Eighteen

I watched something on TV from Monday night. My notes were as follows:

Plaid Oxford buttoned all the way

Crew neck sweater

Jean jacket.

Not what’d work for me, but, yeah, you do whatever works for you.

What is something you want to do that you haven’t accomplished yet? 

How is this really different than the various bucket list challenges?

I used to want to live in one of the big cities, but I’m not sure I want that anymore.

New York? Yeah, I could actually go for that.

DC? Absolutely.

Now, however, no interest at all, really.

The politicians have completely killed any desire I might have had. Do I, once again, want to live in a city?

Nope.

Would I be okay living in the middle of nowhere assuming I could get okay connectivity?

Yep.

So News.

Looks like Lady G is in trouble for some of what he’s done with the election investigation.

Lindsey is pissed. This probably started around the time the Democrats filibustered Justice Gorsuch’s nomination. Then he really went off with the Kavanaugh hearings.

I don’t know whether he’s right on what he did with his call to the Georgia Secretary of State. It doesn’t look out-of-bounds, but he’s earned a permanent space on the left’s kill list. The only thing he can do, now, is come out, ala Kevin Spacey, as part of making the whole thing go away…..

I was listening to something this morning, however. If I understand correctly, Congress passed a three-year budget. What the….? But that’s why they’re doing things like talking about a forthcoming executive order cancelling student loan debt.

Jubilee for Arts Majors.

Or as something else I saw put it, welfare for rich people who went to expensive schools.

*shrug*

Today feels like it dragged on, even though I was busy.

Seventeen

Started writing early today because I woke up early.

Naturally this would be the day that my WaterPik quits working.

But at least something I can put on my Christmas list.

If you could have any career, what would it be? (Assume anything you choose, you are the best in the field).

I know I shouldn’t, but I’m really going to say, “I don’t know.”

I want to be in a situation where I can work as I feel up to it. My last gig came sorta close to that. I think we were expected to keep “core hours” sometimes, but a lot of the operation was more towards the West Coast; I could relax some.

That said, holidays there were one of the bigger down-sides. I would really like to ensure that I can eat Thanksgiving dinner, or watch a football game without disruption. I couldn’t necessarily do that there.

I would feel less bad about taking time off, though, knowing that there was someone around who could stamp out whatever fires might spring up.

I don’t know. I’m at a fork in the road, perhaps, professionally.

How long can I do what I’ve been doing?

I do know that I can’t do it in an office or datacenter anymore.

And that’s okay.

But there’s an option I have with my current situation that’ll pay me enough to live off of for a long time. Maybe I shouldn’t think as much about doing that as I do, but, well….

News.

I stumbled across a story about what’s going on on Armenia on Parler. The stuff going on over with Armenia and Azerbaijan. Wow. In a story I saw on another site, there was something about people setting their houses on fire to keep the invaders from taking their stuff. I think this has many of the same details.

Protecting property is something government is supposed to do.

In this case, absent government protection, people are torching it to prevent invaders from getting it.

People value their own shit. This should not be a surprise to anyone.

And, no, you can’t have a pony. Not yours.

And people might be willing to destroy their own stuff just to prevent you from having it.

Is that so difficult to understand?

Sixteen

Writing early again today, as I had a doctor’s appointment over videoconference.

This Telehealth stuff is really a game-changer. The particular doctor I saw this morning can get the clinical data he needs from a sensor, and I don’t have to actually go in to an office.

Even if I lived close to his office, that’d be something like two hours of missed work time. Given than his office is probably a good 30 minutes away, now, I’d be looking at an extra two hours for travel.

I’m wondering, too, what it’s going to do to doctors’ office space requirements. How much is a practice paying just for office waiting areas?

But, because I’m in my appointment window, I can write.

If you could have any career, what would it be? (Assume anything you choose, you are the best in the field)

I think I’d want to write. I can’t see very well. I can’t be on my feet very long. I can’t speak that well anymore. I can still write, sorta.

I’ve been trying to decide how I could do something. Everybody and his brother has a podcast now. I have a blog. Yes, like all of them, it sucks. Could I do something where I take the one biggest story I see for the day, and offer a bit of my take on it? Would anyone care? Probably not.

News for today…..Moderna is all like, I’ll see your 90% effectiveness on a COVID vaccine, and raise you 4.5%.

I do need to find some more analysis of what they’ve done with these vaccines. It sounds like they’re really a departure from what had been done for years.

It’s no longer finding a similar less problematic virus, or giving dead or live viruses to build immune response.

These use RNA that build immunity without using the actual virus, or something similar.

