Tag: Hot Writing

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.

Maybe no so hot today. pic.twitter.com/aKB9RLfmra

— 757sean (@757sean) July 23, 2020

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.

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.

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.

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.

Another Summer writing period finished, and tomorrow I embark on the final year of, to quote Oscar Santana, my douchebag thirties.

All apologies if I kind of seemed off-in-space on these.  As I said, I really do wonder if a big part of what I was doing was because I was so miserable.

I just got off the phone with a recruiter trying to get me back in to where I was for the bad situation in Norfolk.  I doubt I’ll have any opportunity, but that I’m even willing to consider it is evidence of how much I was fucked up.

Was it better than what I was dealing with the first round in the icebox?  Yes.  Was it good?  Fuck no.  But that there’s no do-not-consider note, and that I might reciprocate says a lot.

At the same time, I am more than satisfied with where I am, now.

What a change from last year.

And just as I started to rank things, I quit.

2015 I was broke.

2016 I was working like a dog, getting treated like shit, and my health was about to go off-the-rails.  (My first hospital stay was in September of that year….)

2017 I was unemployed, after a few more unsuccessful months in the blast chiller.

2018, well, read some of what I’ve written this month, and you decide.

But I did it.  All finished.  Now time to celebrate some, I suppose.

Or watch John Brennan backing down from his treason claims as fast as he fucking can.

But Rachel Maddow will back them all up, so it’ll be okay.

Pfft.

Okay, so maybe I didn’t miscalculate my dates.

One more day of this, then I’m finished. Not 30 entries, but there’s 31 days in these summer months.

I am getting into the kick of writing, but I’m finding reasons not to, too.

Sticking with it, well, that’s just what I do.

Taking things back, though, and I’m going to actually edit this from what I’d originally recorded in my diary.

I have edited the names here, with people other than me replaced by numbers.

---

Conversation from IRC, over an ad on craigslist looking for a roommate….names changed to protect the guilty….

15:49 [@sean] a——.com
15:50 [@sean] temp agency
15:50 [ 1] oh a——-
15:50 [@sean] hrmph
15:50 [ 1] yea
15:50 [@sean] iow
15:50 [@sean] we work like
15:50 [@sean] three weeks at a time
15:50 [@sean] we need someone to pay for shit!
15:50 [@sean] so we can continue buying beer and rubbers
15:50 [ 2 need to cut back on the rubbers
15:50 [ 3] young male professionals
15:50 [ 3] at least they didnt ask for a female only roommate
15:50 [@sean] they’re mcses
15:51 [ 3] they could be ccnas
15:52 [@sean] novell
15:52 [ 3] 4
15:52 [ 5] loz
15:53 [@sean] of course
15:53 [@sean] they’re tards, too
15:54 [@sean] town center ain’t far from planned parenthood
15:54 [@sean] I’ve heard you can get free rubbers there
15:54 [ 3] dude
15:54 [ 3] they’re mcses
15:54 [ 3] they dont use rubbers
15:54 [ 3] just crisco
15:54 [@sean] lmaonade
15:54 [ 3] ANALEAZE
15:56 [ 6] They have a big bowl of them at that planned parenthood
15:56 [ 6] and it’s near the door
15:56 [ 6] so you can run it and run out
15:56 [ 6] w/out talking to anyone
15:57 [ 3] analease?
15:57 [ 6] no, rubbers
15:57 [ 6] I was giving confirmation
15:58 [ 3] we changed conversation focus to buttsechs mgs
15:58 [ 6] since control-H is too scared to go in there
15:58 [ 3] plz keep up
15:58 [ 6] control-H needed to know
15:58 [ 6] trust me
15:58 [ 3] oic
15:58 [ 3] I forgot
15:58 [ 3] winkwink nudgenudge
16:01 [@sean] 6: I can afford ones that don’t break like the free ones
16:01 [ 4] if they get 100% o f the value, I doubt they would do shit
16:01 [ 4] omg those are good condoms
16:01 [ 4] name brand nigga
16:02 [@sean] it’s like the crack dealer
16:02 [@sean] they give you defective ones
16:02 [@sean] so you’ll need to come back in a few weeks
16:07 [ 3] but control-H
16:07 [ 3] it costs them money when you come back
16:08 [ 6] free condoms, but the abortions cost $$$ ?
16:08 [@sean] it’d be like a onconology clinic handing out cigarettes
16:08 [ 7] kek
16:08 [ 3] rofl

---

Notice the tag here is, “everything gets deleted, eventually.”  Maybe it doesn’t, though?

One of the podcasts I routinely listen to regularly has been hitting on lately is about how people’s memories of things change over time.

They do, certainly, but I think, maybe, keeping track of what you’re thinking and doing helps clarify things for later?

I’ve really taken it in the shorts over the past five years on top of being sick.  Maybe what I’ve written will bring back clearer memories.

But, as I said the other day, I think I’d started doing these summer periods because I was so fucking miserable with my situation.

