Twenty-six

I sleep a lot better when I have the bed adjusted correctly. Still some up-and-down, but, for the most part, I actually slept pretty well last night in who knows how long.

The news, again, is about what’s going on in the Pacific Norhtwest.

Someone released a photo of this peaceful protester who’d been hit right in the middle of his forehead with a crowd control round. Probably won’t be any long-term damage from the shot, itself, but they were worried about brain trauma.

Maybe it’s the scarred brain of mine that made me reason — who’s to say that the brain on this one wasn’t traumatically-injured before the Feds shot him between the eyes with a rubber bullet.

So no link to a current news story this morning. What more is there to say, really?

When I sat down at the computer this morning, I had this open.

COVID’s gong to cover all the sins of the whole Russia thing. Ho-hum.

And there’s where my brain goes to the well-they’re-gonna-shoot-me-as-an-undesirable-anyway-so-I-hope-it’s-recorded. I care, but at the same time, I don’t, and this part of why I’m getting professional help. I have these urges to do things I know are dangerous, but I want to do them anyway.

It also kindasorta explains my urges just to go somewhere else. Seeing the video of the things with the hurricane hitting the Texas Gulf Coast yesterday, along with Joe Rogan saying he was ditching Cali for Texas, had me looking at things down there. Could I be happy there? Maybe. Could I live comfortably just on the income I expect to have? Yes. Do I want to live in Lake Jackson, a.k.a. Ron Paul Land?

Hmm.

I don’t think my wife would be at all interested.

On to picking through my past. Going to re-take a survey from 2000. The original author’s name has been removed. Obviously, no idea what happened to him, now, twenty years later.

  1. If you could pick one book that was required reading for the entire world, what would it be and what age group would you have read it?

I think I said something like Atlas Shrugged in 2000. Today, however, I don’t have an answer. I really don’t like trying to compel people to take in things against their will.

If there was something for me that was required reading, I’d probably make it a point to not read it.

  1. Have you ever invented anything?

I don’t know. There’s probably scripts I wrote a long time ago that are still in use some places; is that invention?

  1. What is the first site you visit when you connect to world wide web (after checking your mail and Opendiary, of course)?

Heh. A real 2000 question right there. With everything on the phone these days, there’s really no turning it all off.

I’ve been told I should I should try doing that, but I don’t really want to.

  1. What nicknames do you have that you often go by?

I don’t have one these days. I go by “hurdboy” on some social sites….Fark, Gab, etc..

  1. What are your top 5 favorite songs from the Sound of Music, 1 being the favorite and 5 being the least?

I don’t know that I could name five today, so I can’t do this one.

  1. Name one cool thing you can do with your genitalia.

Um.

This made me think of The Rifleman’s Creed.

  1. Name one thing that you could be doing in your life right now that is more productive than filling out a stupid survey.

It’s Sunday morning. What the hell else could I be doing, really? I already restarted a thing on work equipment after seeing an alert when I first woke up today.

  1. What is the greatest late charge fee you’ve ever had at Blockbuster?

This is what comes to mind.

My wife and I have discussed various “Randy Marsh Moments” probably more than most people.

  1. What is the best Father’s Day gift you’ve ever given your dad?

Damnit.

We’re getting close to the ten-year mark since he’s been gone.

I think my brother and I went in together to get him Yankees’ tickets at the old Yankee Stadium. He and my mom went up, and ended up watching the game with his Army buddy, who wore his “Muck The Fets” t-shirt. (They were young Infantry officers together in the 2nd Armored Division just as Vietnam was coming to an end, and were friends until my dad died.)

  1. If you were to ever open a restaurant that wasn’t a chain, what would you name it?

When I answered this back then, my answer was “Le Merde.” I think that should have been “Les Merde.”

I don’t speak French; maybe I should learn. But I think there’s other languages that might be more useful. My wife has been interested, lately, in German. Meinen Deutsch ist sehr schlecht, aber besser ist wann Ich bin zu viel getronken.

Half-drunk German from high school probably isn’t of much use, honestly.

French seems nearly useless.

German would be easy, but I don’t know that I’d have much use for it anymore.

