If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening around you, perhaps you should start paying closer attention, because it’s happening.  It happening, your country is being overthrown and it isn’t going to stop happening until you’ve been completely overrun by a brutal and unaccountable corporatocracy without a face and a regenerative head.  As I stated before in a couple other posts, I grew up enjoying standup comedy with my father ever since I was a kid.  Rare were such moments when I would feel emotional about a famous person passing away, but I actually wept when George Carlin died.  I grew up listening to him, since the days when he was more of a wordsmith who would do wonderful routines about the English language, some of them were even moderately clean comedy routines.  Hit such as “Icebox Man” and “Fussy Eater”, from his album, A Place For My Stuff, were personal childhood favorites of mine.  But as he got older, he held back less and opened up more in ways that truly spoke the truth about American culture, our government, politics, and the true owners and controllers of our country.  Rather than getting into a big opine of him and trying to convince you how awesome he was, I’ll let him speak for himself and you can decide for yourself.

For more great George Carlin materials…

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It is now the my 20th day in Japan, and I just realized how remiss I have been in my blog-posting duties.  I told myself that I would be blogging more often, but so much had happened since I last posted that I feel there is a tremendous need to fully catch everyone up on what’s been going on since I last posted.  Firstly, let me apologize to those of you who’ve actually been reading my posts since I first started this blog.  To be more truthful, I started blogging long ago under Venomoftheday, but I’ve since made the mistake of attempting to add WooCommerce to my blog pages over and over again.  This mistake gave me the distinct pleasure of having the entire screen turn white and losing everything that I had previously posted.  Thus, I had to completely erase all of my previous work and start all over again.  This had happened with hotdogandbun.com/ericsandoval, hotdogandbun.com/venomoftheday, hotdogandbun.com/themanincorporated, and hotdogandbun.com/stuff, over the past few years.  I’d lost some of my best written material, yet I’m not a quitter, even if I admittedly am a slow mover.  I truly enjoy the written word, and though I tend to write more political and social commentary and criticism, my true passion is in fiction.  I’ve written four screenplays, developed a 13 episode series bible for a television drama about transnational criminal syndicates operating within the United States, produced around 20 stop-motion animations of which some are shared on this blog-zine, produced 2 live-action short films, and wrote a couple plays of which I have yet to get up on the stage.

But allow me to fill you in on what’s happened since I last posted.  Back in late August of 2018, my wife (whom I prefer to refer to as Mrs S.), and I received the news that her mother had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (A.L.S.), once commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.  However, since most people nowadays don’t even know who Lou Gehrig actually was, (American professional major league baseball player, nicknamed “the Iron Horse”, who played for the New York Yankees for his entire 17 season career with 6 World Series under his belt, made All Star 7 times in a row, Triple Crown winner once, American League MVP twice, hit 493 home runs, was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and was so chingon that he was the first baseball player to have his team number, #4 to be permanently retired when he retired from baseball), most people these days simply refer to it as A.L.S..  In fact, up until last year’s absurdly narcissistic social-medial self promoting Ice Bucket Challenge campaign on YouTube and Facebook, I only knew it as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, but I digress.  Once we’d received the news, my wife had to start making arrangements to return to Japan to settle affairs.

MORE TO COME…

Before the car accident which completely eviscerated my income altogether, leaving me with very little money, pretty much no money in fact, I had already started packing.  Mind you, with more than 40 free Home Depot boxes that I scored from a recently moved Angelino off a Craigslist post, I was tasked with packing up 15 years’ worth of me and Mrs S’s accumulated stuff.  Everything from clothes to books, oh my goodness there were so many books, to pots, pans, dishware, flatware, and a whole assortment of goods, items, musical instruments, completed paintings (more than 30, and more than half of them are big), and just about anything else you can think of, all had to be put into a 6.5′ x 16′ storage unit.

So, with no working visa, no bachelor’s degree to fall back on, I agreed to go to Japan, coming in and out back and forth from L.A., and toughing it out for the next two to three years.  Mrs S., came back for two weeks in January, whilst her mother was in a 2 week hospital observation period so that we could work on her paperwork with our Immigration Paralegal, and we traveled to Arizona to visit my father before I leave the USA for an indefinite period.  We’re currently working on a temporary spousal working visa, but not sure how that’s going to turn out, and that’s our situation thus far.  I have been here since February 1st, but I have to go back in March to be able to apply for another 90 days of my medication, which is a story for another post.  Mrs S will soon also have to return briefly the the United States for her biometrics.  On a brief side-note, I have to say that the United States government is being absolutely ridiculous in requiring her to perform a biometrics appointment simply because they already have her biometrics.  The United States government through the INS and DHS have had her fingerprints since 2004, and the last time I checked, not even deleted files are ever deleted.  Essentially, it’s just more bureaucratic nonsensical hoops to jump through so the government can make just a few extra bucks.  But I digress.  

With no income, a slightly injured back, and Lyft’s bullshit car insurance policy that eats the first $2,000 of any settlement, regardless of fault (some ignorant asshole Christmas shopping dickbag ran a red-light right in front of me), our car was settled out by Lyft’s revolting insurer at just over $6,000, $4,000’s worth went to paying the car off, leaving Mrs S., with a whopping $471.00 to spend on something nice. (sarcasm definitely intended).  We handled Mrs S’s green-card variation details whilst she was in town, knowing full well that within 3 months, we’d have to go backfor her biometrics.  But we got that ball rolling so she could go right back to Japan to get back to caring for her Mom, and I had to finish packing everything into storage and travel to Japan right after.  This all seemed to work out just fine, but we were called back to the USA to do her biometrics just 3 weeks after I had arrived to Japan.This threw a monkey into the wrench, because I had just received a 3 month supply of my medication (glatiramer acetate) and I knew that I’d have to not only wait for my medication but also for her re-entry authorization visa.

Now, for those of you out there wondering why my wife of 15 years isn’t a naturalized US Citizen, that would be because there is a house in question here in Japan, and why should she lose her inheritance just to be a US Citizen in a country that people lose everything just because someone in the family gets sick?  But I digress.  Point being, Japan does not recognize dual citizenship.  But there’s a lawsuit that we’re keeping a close eye on in hopes that this situation will change in the next decade, hopefully.

MORE TO COME…