The other day, while using the internet, I saw this:

“Quick!  Name the last time you played hooky.  If you can’t remember, you’re probably overdue.”

Insert annoyed groaning sound here.  I can’t quickly remember the last time I played “hooky.”  Not from work, at least.  It may have been after “senior skip day” in high school and before I started working for a small Portland company in 1986.  As I think back, I’d date my “hooky” period to the four years of college; I was there on my own dime and none of my professors cared about my truancy.  Still, in dreams I often drift back to the University of Maine and find myself wandering around campus with a cup of coffee, wondering how I will complete a final exam for a class I’ve never attended.  Yet another one of those dreams where I wake up screaming.

The internet…a place of useless sentences leading to nothingness and hooky.  Technology writer Nicholas Carr speculated in a 2008 Atlantic essay that Google was making us stupid and when I find myself pondering the last time I played hooky, I can’t help wondering if he is on to something.

In other news, Donald Trump is coming to Lisbon tomorrow.  The location surprised me; I wonder how he and his entourage will travel to the spot.  Will they pilot Trump-force One into the former Brunswick Naval Air Station and travel by motorcade along Route 196?  That would be the route President Johnson took on Saturday, August 20, 1966 when he was touring the Northeast, peddling his “Great Society” domestic programs.  My father says we all went down to watch the motorcade go by.  According to newspaper reports, 12,000 people assembled around the Kennedy Park bandstand in Lewiston to listen to president’s speech.  Over fifty years ago, LBJ promised to eliminate poverty and racial injustice with the “Great Society” initiative.

As you watch and listen to the ads in the remaining days of this hideous horse race and hear the promises of improved this and better that, just remember there is nothing new under the sun.  Every politician makes glorious promises which never come true.

Every single one of them.

Here’s a snapshot of what a motorcade along Route 196 will pass.

I may be cynical, but I’m not playing hooky today.