the hole came from but it is big enough to hold two three pianos and the sidewalk looks like it could collapse when someone walks by. I don’t know if rain, storm drains, or the prolific local population of ground hogs is responsible for the hole, but I hope the city fills it in.

When I was little we had a Mexican family, the Martinez’s living across the street. I recall being forever angry because they would not let both of us twins play with Marcus at the same time. Every time I went over there they asked me, “Are you the good one or the bad one.” I always wondered what Ted had done to make them mad, but I just said I was the good one and played with Marcus, their grandson. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. When I was at college, I studied international cultures and customs and found out what this was all about. Like many cultures, Mexican’s have the superstition that twins always have one bad and one good character in the pair. I suppose there is some social use to this. It may, for example keep people from expecting twins to act too much alike. I have a twin book upstairs that lists some 80 twins with pictures and their twin stories. One that is rather disquieting is about a pair of women who were up in their 70s when the book was written. They had lived together all their lives and took pains to each eat exactly the same foods and amounts of foods every day. That seems creepy. Too much is just too much.

In any case, I found out in college that Mrs. Martinez statement probably meant nothing more than my Mother’s nightly admonition “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” Of course, this was long before the current hysteria over bedbugs in hotels. What a worked up bit of idiocy that has been over the last month. The things people stir up to no purpose! I just wonder how news stories get started, grow, and go.

Glenn Beck really got into old children’s fairy stories today. He made a big point of how we have cleaned up the original Grimm’s and other tales to make them less scary. As a result we may be missing some essential lessons they once taught.

My phone is such a piece of junk. Battery is always dead. I can’t get a signal sometimes sitting right here in my living room in the middle of town. I miss calls all the time. You can’t shut the ringer off silently, it always makes this huge ringing sound when you adjust the volume. What idiot made this piece of absolute junk! LG. The function menus are impossibly inefficient.

Our side door is in clean, solid, and neat. This guy DOES know just what he is doing. We’ve had a great year for house fix ups.