Knowledge of both German and English does help you be able to almost read Dutch (or Flemish….Stupid Flanders.).

I am still fascinated by Portuguese. Again, however, I get put off by the usefulness of it; when am I going to go to Brazil?

  1. If you could throw a dinner party and have one dead person and one person from today come to it and meet, who would you choose?

And we go back to Question #9. Maybe Governor Hoodor Blackface will have loosened things up enough so that I can go see him on the tenth anniversary of his death in December. Guess we’ll see.

  1. Have you ever gone skinny-dipping (do not answer this question if you’re ugly because then you’ll just put gross images in people’s heads)?

I’m ugly, but I’ll answer anyway. Yes.

  1. Do you remember the candy “Bonkers”?

Only vaguely.

  1. In your opinion, who is the most underrated actress in Hollywood, and how would you like to have her positioned for the first time you fuck her?

I don’t really know. I watch so little these days.

  1. What did you give up for Lent this year (if you’re one of those heathen pagans, do this as a hypothetical)?

With my seriously-lapsed Catholicism, I’ve not done that in I don’t know how long. Maybe I should try next year.

Taking that took a lot longer than I anticipated, but it’s gotten me a good part of the way through this week’s Run Your Mouth.

More tomorrow.

Twenty-five

I was a day off in what I posted last night. Once again, good discussion with friends about various youthful exploits, and what’s happening in the tech world.

I am seeing others arriving at the same conclusions as I have about the theings you must do to be an IT practitioner in good-standing.

I’ve probably said here before, but it’s worth repetition — before my vision really started going, I was a shitty Minesweeper player. I did do marginally-well on the SAT when I was a kid, but that wasn’t the sort of tests you commonly see these days — multiple choice, but there’s an unknown nummber of correct responses. On Question One, there’s six answers provided, and only two of them are correct. If you only select one, you get the entire question wrong. If you select the correct two answers, but also select a third incorrect one, you miss the whole question.

With barely-functional eyes, and a brain that’s slightly affected by MS, it often just ends up as an exercise in frustration.

But I have to do those things if I want to keep working. Along with paying the certification agency’s protection racket fee.

Fuck that. I really don’t need to do it anymore.

I also don’t want to do it anymore.

But on to what I promised to do — news.

Portland sounds absolutely insane at this point. I am paying attention, though not terribly closely. I heard Andy Ngo on a podcast or radio show. I started following on Twitter. Incredible.

I also saw something, last week maybe, where these “peaceful protesters” beat the living hell out of an East Asian guy because they thought he was Andy Ngo.

There was widespread outrage early this week that there were Federal officers just arresting people wearing no ID, and travelling in unmarked vehicles. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that these are the same folks who spent two years talking about how the President worked with the Russians to be elected.

So what to do? I don’t know. Governments are established to protect individuals’ rights to life, liberty, and property.

Government is failing in Portland.

That’s the biggest thing I see. I am biased, and I admit that. Still, shit’s burning, and people are getting hurt.

How do you stop that, who does it, and when does it happen?

Flashbacks

Playing around in Jitsi with friends, and remembered I’d seen this looking through my archives the last few days.

Nervous – 7/25/2002

Going to a gathering of geeks this evening and I’m quite nervous. I don’t normally do well at these types of thing…..

I think one of my friends is going, so that should help some, but I’m still antsy. Will give a full report later.

Went down to Hatteras last night austensibly to go fishing. Didn’t even make it all the way down there, actually. I turned around in Kitty Hawk…..I was bored, and decided that standing around on a beach, barefoot, with a 9′ graphite fishing pole in a lightening storm probably wasn’t a great idea…..

Twenty-four

Not a lot of desire to do this today. I was actually thinking early this morning that maybe it’d be easier to just quit.

I’m not going to do that, because I want to finish what I started.

So. News. The team with the formerly-offensive name is now just the “Washington Football Team.”

I still think they’re missing out on the moniker I thought of.

So. News. There’s this.

It’s almost amusing to see all these “icons” getting torn down years after their deaths. Was he a racist? Probably not nearly as much as Virginia-born Democrat Woodrow Wilson, but….