Medical science is advancing. But, if only Donald Trump had acted sooner, we’d have less of the sort of thing we were accustomed to, and maybe they’d sort of work.

I really hope that Biden is the least powerful president we’ve had since before the Great Depression.

Fifteen

Something I meant to write about during yesterday’s entry….

Discussion with one of my best friends about use of the restaurant delivery apps.

Yes, the restaurant delivery services sorta fuck restaurants. 
BUT
Isn’t the restaurant agreeing to those terms by offering its food there?
They can choose to not participate if they don’t like the terms….
Yeah, it’d be better to find some way to spare the restaurant that cost, but they agreed to it. 

I’m really not sure what to think or say about it. These costs aren’t implemented by force; the restaurants agree to pay them to sell that way.

On the other side, governments are placing arbitrary limits on what these companies can charge.

If the restaurants lobbied for those caps, they’re the ones violating the nonaggression principle.

He did finally get back to me, and said that it’s kind of a one-way transaction. The delivery services set up services for a restaurant whether or not the restaurant had sought, or agreed to, the plan participation.

Then there’s little that can be done for dispute resolution, because of the credit card companies involved.

I haven’t been paying all that close attention to what the CC companies are doing. I had kind of barely kept track, after hearing what they were doing to the evil gun companies, but really wasn’t tracking all that closely.

In a society that’s practically cashless now, it disturbs me that companies can just refuse service to other companies based on whatever whim they’ve chosen.

Imagine, if you will, a situation where people convicted of crimes weren’t allowed to even have cash…..?

Halfway finished. What’s gone right, what could be better?

I don’t know. I’ve been pretty good about making sure that things get done. I’ve probably short-armed a few entries, sure, but I have written a few things about which I can be proud.

Obviously my scarred brain has been working overtime.

I worry about things that may not affect me that directly, while failing to notice other things.

The MTA on ^H was down for just over two weeks. Oops.

Not that anybody is reading or commuting here, anyway.

But I’m going to be on the downslope of the month, so there’s that.

In previous periods, I would have been very relieved that I was more than halfway through. Now, however, it’s just another thing that I need to do for….

Lockdown world. Nothing to look forward to. Things happen, but nothing memorable.

Fourteen

I know I’ve written about this one before, but I’m going to recycle it.

Book that left a lasting impression. Why?

I was a bit concerned I wouldn’t get through this audiobook before I was set to write on this prompt today.

I finished listening to it yesterday.

The book? How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World.

I’d decided I wanted to read it again, for the first time since probably 1999, as Jo Jorgensen was running for President.

As I said, I voted for Dr. J. this year, despite some very deep reservations about her campaign team ran the campaign.

I handed out Harry Browne campaign literature on campus in 2000. Dr. J. had been his running mate in 1996, but had kind of fallen off the LP screen. She was off in South Carolina teaching psychology.

I had, myself, fallen away from the party after 9/11 happened in my next-to-last semester in college. I’d voted specifically against John McCain, and for George W. Bush, in Virginia’s open primary in 2000, and voted for Harry Browne in the general election.

If you live in a locality that’s been controlled by the Democrats since the Union occupiers moved out in 1876, you normally need to vote in the Democratic primary just so you can have any bit of a vote for some of the local office.

That’s kind of where I was when I lived in Norfolk. Living here in Alexandria, it’s the same sort of thing.

These localities haven’t had an elected Republican in more than a centaury. If you cared about seeing your local sheriff replaced, you had to vote in the Democratic primary.

How I Found Freedom is really not a political book, but it does describe some of the things that really flavor my politics.

Nobody rules you but you.

When I moved up here, I was actually using one of the tactics straight from that book, a book I hadn’t read in twenty years.

Get to zero, then build the life you want starting from zero. I was actually picking through some of my writings from probably 2015 until early this year, really, which was the idea of Get To Zero.

No debt. Few, if any, commitments that would keep me from being free do to what I want to do.

Dr. Jorgensen’s campaign was actually a decent re-statement of what Harry Browne ran on in 1996 and 2000. She’s been on campus, isolated from the world, and some of the things her campaign did this year really show that.

As for other things the book teaches, I wonder how much of it overcome by history. In the world of COVID-19 lockdowns, is there really anywhere where you can go to live the life you might want to live?

I don’t know.

So. News.

There’s this on what Justice Alito said about the lockdowns. I’m actually listening to this at the same time.

The chances of me getting COVID-19 are near zero. The chances of me dying from it are smaller, still.

Is there anywhere where I can still be free?

I really don’t know.

