Month: November 2023

Free Write

Sofa-king busy.

Two-thirds of the way finished.

Taking a lot of effort not to start trickling out the various parts of what I’m trying to do with the HR Geeks stuff.

Trying to stay atop fantasy football, but looks like I’m going to lose every league. Maybe not finish at the bottom of any of my leagues, but it is what it is.

Watching the FormskinsCommanders yesterday was painful. The Giants are not good, and Washingtons was managing to turn the ball over something like six times.

Norval’s boy wasn’t the problem with the offense.

The Sunday night game was actually halfway interesting, but I got distracted by the news that Milei had won the presidential election in Argentina.

My sensation is sort of reminiscent of Brexit.

This was not something that was supposed to happen.

I’ve been kind of following along with issues in South America here and there.

If you want to see examples of failures of modern leftism, you really don’t have to look a lot farther than South America.

The curiosity dates back to the days of dealing with the Chmosky bobbleheads on Orkut.

Many of them were really big on Chavez around 2004. The results of the Bolivarian Revolution have completely destroyed the country.

I’d also paid attention to places like Brazil with Lula. After he was convicted of crimes, his hand-picked successor took power, got involved with corruption herself, and laid the groundwork for a somewhat-questionable successor.

I paid some attention to Chile, which seemed to be on the verge of heading to a Bolivarian paradise like Venezuela. VICE News Tonight had a big segment on that in the last days. Chile, where the Frau Doktorin Bachelet (she went to medical school in East Germany after her Allende-aligned father had been imprisoned by Pinochet) seemed to have her administrators seemingly disrupted by seismic activity.

Listening to some of the discussion of Milei on the Reason podcasts, the initial excitedness about his potential had kind kind of evaporated in the past few episodes.

This was not something that was supposed to happen.

He was not supposed to win.

But he did. I’m kind of beyond words.

I haven’t had time to really review a lot of the analysis of his win. He’s planning to excise many, many unnecessary government departments. Whatever. Of, course, some of the zOMG CBDC people are even more worried about his tiptoeing around dollarization of the Argentine currency, or even the direct adoption of the dollar, itself

But I’m inclined to say that any CBDC really won’t work with so many other countries using the USD, or attaching their currencies to the value of the dollar.

Some politician can’t just direct activity without any negative response.

I’m sure I’ll have some more information when I get an opportunity to consume some more reaction. Meetings have really prevented a lot of listening about it, but this is really big news.

This was not something that was supposed to happen.

Meanwhile, a lot of the excesses of modern culture seen over the past few years are being reconsidered. Not kindly.

It’s the end of the world as we know it/And I feel fine

So much for a free write session. News intervenes.

I didn’t have anything penciled in for today. I was halfway tempted to do the Thanksgiving plans entry, but that’s for tomorrow. I’m excited by what I plan to lay out.

This could be good and fun.

Searching back through my archives, I stumbled across my entry from 2020. The prompt for that was about

Part of the reason I picked that one out was to see what COVID stuff was there.

(omitting a string of excited utterances…)

Who’s going to revisit the efficacy of the decisions politicians made?

Now that we’re on the other side, how many people didn’t get sick because Detroit cancelled its parade?

Even the New York Times came out this week with a mea culpa. (If you pay them money, is it really mea, or are they blaming others for what the politicians did to the kids? I really don’t feel like spilling out more money for news….)

IN that entry back then, I was writing that I don’t think that I should have an opinion on everything. I still feel that way.

At the same time, when you look at things in retrospect, given ample evidence, you can make a pronouncement.

You would think that young people would be able to do analysis on thing. Then i see things like this.

“Shaking My Damn Head” doesn’t even come close to describing my feelings.

I could spend a lot more time really struggling to put something down here, but I really don’t feel like it.

Some things to get accomplished left for today. Let me try to get some of those knocked out before the football games kick off this afternoon.

Falling into this this morning. (No, grammar check, that repeated word was intentional..)

I’m awake waiting on a delivery that’ll let me keep working over the weekend. And forever.

I really was good trying to make sure I disconnected from work concerns while I was away.

I appreciate that I’m now in a position where I really can just step away. Completely.

There was a coworker on one of my calls the past few days talking about how he was planning to go deer hunting, and would be completely contact-free for about ten days.

Jealousness is not really bout the idea of shooting Bambi, but being completely in a different world for a few days.

Obviously, I’m not sure if or how I could do that.

…a pig in a cage on antibiotics…

Terror and Risk

Flashing back again to this.

1. Are you a risk-taker? Do you weigh the pros and cons or jump right in?

At this point, really not at all. There’s not many things where I push for a bigger payoff.

I really don’t think I’ll have much opportunity to really enjoy the benefits.

Eating a raw oyster might be about as I’m willing to go for.

Something that brings a small amount of pleasure is about what I’m doing at this point.

