Exhibition football.  The Chargers look great.  Easily converting third and long but why are they ashamed of the old uniforms?  The same with the Bills.  If it was good enough for Jack Kemp, Tom Sestak and Ernie Ladd then why not the modern game?

I now live on Delmarva.  The Eagles, Ravens and Redskins are the big teams.  The Eagles are well coached but just not my fancy, the Ravens remind me two wrongs with stolen franchises don’t make a right.  Lastly, Daniel Snyder.  Sorry, I won’t be switching allegiances.

Which follow:

1. Buffalo Bills.  Maybe even after the move to Toronto.

1. The Jags.  Tom Coughlin is a Western New Yorker and was the first coach of the Jaguars.  Now he coaches the Jerks in Jersey but the Jags still have lovely uniforms.  The old Browns were my number two.  Now they wear purple and some upstarts are called Browns.

1. The Saints.  They were a joke when I was a kid.  But they’re so much fun to watch.  If the defense could just match the offense.

1. The Cardinals outplayed the Steelers.  Fitzgerald is the best player in football and maybe even better than the legendary Jerry Rice.

1. The Chiefs.  Because I remember Lanier, Buchanan and Dawson.

1. The Packers.  Not for anything current.  It’s where Skoronski, Gregg, Thurston, Kramer and Ringo played.  Ringo was replaced by Bowman and Gillingham replaced Thurston. 

That’s it.  Tennessee belongs in Houston.  The ugly uniforms in Houston can go to Orlando or San Antonio or Los Angeles.  The Colts belong in Baltimore and if they were, maybe I’d have a new love in my life.  The Ravens can go to hell.  Where they can play Dallas every week. 

The Jets, Giants, Lions, Seahawks, Rams, Dolphins, Bears and Falcons would all make very good entries in the Big Twelve or Southeast Conference.  Teams not mentioned could be reassigned to a minor league.  Except for the Vikings.  They should be fun to watch.  And the Steelers, well, for overall excellence they get to wait until the playoffs for an opponent. 

AFC West?  What the heck is that?

Walt Simmons hasn’t changed much in 20 years.  He has a goatee with a few whiskers of gray.  He hasn’t gained a pound since college.  He turned his back on the rat race a long, long time ago and we all thought he’d gone off his rocker.  It all happened when he met the woman from Mexico.  She couldn’t go home.  She was a communist and feared for her life.  Walt married her, dressed as if he was playing the role of Gandhi.  The two waded into a river and said their vows.  Then Walt returned to his liquor store, somewhere near Winchester, Virginia.  Then the wife divorced Walt.  He sold the store and moved to New Mexico.  Then he vanished for two decades.

Back in ’98 Jim Wojnovich told me Walt was living on a mountaintop, growing peyote.  Then I lost track of Jim for a decade.  They were two of my three closest college friends.  About six months ago an alumni newsletter told me number three, Ed Steinberg, had died two years ago this month.  I likely would’ve seen an obituary in the Syracuse paper but I’d just started packing for Delaware.  I wrote Jim and shared the news.  Not long after that a handwritten letter arrived from Walt.  A few letters and calls were exchanged and then Walt mentioned he was going to be in Delaware for a weekend while making an eastern vacation swing.  Saw him briefly tonight and agreed to meet for breakfast tomorrow. 

I’ve grown old on the outside.  He hasn’t.  The peyote is apparently a tall tale.  Walt built a house on a mesa, a good 7,000 feet above sea level.  He has a farm and no debts.  He put up windmills and solar panels and told the electric company to take a hike.  He bought a satellite dish and watches football every autumn weekend.  Jim was going to join us but an uncle suddenly died and he has a big family to watch over.  Walt is disappointed he missed meeting my daughter a few days ago. 

We graduated college 25 years and 3 months ago and I really don’t spend much time thinking about those years but I enjoyed the time immensely and none of us had any respect for authority and convention.  It’s good my little girl isn’t around to hear the stories.  Like the night we were invited to a party at Carla Warne’s house.  She had steel blue eyes and I couldn’t stay away, that is until in the kitchen Walt and I met two young ladies in tight black T-shirts and we were off to some gin mill with them.  And from that point until 11:00 A.M. the next day I remember nothing.  Walt showed up at my door and his knocking woke me.  “Do you have any idea where we left my car?” he asked.  I didn’t have a clue.  It took us 3 hours to locate it on a narrow one way street.  The next week we saw the two women in a bar and when I asked the one with the thick red hair her name she got an angry look on her face and stalked off.  I’ve no clue as to why. 

We weren’t bad people but we were blunt.  The Phi Lambs tossed us out of a party one night when Jim was asked by a young lady about her dress and Jim told her the truth. 