Thirteen

Writing early today, as I’m trying to not give free hours to my employer. So, more emptying out the drafts folder.

This is something I wrote during the summer writing period. I quoted what I my first writing bit when I started writing on OD in 1999. So, as you’re seeing too far on social media, How It Started

This was from when I started writing in earnest in 1999.


Aspiring to the Weekly World News – 7/23/1999

Let me bring you up to speed…..

Occupation:

I work full time, and go to college full time. I also spend lots of time on the road, because I’m still living with my parents in BFE.

Family:

Parents are okay….brother is a stoner.

Love life:

Pretty slow through high school….two girlfriends as a freshman, two as a sophomore. I wasn’t looking for anyone as a junior or senior, but a girl kind of shoved her tounge down my throat, and I went along with it. I didn’t leave for college like I planned–we dated until last October. It’s been a really nasty breakup. Since we split, she’s banged two of my friends. She’s now living with one of them…..needless to say, I haven’t spoken to them much. There’s now somebody who I’m sweet on…..I’m not sure if she’s quite figured it out yet. I’m trying to figure out how to proceed. It’s a bit of a weird situation for me, because everything is rather wholesome.


So this would have been roughly five years after I’d sworn off writing. In the high school I attended as a sophomore, during the six-week grading period, (yes, that’s how they did things there…) you could earn an extra credit grade that’d replace the lowest test grade you got in my Honors English class. I think we had to write two entriesS per week over the six-week period. They weren’t anything terribly difficult. I was a fifteen year-old kid locked in “Smruf Village” at Carlisle Barracks. I’d given up on my dream of playing football. The Pennsylvania kids were bigger than I was. I made up for the size difference by being slower. It didn’t work well.

But back to the writing, I was the only kid in my class who tried to ado the extra credit assignment. Naturally, the teacher read everything I wrote.

And was concerned.

I don’t think I wrote anything that was really too far out-of-bounds for a fifteen year-old boy whose body is going nuts in all sorts of ways, but she disagreed. Down to meet with the guidance counselor, who spoke to me, and was less concerned.

This would have been the fall after Kurt Cobain had killed himself, so worry was probably top of mind for high school teaching staffs.

After all that craziness, however, I swore off writing until 1999, when a friend showed me The Open Diary. Though they took a couple years’ hiatus, I’ve not left.

Many of my entries are for my own consumption. I hid many around the time I left radio.

But what’s there is a lot about some of the early days of my relationship with my wife. I’m also seeing things that were probably early MS exacerbations.


So, how’s it going?

I don’t know. You tell me. My writing stretches are a manifestation of Pure O.

Ruminations.

Writing is a strange one, certainly.

That said, it was something I could do without much real screen interaction. When I was in radio, often in the middle of the night, I’d sit back in the darkened studio, close my eyes, and type.

Sometimes it turns out better than other times.

OD was the place I primarily wrote back then.

Twelve

Not a lot to say, really. More recycling from things that were in the Drafts category, but I’d never posted…


I accidentally had a second prompt for my trip to Georgetown.

That happened, and I described a bit of it yetsterday.

Takeaways I didn’t cover yesterday:

With those out of the way, what else do I have to say….?

I’m trying to keep an open mind about the electoral results. This, really, could be real change in Washington. Notsomuch due to the Trump surrogates’ bigotry, but because at least it’s a completely new crowd.

Regardless of what happens, it’s not going to be an administration full of recycled Ford and Clinton folks (which is what we saw with the last two administrations). If an opportunity presented itself to get me to DC to work in the Administration, I don’t know that I’d turn it down. (Though they probably would want nothing to do with me after I didn’t vote for them…..)


I guess I wrote this coming into a recent administration transition.

I didn’t like the Trump Administration, but how much of it is going to stick, really.

I think if he just declassifies a bunch of stuff on his way out, along with pardons of some hated people from the past *cough*Snowden*cough*Flynn*cough*Assange*cough*Ulbrecht*cough*

It’s pretty incredible how much I’ve “come home,” as it were, on many things.

The entire world was lied to.

I, personally, was opposed to Iraq II until I heard Tony Blair pitch it to Parliament.

But a lot of what was given as intelligence wasn’t true.

So. News from today.

AOC wants a “truth and reconciliation” commission to deal with Trump supporters.

I guess she missed the lectures about this in school. Hell, was she even alive when Tiananmen Square?

Or is it a new House Un-American Activities Committee?

Things that don’t fit in with the artfully-crafted narrative.

Twenty-four

i was going to go through and finish something I’d started a couple of years ago, but never got around to finishing.

My brain is still swimming around with to do with this next project.