I asked on Twitter, and got a funny response:

Was he a slave-peddler? Nothing that I’ve seen really indicates that. Did both good and bad things pop up because this Italian guy did the bidding of the Spanish monarchy? Sure. Do I support the Spanish monarchy? No. Do I support eliminating every mention? No. It happened. Some people are happy about that.

Whatever.

You’re not going to hide it.

Some people in the past drew inspiration from what he did, and erected monuments to those things. Fine. Let them stand, and remove them when they don’t serve any purpose anymore.

Should the Wilson bridge have been renamed when it was widened? Yeah. Should it happen right now? I’m very conflicted.

Is “Redskins” offensive? Yeah, at some point it was. For me, someone born during the Carter Administration, when I hear it, I think of George Allen, and the “Over The Hill Gang,” Joe Gibbs, John Riggins, Mark Rypien, and the Posse. I don’t think of anything racist.

Hell, I’m young enough that when someone mentions “Earnest Byner,” I think of the 1991 Redskins, not “The Fumble.”

Somebody from Cleveland probably thinks differently.

I also, as a Saints’ fan, think of the Saints losing to the Redskins on Sunday Night Football to a Redskins Team that’d started the season 0-5, and led by Tony Banks after they’d released their starting quarterback (Jeff George) something like three games.

Whatever.

But FedEx and Nike are on my no-buy list..

On to digging through the past….

I want a beer – 7/24/2002

It’s 4:39 in the morning, I’m at work, and I want a beer.

WTF?

Tfffftbt. I wanna go far, far away from here.

I get off at six, and don’t have to be back at work until 9 saturday night.

Hmmph…what to do what to do…

I’m not sure what was going on around this time. I’d graduated from college, and was still working in radio. My time off, still, wasn’t really fun nights to do things. I didn’t have a lot to do. It would have been hot outside, so maybe that was it.

Twenty-three

Again. This is my second attempt at writing this as I sit in the Clinical Research Unit at Georgetown with Tysbri flowing through my veins.

I’d started in on a very long bit about writing. Today is the twenty-first anniversary of when i started writing on The Open Diary.

But instead of elaborating on my compulsion to write, I’ll just ease back into what I’d said I was going to do.

News story. Oh, right. Things are crazy as hell in the US right now, but they actually manage to get crazier from time to time.

I guess the people who spent three years building a Cold War-style Soviet conspiracy story are probably loving this.

(No, I don’t support the President, but the Russia collusion narrative is just batshit crazy. The politicians and media who fostered it should delete their accounts.)

But with all that finished, time to go do something more productive.

Twenty-two

As I promised, going to do a news story, and free-write.

For the news story, there’s this.

Obviously, with my tenuous health, and the state of the economy, these sorts of things have been of great interest lately.

I’ve been dumping money into my 401(k). And what I wanted to write about just now I deleted, because I might not be allowed to disclose.

I will say that I’m not old enough to qualify for any of the “catch-up” provisions in tax law, so it’s kind of forcing me to do things on my own apart from the “normal” ways of doing things.

As if there’d be anything different in my life.

I have a chunk. I’m not sure how long I could ever hope to live on it. I think probably some sort of long-term disability is more likely, honestly. What I have now would be more than I was earning not terribly long ago.

Even before the MS diagnosis, I was probably only looking at a lifespan of 65 years. MS, when you take a look at the actuarial numbers, takes ten years off your life. So that puts me likely dying before I’m able to tap anything without significant penalties.

Oh well.

I did listen to something interesting a few weeks ago that really changed my way of thinking about “investments.” Putting money into stores of value is not trying to get growth; it’s just trying to keep the value from going away.

In other words, I’m not planning to get rich off Tesla stock. Maybe next week, that’ll have appreciated a lot more than an ounce of gold or silver; what will it be worth ten years from now?

The same can be said for other things like real estate. Even if a big crash happens, it’s not going to be worth zero.

I can’t say the same for the Flooz I bought in 1999.

I’m also interested in buying stock that’s not publicly-traded. If I put, say, $10K into an apartment management/ownership group, maybe it’s a smaller payout than it was when I bought it. Maybe not. Maybe the Federal Reserve will juice the currency so much that it’s worth a lot more.