We often found refuge in a gorge by a waterfall and with a handful of friends spent our down time there.  One night Dan Doland dropped by and suggested he knew a better spot.  Later a couple of carloads emptied at a stream with multiple short waterfalls.  We were wading with our pants rolled up when I stepped on some green slime and it moved.  Everyone was soaked but safe when we finally got to the bank and dry ground. 

It was the way we all dreamed about living our lives.  Then we got jobs and some of us got families and ten or 15 years ago we all judged Walt to be a mess.  Now he’s fine and maybe he found the answer to life.  He’s free. 

I was asked about next week’s Congressional visits and I wrote this as an answer:

We gather outside Castle’s office just before 9:30 as I gather parking is quite spread out.  I’m hopeful everyone will bring a greeting card for Castle (the same for Carper Tuesday and we’ll meet at The Circle).  We’re asking him to expand the town hall meetings with his employers.  We want more regular visits in Sussex and lower Kent Counties.  We don’t want to be screened before meetings and we don’t want our questions and comments filtered.  If we’ve a small group we all enter at once and deliver our cards.

If we have larger groups we go in with teams of two or three and deliver cards.

The way I see it, this is the polite but firm approach.  Spread the plan around.  If the upstate folks can’t make Dover or Georgetown, I urge they do the same in Wilmington.

Today I’m reading the post mortems about sports betting in Delaware.  It makes me believe the obituary is written a little too soon but there should be a warning here.  If government doesn’t get radically smaller its options at squeezing the people it serves will shrink inversely and ultimately the system will collapse. 

An editorial writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer today suggests the state of Pennsylvania place toll booths on Interstate 80.  Over the last two weeks I’ve driven that road, Interstate 81 and the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  Route 80 appears to be in the best shape.  Construction of Route 81 started some 50 years ago and continues to this day.  Tolls on the Turnpike are 30 percent higher since I last drove on it just after Easter.  Judging by the condition of the tunnel in the center of it the tolls aren’t being collected for road maintenance. 

This morning The Baltimore Sun tells me Governor O’Malley is going to furlough some state workers for up to 2 weeks.  For those of you scraping by from paycheck to paycheck this is news which must make you shudder.  This will of course back the frightened state workers into a corner and when O’Malley suggests higher taxes as an alternative he’ll have some scared but desperate and cornered allies in Annapolis. 

What strikes me as peculiar is if the state of Maryland is like most of its eastern counterparts there are scores of quasi-government “authorities” overseeing roads, bridges, dams, utilities, parks and stadiums.  These are staffed by the politically connected.  The connected show up once or twice a year for a board meeting, rubber stamp the agenda of whoever appointed them and, by the way, get a large check for applying the stamp.  Hence the constant need for higher tolls and taxes.

I’ve seen the figures, some eastern states have as many as 800 of these “authorities” in operation.  It takes a great many make-work offices to reward the men and women who finance campaigns and stage the fundraisers.  Then the Governor turns around and preys on state workers, who then wail they can’t make bricks without straw, and the voracious leader then turns on the population-at-large.  Come the next election round the Governor and his or her minions blame the long departed Bush administration in Washington. 

Is there a lesson for Delaware?  Let’s take California as the canary in the coal mine.  It’s where the rest of the remaining 49 may well be headed.  There are a dozen states with good fiscal management and courageous leaders where this may never play out.  Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania aren’t among the dozen and gambling is a gimmick.  The success is exaggerated and its costs buried, until the periodic tanking of the economy.  See Atlantic City. 

I’m already on the record as a sometimes gambler.  Every 15 years or so I walk into a casino and drop some nickels into a machine.  Then I eat and go home.  So I can’t condemn gamblers and folks with healthy appetites but no sane human being can look at gambling and believe it’s the shield protecting us from the unbridled growth of government.  The pickpockets work the floors of the gambling dens and the floors of Dover, Annapolis and Harrisburg, 

For Delaware readers. There will be an attempt for a spontaneous town hall meeting with U.S. Representative Michael N. Castle at his Dover office next week.

Monday, August 31 at 9:30 A.M. The address is 300 South New Street, Dover, DE.

If Mr. Castle isn’t available then I’ll be leaving a greeting card and invitation. I’ll be inviting media. Who’ll be joining me?

Vacation ends in sweltering lower Delaware.  Much of it was spent within 30 miles of home and some of it 360 miles from home.  My daughter says it’s strange I spent so much of it locally, but it wasn’t local for her and she was here much of the week.  She got two days in Ocean City and dinner at a restaurant featured in a Julia Roberts film.  Alaine liked the restaurant and offered she doesn’t understand the whole Julia Roberts’ thing. 