I think I might try to write an record an ep this weekend to see how it goes.

I’m listening to Adam Carolla talk about family Thanksgiving.

As a kid, we were overseas so often I only got a couple of those. The last one I really have memories of was riding down I-95 next to a very excited Golden Retriever puppy who would get carsick.

This.

Yeah, there’s not much I can identify with that.

We were so spread out across the world that it didn’t happen all that often.

There were a few times where we went to the mess hall so my dad could eat with the people he was commanding.

There was often one or more bachelor officers and soldiers who were invited guests to eat with us.

Nobody would have ever even considered bitching about the Mac & Cheese.

I just realized that maybe part of the reason I’m partial to the Lions’ game is because it was playing in the evening in Germany.

But I think the idea of traditional Thanksgiving might be part of what’s got me on the try-all-the-things-people-used-to-rave-about kick.

I realized a few months ago that I’d never actually had Maxwell House coffee.

Part of that could have been the period where I got out of drinking coffee for a while, but my parents were always Folger’s people….until there were other things coming in at the Commissary, and they got a Braun coffee grinder.

My mom, on one of her antique store trips, found a cookbook from the White House. The calculations take a lot of time to cut the recipes down to a consumable size, but these things were saved for a reason — by and large, they were really fucking good!

These things take time to prepare, but I think the payoff is worth it.

I would like to do some things, myself, but it’s not an issue I’m excited to debate.

I’ve written enough, now, I think. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

Almost finished.

Eleven

Veterans’ Day

Thankfully, there’s been very little coming into today about remember-the-fallen heading into today. Veterans’ Day is for everybody who served. Memorial Day is for those who died in service of the country.

Michael Malice had a tweet about how all of the World War I veterans in Pennsylvania were voting for Biden to protest the president’s purported comments about the World War I veterans.

(For those scratching their heads, the last US WWI vet died in something like 2011, and the last one in the entire world a couple of years later….so dead people voting for Biden.)

I guess the big takeaway I have is that since 2001, it’s been a state of constant war. The troops never really come home these days.

You get into the discussions of whether that’s intentional; I don’t know. I do know that when my dad was deployed (Army 73-97), it wasn’t any of these situations where you have endless rotating deployments.

Bring them home. Now.

There’s nothing more that will be accomplished.

Bring them home. Now.

So. News. One of the big stories, locally, has been about this former bishop/cardinal/whatever.

What he’s purported to have done sounds horrible. The Church didn’t do the right thing in covering it up. For the allegations that occurred on Church property, the Church’s law reigns. For things that happened in place’s under another jurisdiction’s control, the Church should have eagerly aided in extradition/prosecution.

It’s not that difficult to figure out.

I do hold colleges and universities to a different standard, however. With the exception of completely privately-held schools, they are subject to the jurisdiction of wherever their campus is.

If someone is raped in a dormresidence hall (my indoctrination at my alma mater is still fresh, more than two decades later) , the local authorities should investigate (and prosecute) whatever crimes occurred. This doesn’t fall to the star chamber of a university judicial system, no matter what the US Department of Education says.

I’m stopping there. Bring the troops home. Now.

Ten

I’m writing in the middle of the morning while waiting on my doctor for a Telehealth appointment.

I had a periodic MRI a few weeks ago after my last Tysabri infusion.

Looking at my results, I don’t think there was anything remarkable; I’m not having an exacerbation.

But you’d think that on a telemedicine appointment there’d be fewer times when you’d be twiddling your thumbs waiting on your appointment to start.

It’s fine, though. I don’t have any work appointments today, so, whatever.

I didn’t have a prompt ready for today, either. I really don’t know how I missed the first week of the month. I do have most of the month covered, but this one is missing.

So, another prompt from my collection……

How do you feel about the political climate of the country?

It’s horrible. It appears that Biden was elected, but that’s not going to fix anything.

Obviously, I’ve written quite a bit already about things over the past week.

In my session with my psychologist yesterday, I was focusing more on my whole thing with what is the function of government; why do we have it if it’s not doing the things it was established to do?

I’m also still listening to Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World.

In addition to some very 70s ideas on intimate relationships, there’s this sense that you can choose to just not participate in things that negatively affect your freedom.

I’m not sure you can do that anymore.

I’m also disagreeing strongly with the ideas on marriage. Maybe it’s something where you presume equality between partners at the start of the relationship.

My wife and I built our financial situation together. There’s been points in our marriage where we weren’t at all on financial parity. Okay. That happens. We made a commitment to each other, and that works for us.

Maybe I write some more later, but I think I’m finished for now. Back to work.