Take me to Waffle House, and I’m going to be content for a while.

2. “The most terrifying moment of my life was…”

Again, I’m pretty risk-averse. Getting back, as usual, to football. What I’m listening to right now had a longtime Iggles’ fan talking about news that the team had just released this guy.

I guess I would have been in Germany when he was drafted. The Saints were going to win it all behind Jim Everett.

That really doesn’t have anything to do with being terrified,. But the point is that I rarely put myself in situations where I would be terrified. Even when I had the physical ability to do something terrifying, I didn’t.

Figure out how fast I can make this car I’m driving go? Nah. I’ll pass. (Or get passed, depending on your perspective.)

Maybe that aversion has served me well. Maybe not. But does it really matter? I am going to die; life is a terminal condition. But I’m okay being in relative comfort for as many years as I have left.

I do appreciate the argument that doing something dangerous might get me killed quickly. And that might be particularly painful for a short time.

I can remember being on a camping trip with a doctor who said that when you go, massive heart attack probably isn’t bad. Yeah, it hurts really bad, but it’s pretty quick, and you’re just gone. That might be better than years of suffering from something else.

Oh well.

I know MS probably isn’t going to kill me. I’ve often said that I’m probably going to die of cardiovascular disease or cancer…just like everybody else.

But going slowly, I am confident that there can be some sort of medical intervention that might make it less painful.

I was thinking this was about Thanksgiving plans. I guess I had something in my drafts folder, but rechecking my early entry about my targets for the month…

Uniqueness. Flashback to 2013, but a bit of modification.

What characteristics define you and make you unique?

I am really strange.

I’ve spent a ton of time trying to refresh my wife on this last few months.

What’s changed, however, is that I’m really not trying to change that at this point.

I put up lots of things to hide who i am, and what I am in the past. That kind of synchs with several of the things I’ve been working through in my mental health sessions.

It kind of explains, too, my recalcitrance towards many of particular Critical Theory-inspired things that have popped up in the common culture

With the most-cursory examination, I’m just a privileged straight white dude.

Me explaining otherwise is largely just an exercise in futility.

I’m not at all from an affluent background.

I’m disabled. Unless you see my cane, or see me try to walk without it, you’d have no idea. STFW for ‘But you don’t look sick.” Yeah, no kidding.

I went to school with the intention of doing something completely different than what I’m actually doing.

I like unusual things.

I rarely get visibly excited about anything. Let me but that a different way — I got to the point where it was nearly impossible to get me to show any emotion at all about anything.

I have a bunch of stuff I wrote probably 2005ish about trying to make myself cry, because I wasn’t sure if I even could anymore.

There was a scene in Brain Candy, where a character was relaying to the shrink about his sorry place in life. Naturally, this is in German, and the shrink’s response after the sad bit was something the lines of, “I don’t understand German.” “Scheisse” (And looking around, here it is…)

My girlfriend spent quite a bit of time trying to fix it. (She did, and we’ve been together for years…and we’d make this “crying little pussy” if we bred…)

I’m not really the beneficiary of the “privilege” I purportedly possess. I make almost every attempt to fit in with whatever crowd I’m in. Those efforts seem to be to my physical detriment a bit too often.

So do those things make me “unique?” Maybe? But it shouldn’t matter. What should matter is how I’ve behaved towards you.

Certainly there’s a select number of people with whom I don’t want to interact anymore (or again).

I hope the same is true in reverse.

Halfway Point

It’s honestly a big of a sigh of relief. I’ve gotten halfway there. Again.

I’m making progress in completing other things I had on tap for this month, too.

It doesn’t really feel like as much of an accomplishment as it should, maybe, but, again, doing it on the regular helps get me in the mode of doing something every day to get myself in the habit.

I really don’t want to go to the sports comparisons, but the lessons are the same.

Getting accustomed to doing something, even something tedious, helps focus you on the larger task at hand,

I was listening to one of the NFL games, and the announcer were talking about how you’d address things with a backup quarterback entering a game — you run a small subset of plays you commonly run in practice to get people up-to-speed.

The November writing streaks kind of get me focused on the litany of things I need to do before the end of the year.

So, where am I on the checklists…

• Trip to Mississippi complete
• Reason event complete
• Book signing complete
• Thanksgiving plans cemented (And I feel like that’s exactly the wrong word for a day of gluttony.)

Still to do:

• Concert
• Finalizing the Christmas stuff (gifts, etc.)
• Paying that certifying agency’s protection racket by the end of the year

I am still stupidly-excited by the concert after Thanksgiving.

Other schtuff….

We dug back into The Morning Show for a couple of episodes last night.

Now it’s getting to be a bit tiresome with the leftist topics. zOMG ROE WAS OVERTURNED!!1!

Didn’t St. RBG write about how it was a bad decision? Aren’t states defending “the right to choose” above and beyond what was protected under Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey Yep.