Thursday afternoon I took my daughter home.  She wanted to go to an art show Saturday.  I drove home myself today through the Pocono Mountains, then through Annapolis and across the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake.  In less than 24 hours I saw ocean, the Finger Lakes, an eastern mountain range and some miserable waits in traffic.  I often feel waiting in traffic is akin to my current life.  A holding pattern of sorts.  My two year lease on my home ends soon and I’ve no idea where next I’m going.  The redhead and I long ago talked about settling down but it hasn’t gone beyond words. 

A holding pattern sure beats being unemployed but it sure makes me also think I’m not living up to my potential. 

Thursday night I had a couple of free hours before bed and I wandered into Auburn, New York, where I grabbed a beer with a friend.  It was at a tavern I used to frequent 20 years ago and the only remarkable thing is I still recognized some folks at the bar.  Most of the people I called friends when I used to “hang” there long ago moved away.  Auburn isn’t just a city in distress it’s a city long ago collapsed.  A beautiful old bank building, which had been the centerpiece of the downtown, recently sold for 35-thousand dollars.  It’s several stories high and is filled with marble.  And it remains empty.  This is a long term pattern in the snowy counties of New York, the places north of Rockland. 

Main Street in my hometown died during the 1970s.  There was a brief revival in the middle 1980s and now it’s again moribund.  The world passed it by a quarter century ago, however.  The world passed by during the 1800s and it was only during World War Two and a few successive decades when opportunity came around once more.

The Delmarva Peninsula even missed much of that train but over the recent couple of decades the ocean, available land a lack of snow revved the local economy.  Things have quieted somewhat since I arrived two years ago.  Tuesday night after dinner we walked the lovely streets of Berlin, Maryland.  Two years ago the specialty shops were still all open and it was a vibrant place.  No wonder it made a great movie set.  Now many of the storefronts are empty.  Victims in an economy where antiques, art supplies and novelties are in lesser demand. 

It was broiling hot on those streets Tuesday.  It was cooler in Upstate New York and certainly more comfortable for walking.  And soon it’ll be winter.  I recognize the cycles but no parent of a child soon to be an adult can be comfortable with the future. 

Worrying, I’ve been told, is a sin.  Then if that’s the case I’m a terrible sinner.  I sin when I’m awake and I often sin when I dream.  This sinner suspects he’s far from being alone. 

I’m on vacation.  Tom Carper is apparently the same.  Or halfway there as his useless and stage managed town hall teleconference reveals.  I wrote his press assistant today and suggested the once proud aviator was cowering from constituents.  She then charged I was unprofessional.  I followed with this salvo, which as of this writing, is the last communication:

Unprofessional?  According to whom other than you?  I can clearly see what
the Senator is attempting.  A public servant is looking to channel public
input.  Likely for a predestined result?

He wanted the job.  Now he has it.  “If you can’t stand the heat then get
out of the kitchen”, as Mr. Truman said.

This is exactly what’s wrong in American government.  We’ve a House of
Lords instead of a Senate.

11 days ago I spoke at the Silent No More rally in Dover, where we saw no
Kaufmans, Carpers or Castles.  Twelve hundred constituents there and
essentially disenfranchised.  I suggested we take the town hall meetings
to the doors of our elected.  Their offices and even homes.  It brought a
massive cheer and many, many volunteers.  It appears this is what we need
be doing.

Tell the Senator to ready coffee for several hundred.

Sincerely,

Bill Colley

Some of us in Delaware, and I in person polled in excess of 1,000 Saturday, demand that our two U.S. Senators and at-large U.S. Representative, each hold town hall meetings in all of our state’s counties before the summer recess ends at Labor Day.  We urge you to write these men and outline the demands from the employers.  First, these meetings will take place in large venues.  Second, all questions are on the table.  Third, questions won’t be cherry picked but by lots.  Fourth, all ground rules will be designed from the consent of the governed. 

Flood the office of these men with letters and telephone calls.  If you live out of state I suggest you do the same.  If your representatives ignore the remonstrance then we’ll go, as employers, to their offices and even their homes.  We’ll follow them to ribbon cuttings and the beach.  I am so sick of the House of Lords attitudes being copped by these people. 

They can start by explaining who in Hades will pay for all their grand schemes.

U.S. Senator Thomas Carper

Wilmington
301 North Walnut Street
Suite 102L-1
Wilmington, DE 19801
Phone: (302) 573-6291
Fax: (302) 573-6434

U.S. Senator Ted Kaufman

Wilmington

1105 N. Market St.

Suite 2000

Wilmington, DE 19801-1233

tel: (302) 573-6345

fax: (302) 573-6351

U.S. Representative Michael N. Castle

Wilmington Office 201 N. Walnut Street, Suite 107
Wilmington, DE 19801-3970
p: 302.428.1902
f: 302.428.1950