^H

I started writing this years ago, and it was sitting in my drafts folder.

I’m not sure if I posted what I wrote then, but I’ll repost it now, and redo the prompt today.

What job would you never take?
Another with the four-letter company where I worked.  What a disaster.
Backstory this criminal recommended me following a contract changeover. I’d butted heads with him several times, trying to get him to provide some justification for whatever hairbrained drop-in solution the vendor who’d picked up his bar tab was hocking….
And, so I took the job. For 77% of what i’d been earning.
But the overall experience was bad. The shitty compensation only exacerbated things. Because I wasn’t in a sunny mood all the time, and continued to call people on their bullshit….. I’m going to stop there, because it’s not all that interesting. (And I had to just delete more snark about it….)
So, that’s an easy answer to that question.
I had a dream last night I was back in radio. Who the hell knows where that came from. I really am not in shape to be doing air work, would have trouble doing some of the techie work, and would never do sales….I don’t know.
Writing early in the morning today because I woke up way early. I’m still in pain. Pfft.
So, what to write about tomorrow? Hmmmm….
The Hall of Fame game got cancelled because the logo painted on the field made the surface too hard to play on. I’m looking forward to Hard Knocks. Have you ever been to see an NFL training camp? One of my three high schools was in Carlisle, PA, which is home to Dickinson College, where the Redskins trained for years.
After the tumult following Jack Kent Cooke’s death, The Dan saw that Norval moved camp back to Virginia, after a couple of years in Maryland (Frostburg?). Either Schottenheimer or Spurrier decided it needed to head back to Carlisle.
I had a Tuesday off, and decided to head up to see camp. Going to go through my old OD archive to see if I can find what I wrote then, and whatever else I can add.

Onto today….

What job would you never take?

We’re still in post-election reax mode, and that might be affecting my answer here.

Don’t ever settle for something that’s beneath your skills.

I really view what happened to me at the four-letter company is me giving 150% effort for 80% pay. Yes, I had an attitude problem. Yes, I was abusing myself with too much alcohol. Yes, my body was going absolutely nuts.

But I shouldn’t have ever done something in my career field for that little money.

I could have made similar money doing something unrelated, and not gotten the abuse I incurred.

But I did what I had to do to take care of my wife and myself.

I can still think. I can still type. I may not be able to see worth a damn, but there’s lots of stuff I could be doing for a similar pittance.

So. News.

I heard something on one of my many podcsts about these folks. (Apologies for audio coming out of link…..)

The pod I was consuming was talking about them being a cult, just like the People’s Temple in Guyana.

I wonder how you get taken away in those things.

You can leave.

Yep. Yes you can. If you really can’t, and this sounds like one of those rare situations, that’s where it’s legitimate for the state to get involved.

Those rights the government is supposed to not deprive, and defend, are life, liberty, and property.

Yes, the prohibition is on the state abridging those, but you can’t transfer the power to someone else to take them, either.

You can’t give someone authorization to kill you.

You can’t give someone the power to imprison you.

You can’t give someone the power to take all your shit.

Does that make me a minarchist? Perhaps.

This is something I’ve had sitting in my drafts I’m folder for who knows how long, but maybe now’s the time to use it as a prompt.

Do you ever feel conflicted when someone you admire comes under controversy?

I’ve been trying to think about this one since I re-read it earlier this morning.

I think, probably, many of the early ones were surrounding celebs getting busted for drugs. I seem to have memories of a deejay quipping about David Lee Roth getting busted with some product out of Panama.

Hmmm….? Wonder what that was?

Growing up during the Nancy Reagan All-drugs-are-bad-mmmkay? era definitely affected my thinking about those sorts of things.

How could that baseball pitcher have been effective when he was doing so much Coke?

See what happened to Len Bias? He did die after smoking crack, and, you know, that often happens the first time you smoke it.

If you have unprotected sex, it’s less about whether young girl pregnant, you will catch teh AIDS, and DIE.

I miss Magic Johnson. Such a tragedy.

Oh. Wait.

How did Bill Clinton not catch anything?

I wonder if that sort of thinking partially explains some of the Wear a damn mask rhetoric.

If you don’t wear a mask, you will catch COVID, and die.

If you had extra-marital sex without a condom in the 80s, or 90s, you would catch AIDS and die.

Yeah, about that….

I was really concerned, even, when Coach [READACTED{ came in to health class, and told us the he was tired of seeing Americans puking all over downtown Heidelberg, so he was going to teach us how to drink (and not get obliterated).

Happy birthday, too, to my brother. I think he would have been too young to deal with the DARE and AIDS-era sex ed.

News. I’ve been kind of tracking this after I saw it somewhere else early this morning.

I am very upset that Rep. CIA is going back to the House. You would think the true-blue leftists might have a moment’s pause about a Senate seat likely being stolen from a successful black guy. *crickets*

Yeah. He’s playing for the wrong team.

All that said, the full stupid seems to have stopped.

Why come the “FOF’s” support growing among minorities? That’s just, well, unpossible!!1! (And, again, I voted for Dr. Jorgensen….)

How did Susan Collins win so big when she was totally supposed to lose? They spent a ton of money in South Carolina, and Lady G still won?

But, at least, it doesn’t look like any of the stupid stuff will happen.

So I can relax a bit.