I am personally against elective abortion. I don’t want to see any money stolen from taxpayers being spent on it. But I’m also opposed to throwing people in prison from doing it.

At Common Law, the standard was “the quickening,” which is the point in pregnancy at which the mother feels the baby move.

But all of what was there was built atop a rather-weak foundation going back to Griswold.

But such analysis is not allowed. You either agree with abortion up until sometime after delivery, or you want the completed subjugation of women.

No, sorry. I would venture to say that most people fall somewhere in between those extremes.

Yes, I just finished listening to another High Noon ep.

Naptime.

Recap of Walt Hickey book signing

I missed probably half of the Q&A section because MetroAccess couldn’t get me there on time.

No kidding. Two taxis notified me that they were on the way to pick me up before the pickup disappeared.

I was worried about getting there way before the event started, but I ended up phoning them to get an Uber out to take me into the District.

The driver, too, didn’t take the route that the Uber app had recommended, and we ended up bouncing through backed-up traffic getting into the venue east of Capitol Hill.

Once I navigated my way down the stairs, I saw about the second half of the presentation. I was at a distinct disadvantage, since i hadn’t been able to get finished with the book. Between trying to read tiny text on my phone, and the insane work schedule, just hadn’t finished it. (And, as I’ve said in the comments § on the site, an audio book on Apple would be very nice. hinthint)

I did buy a paper copy of the book for Walt to sign. He knew exactly I was from my comments on the site. Though I generally try to avoid linking to Space Cowboy Jeff’s shopping site, you can buy the book here.

Some of the discussion toward the end was about the pros and cons of “binge-watching” shows.

With my limited vision, I don’t watch a ton of TV. I will say that I probably watch more than I did early in my late-night radio days (say 1998 to about 2004), but there’s not a ton of “must-see TV” for me.

When it comes to episodic stuff, too, shows often get to the point of tedium.

My wife and I had been getting through The Morning Show on AppleTV+. With the new season, after the Matt Lauer-inspired character died, it kind of feels like somewhat empty political posturing.

The one we watched last night after I got home had Bradlee’s (Reese Witherspoon’s character) brother as one of the January 6th people.

I almost turned it off.

The more that comes out about all of that after the pre-produced Congressional drama….the less convinced I am that there was any coordination.

Flashbacks to childhood in Europe with the Baader-Meinhoff crowd, having to stay inside on May Day, what happened to Ceausescu, the fall of The Wall, etc.. Watching what was going on in Tiananmen  Square on a dying Sony Trinitron, etc..

I know that in some of my recent forays into the city, I’ve ridden around Sheridan Circle.

There’s always been bad things happening if you check. But how much of it is just an attempt to bring something to the fore?

I don’t know.

---

After the presentation ended, I called to see if I could get my ride home bumped up. I was within an hour of the pickup window, so they wouldn’t bump me up.

Ended up at Fight Club DC for a quick bite, a beer, and a trip to the bathroom before my ride got there.

Odd sense of Deja vu being there….like I’ve been in that spot before at some point in the past. I’ve spent so many random nights in DC, it’s entirely possible.

Halfway mark tomorrows. Yay!

Somehow I omitted this from my writing schedule. Nobody noticed, but that’s because there’s very few people reading. Whatever. I do these for me.

Is the aversion to Fourteen based on hangover from Andy Dalton as a Saint?

Tough to place that blame, but it’s a starting point…if not a decent starting quarterback.

So look though the old entries, and stumble on this.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about being sick, what my current medical state is, etc..

After popping positive for antibodies on my JCV test, I’m now on Keysimpta.

The switchover was during my summer writing streak this summer, and I hated it so much to start.

Even after three full doses, the fourth will be towards the end of the month, I still get all sorts of concerned about how it’s going to affect me.

Relax.

Um. No.

The new drug, as I’ve become accustomed to it, really isn’t that big a deal. One Sub-Q shot in the thigh once a month. Take it after work, spend the evening kind of as normal, and go to bed.

The doctor at Georgetown who was good enough to see me, then not get upset when my out-of-network Tidewater insurance didn’t cover the visit, has been my neurologist since I got up here. I appreciate all that she, and the rest of the staff at Georgetown have done for me.

There’s many aspects of my life, related to my health, that are a ton better now than they were back when I first wrote about what was going on.

On positive side, I’ve been able to continue to work far longer than I ever anticipated. My wife is, now, excelling in her career, and we’re not on the lip of destitution.

Some things, of course, are worse. My vision continues to get worse. Certainly not as markedly as it was early on, but things really aren’t good. I don’t know when they’ll want to put me through more vision tests. I am not, I don’t think, to the point of legal blindness. I still do find random tricks that help me be able to see/consume things, but it’s still difficult.