Even if it goes bankrupt, I’d be an unsecured creditor, and would get something back during the liquidation.

This is rapidly turning into the free-write I promised.

But I’m going to stop, as the weather’s nasty, and I’m worried about the power going out.

Twenty-one

The motivation to do this is waning quickly. I did write to my doctor when I decided to embark on this session.

I found in my archives an entry I’d written almost twenty years ago, where I beat myself up for being lazy.

Mind you, this was when I was working basically full-time largely overnight, along with taking something like seventeen hours in college. And I was beating myself up over it. I’d spend my two nights off per week largely out driving around, listening to the radio, smoking way too many cigarettes, and trying to figure out what I was going to write.

Yeah. That was lazy.

Notsomuch. But that’s where I was, mentally.

As far as this goes, I was going to go on with what I suggested yesterday, and just find a random news story, and write about that.

Today, instead, since this wheezing PC decided it was going to flake out while I was trying to find where I write, I flipped over to the TV input.

The station I’ve been watching lately was talking about this. Even the reactionary mayor was in full maybe-this-is-really-fucking-stupid mode.

Because it is.

Is it the stupidest thing I’ve seen proposed in the past few years? No. That it’s not says a lot about the pols who’ve been put in office lately. Yes, that extends to the current occupant of the Oval Office.

But the disappointment that they won’t be able to execute him for treason could be amusing if I could bring myself to be amused.

Instead, it’s just disgust.

If I keep talking about it, I might turn into what I’m calling one of my Fantasy Football teams this year. Since Redskins is no longer okay, I think there’s a nice ring to “Washington Wokescolds.” My fantasy teams is the DC Wokescolds, because using the proper city name was too long.

Do I plan to keep doing this? Yes. Why? Because I started it, and it gives me a reason to pick through my archives to see what I wrote once upon a time.

So, from this day in 2000, I found this.

See, I believe in big miracles – 7/21/2000

It’s an inside joke, and if you haven’t seen the Robert Tilton Spiritual Flatulence bootleg video, you wouldn’t understand. (I have a copy somewhere, if you’d like a copy, drop me a line. I might be able to oblige).

Anyway, I just thought I’d say that I miss Art Bell. Mike Siegel sucks hairy goat balls.

The reference is to something that was much shorter than the YouTube find here.

Obviously it was incredibly funny to a seventeen year-old boy.

More tomorrow.

Twenty

I’m doing this, though the temptation had really waned after I started in on it yesterday.

No prompts this time, just free-writing, and reaction to news that hit me on first scan of a news site.

Today’s news? This.

Everything touching the Epstein story just evokes a what-the-actual-fuck response.

Somehow it seems totally appropriate that there’s photos of both Trump and Clinton with him.

What’s happened with the story I linked is that the judge who is handling the case’s family were murdered. But they think it’s another issue, altogether. Or something.

No, I don’t think electing Crackhead Joe (hattip to Michael Malice on that one; he’s not the crackhead, that’s his son! And there’s the point….) will fix this.

Now to dig through very old writings, and find something I wrote on this date in a previous year.

Nope. Not that one. Or that one. On to 2013. Nope, not that one, either.

Better luck tomorrow, maybe.

Resistance Is Futile

Thirty-one days of writing ahead. It’s happening, despite my attempts at fighting it.

So what am I not going to do?

Pick prompts.

If I’m not free-writing, I’m going to just look through the news, pick a story, and shoot out a few lines.

July Eighteenth is Hot

I have two friends, and a relative who’ve got birthdays today. *does quick math* Halloween parties? All Saints’ Day? Armistices Day?

It is incredibly hot outside; 99 Fahrenheit here right now. Though there’s a taco truck visiting my ‘hood, I’m resisting the urge to go outside.

Fighting the urge urge to write again this summer, too. I did find some interesting prompts, but the weird Creative Commons stipulations made it too difficult to really consider using them. Whatever.

So what do I do on this hot day? Listen to the Peddling Fiction Podcast, look at some of the idiocy on Facebook, and stay inside.