Yeah, I know, good luck with that.

Election Day reactions (if we know the winner….) Other things in the week, relatives’ birthdays.

I decided on Monday 26 October that I was going to vote for Dr. Jorgensen.

Every candidate I supported lost. I kind of expected that going in.

A “winner” in the Presidential contest really still hasn’t been named as I write this after 1500 the day after the election.

Am I suprised? A little. Am I upset? No. It doesn’t look like the Democrats will be able to go full-on stupid. Yes, there’ll probably be a different party in the White House. There may be a new Senate Majority Leader.

But I think some of the more off-the-wall ideas that were coming out over the weeks leading up to the election may have died the death they so desperately deserve.

There will still be a filibuster rule in the Senate. DC and Puerto Rico won’t be states.

The economy will probably collapse once the Federal Reserve can’t create digits (not print money….that’s so antiquated!!1!), but things will survive. I wasn’t so sure about that with the potential of folks like Chuck Schumer acting with reckless abandon.

You will still have the right to private property.

You will still have the right to speak. Maybe not online, but, whatever. TCP/IP isn’t something the government can shut completely. No matter who tries.

I have little doubt that if I had the misfortune of being in Best Korea, I’d figure out how to get a VPN connection through to Switzerland.

It’s akin to the stupidity of government backdoors to encryption. You can mandate it, but, short of killing people, you can’t enforce it; it’s math.

Election Day.

Another election that’s the most important in my adult life.

I sent off my absentee ballot last week. When I came up with the prompt, I was still kind of thinking I’d go over to the poll in person.

But it really doesn’t matter, now, in Virginia.

The prompt for reax, and more description is tomorrow’s prompt.

Part of my strange interest lately has been related to oppressive governments.

I think I’ve written before that Montgomery County, Maryland, is really reminding me a lot of East Germany.

I’ve also been reading things about the South American juntas of the 70s and 80s.

Are we headed to those sorts of states in the US>

I worry.

COVID

As we approach the most important election in anyone’s lifetime, this infrequently-deadly virus is the biggest concern. See what I put out yesterday about Australia

Obviously, as someone on a very strong immunosuppressant, I do have to be concerned about the virus. At the same time, I worry about the creeping totalitarianism to combat the virus. I can stay inside, work remotely. Many folks can’t.

I’ve been assembling this as i watch football on Sunday. Fox had this impassioned plea about voting.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”

With the measures taken to prevent the spread of COVID, there is no government protection of liberty.

But don’t you care about other people?

Fuck, yes, I do, which is why I’m willing as someone with medical problems to keep myself isolated.

The pursuit of happiness section is further clarified by the Bill of Rights, and, since I live in Virginia, the declaration of rights that went into the Virginia Constitution.

Government, even one in which you had a small part creating, doesn’t protect either your property; taxation is theft. It doesn’t protect your liberty.

When does it stop protecting your life?

…

As I pick up the draft today on Monday, I’m wondering if this is part of what’s affecting my drams. Had some very odd ones again last night, then woke up worrying about things like DINA, and East Germany.

For whatever reason, I really worry that those sorts of authoritarian societies are what people are seeking today.

Some of the conversation I had with my oldest friend yesterday over Jitsi was about whether in the age of COVID, it there’s any place in the entire world where you can go to get away from the nervous Nellies worried about whether you’re wearing a damn mask.

I don’t know.

I really don’t want to live in East Germany even if Frau Merkel said you could almost be happy living there..

I want to be free. Maybe that will cut a couple of years off of my life, but would those extra two years be ones I’d enjoy.

Maybe it makes me a bad person about thinking about suck things.

Writing about doing NoJoMo again, more.

I’ve written every day in November starting in 2010.

It was a thing that was going around on OD before it went MIA for awhile. The first time I did it, I’d just married my wife the month before.

Yes, she’s still my wife, despite my unintentional attempts to make her leave.

A week after my final entry during that month of writing, my dad died.

On OD, there were normally prompts provided. I used those sometimes, and free-wrote other time. If you look at some of the archives, I think I have most of what I’ve written.

There’s so many things that have happened over the past decade.

I’ve tried to stay writing. My psychologist says that it’s a compulsion. She’s probably right about that. I’d developed a lot of “ruminations” to address what’s been going on with my psychically since I first started having MS symptoms. Writing isn’t one fo them, specifically, but it’s something I can do without needing to see what I’m doing, necessarily.

Really, though, for the November writing, it provides me an opportunity to reflect on what’s happened, and prepare for the holidays.

This year, of course, portends to be incredibly strange.

But there’ll still be Lions and Cowboys football on TV.

And I’ll still write; it’s what I do.

This past summer, in another of my writing fits, I was taking a quick glance at the news, then writing my reaction to it.

I’m probably going to do that some more this month.

Things could be absolutely fucking nuts.

The Aussies are warning their citizens about traveling here.

With heroes like Herr Fritzl, maybe that’s a good thing.

(If that meme doesn’t get you, this might…..)

I’ve been trying to stay a bit optimistic about what’s going to happen, but I am worried.

I have a prompt for later about a book that’s had a great effect on my life. Since I’d been too lazy to figure out how to cancel my Audible subscription, I’ve been listening to it again.

I hope I’ll be able to finish before I’m supposed to write about it.

So here we go. Another year, more writing.