_{(Random hint: If you’re using Sarai in IOS, you can actually bypass many paywalls simply by activating the Reader mode.. Don’t tell anybody, okay. Pay for your news!!1!)}

One of the pods I used to consume had a Tweet, I mean Post, about some breakthrough in nerve repair.

Am I interested? Absolutely. Is that going to really convince me to continue avoid taking advantage of the options I have?

Um.

Off to buy a physical copy of Walt Hickey’s book, and get it signed. Subscribe to his Substack.

Disappointment (Flashback to 2013.)

Geez. This prompt really hit at an odd juncture.

My current work situation is really in an odd place at the moment. And, because of entrenched people, I’m going to have to make a trip tomorrow I didn’t anticipate.

Not happy about that.

Reading back on what I wrote back then, however, does bring some perspective about the whole situation. I had glowing things to say about my former employer — things I wouldn’t even come close to saying now. They had glossed over criminal activity. There were things that people there did know about, and kept conveniently hidden from me.

I remember one guy the old company hired. I told the division manager, specifically, NOT TO HIRE him. There was something fishy going on. I could tell that, but I didn’t have any idea what it was.

As far as I know, he’s still in Federal-Pound-Me-In-The-Ass prison. DOJ link.

Shortly before all of the news had come out about everything that was going on, I interviewed with a company that was touching the problem.

After the government guy reached his plea agreement, they fired me laid me off.

I can say, without any reservation, that I have never done anything as an adult I knew was against the law.

Never.

Not once.

Maybe that doesn’t pay the bills, but it’s how I can live with myself. Maybe that makes me a square, but so be it.

I’m always going to do what I think is right. *shrug*

Write about Reason event in DC

Ah, yes, the thing on tap for me.

I think I missed most of the fun stuff that was earlier in the day.

It’s not something I paid particularly close attention to, but I was really just going to kinda show my face as a donor.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, and a couple of others I sorta recognized were out front of the building when I showed up.

Looked like people partaking in various smokable materials. I didn’t ask to partake.

The new office is a nice location.

I was only there about an hour. Had a drink, talked to a few people, especially the couple from LA who are on the foundation. A bit of discussion of other Reason events I’d attended; how I thought King NeoHip Scott Horton lost the debate-to-end-all-debates from NYC last year.

Nick Gillespie came and introduced himself, shook my hand.

I kind of touched on it yesterday. There’s a lot of instances where the US has done things it shouldn’t militarily. But it’s also done things that don’t have any benefit, whatsoever, for a particular Defense contractor.

I don’t know how much time and effort the agency I used to support, spent copious amounts of resources getting the hospital ships ready to go do humanitarian operations around the world.

But, nawp, everything is to put more money into Raytheon. (And they missed that that moniker has kind of been abandoned in the past year or so. But they also think that the stuff that comes from the hippies circa 1983 is still all, and forever true.)

So more money going to support what they’re doing.

I do wish they’d push back harder on some of the stupidity that’s coming out of Auburn.

Veterans’ Day

Many of the things happening in the world lately are, ultimately, an outgrowth of World War I, which ended 105 years ago today. As I said in the last entry I wrote, I was kind of distracted trying to find the photo I have of my dad in BDUs from his last assignment in the Army.

Both my father, and my father-in-law were career military.

I’ve written here before about how few people these days even know someone who was in the military, much less served themselves. Obviously, I’ve been related, at least tangentially, with the US military most of my life.

My wife, with our travel earlier in the month/week, saw first-hand, the sort of world my parents came from.

More than anything, however, I think time in the military really gets you into a particular routine for everyday life.

You could say the same of organized religion.

This is the time when you do a particular thing. It might not be something that particularly helps you, or makes a lot of sense, but it’s something you do to center (not sure if that’s the right statement, but go with it…).

There’s something important, there.

I would not expect a Marine to steal my stuff. My expectations of a faithful member of a major religion is the same. Or someone who’s on a sports team to which I belong.

Are there concerns with the use of the military?

Absolutely.

Does that make what the NeoHips say true?

No. There’s lots of things that aren’t just there to feed private corporate profits.

Yesterday, the political party of which I used to be a member, put out tweetpost about how JFK was a great antiwar president. I brought up Rocky Versace who came to my attention while I was living in Norfolk.

Check the date of his capture, and square that with the antiwar president’s tenure.

Tempted to go with a Dr. Lexus quote, but there isn’t anything I’m seeing that fits nicely.

Excessive militarism isn’t good for anybody.

But not everything is because some company wants to make money. There’s lots of things that are, actually, done for noble reasons.

All of that said, there is a point of the military. Use of force should be a last resort. And its use in defense (or retaliation) is fine, in my opinion.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is a direct response to the attack on October 7^th.

Maybe that would be a role for something like something that’s been operating in the Sinai for around thirty years.

More tomorrow.

To those who’ve served, thank you.