When I did this last year, I was about to start my next round in hell.  Perhaps I should say that I regret going back there;  I should have learned my lesson the first time.

But, no, I did what I did because it was the right thing to do for our situation.  Things have changed.

Speaking of that, reading back through that exchange, “a——” is a pretty sizable staffing firm.  So this was from August 2006, and sorta signified the start of the “gig economy” that was so widely-panned in the 2016 election.

My understanding of it was a bit misguided, thinking that they were only working two days per month, and were focused on selling Microsoft’s products.

I didn’t take into account the price of benefits.  I wonder if someone would do the math on that compared to now to see what the difference is.  Big companies are looking to peddle labor with a minimum of government meddling.  So government just puts things that further discourage companies from hiring anybody full-time.

*shrug*

Free-write tomorrow to close things out.  My head is pretty clear, even if my vision isn’t.

Another free-write as I wind down for this summer.

Today’s been spent trying to fish things off my long-stored virtualization host.  It was in the basement, and getting data off of it is taking fore v e r.

Unfortunately, it’s proving more difficult than I anticipated.

*steps away for good dinner courtesy my wife*

She’s out swimming, and I’m copying shit off a thumb drive to my desktop.  When it finishes, I’ll SFTP it up to my VM, and try to get the hrgeeks list back up and running again.

That’ll probably have to wait until tomorrow, but at least now I have the data.

Probably going to have to expand my Fantasy Football League to accommodate two more teams as another of my leagues dies.

*shrug*

But two more days.  Maybe I should have found something to recycle for today, but busy doing other things.

I do like where I am at this point, minus the travails with my health.  I don’t think I’m near death, and I’m not drinking myself into oblivion several times per week.  So there’s that.

As I near the end of my weekly TV allotment, I should find a football game to watch or something.

I was trolling through old entries again, and the one I found from 2002 is pretty lame.  I was writing all about my newly-acquired Mac G3, where I was trying to get both System 9 and OS X 10.1 to work.
The fun part of that release was when Finder would crash, and the only way you could fix it was to ssh in, and reboot the host.  Thankfully, things are more reliable these days.
That said, in my current role, I’m finding that there’s a lot I missed with UNIX and Loonix in the past few years.  But, then, I didn’t have the position, money, or energy to spend time with any any of it.
I paid attention, even if I wasn’t able to do much hands-on.  I could be sore about it, but the responsibility is split between me, myself, and the folks living in Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison.
All that said, however, I do feel uncomfortable sometimes with the seat-of-the-pants moves.  But not as uncomfortable as I was in my last round in the icebox, where they did whatever the fuck they thought would work, and blamed others when it didn’t.
Purportedly, things there are going higher.  I have no idea what the status is on the complaint I filed.
((somewhat long rant about the hell I’ve been through deleted))
The dilemma I have is how much time I spend learning stuff that’s already obsolete.  I’m relatively comfortable in both a real System V and Linux System V environment, though there’s blanks I have.
But how much do I focus on filling in those blanks when it’s already obsolete?
Hmmm.
Tough question.
Today is the start of the Thanksgiving babby birfday roll call.  Interestingly, the two who celebrate today are two of the ones who are most removed from my life these days.  One largely on account of actions taken against me (yes, I can hold a grudge).  The other on account of adherence to a faith that worships a thoroughly corrupt political organization.  I do wish both of them well, though I’m having trouble being upset about the lack of F2F.  ‘What can I say;  maybe that makes me a bad person.
I started writing a couple of days too early this year.  Consequently, I’ll finish before my normal 20 August end date.
Kinda distracted by all of this.
So, another free-write today.  It happens.  That said, maybe that’s what I was trying to do all along.  The writing is coming a lot more easily the past few days.
I can’t see worth shit, but I can still plunk out some words.

I had something in about this.  (https://ijr.com/2018/07/1108794-10-intense-reactions-kavanaugh-pick/).  Especially the former governor of Virginia’s response.
Well, at least he’s learning well from one of his former constituents in NoVA.
People will die.
Not a lot of writing tonight.  I had a busy, but successful, day, and dinner just showed up.

Trying to dig through things I have marked as Draft here.
This has been floating around lately.
How can you purport to support “Net Neutrality” while supporting this sort of editing?
I don’t know.  I think I wrote about that plenty of times.
You can’t be butthurt about Ajit Pai changing rules about Net Neutrality while at the same time favoring private organizations making choices to block speech.
Here’s where I am with it — there’s lots of shit on the Internet that I choose not to consume.  Let me reiterate with emphasis;  there’s lots of shit on the Internet that I choose not to consume.  That it’s there has no effect, whatsoever, on me.
It’d be foolish for me to worry about things that do not affect me.
My Tysabri infusion really hasn’t kicked in yet, though I do feel better than I did, say, Thursday and Friday.  More than a little miffed that my former insurer called me seeking information so they can try to fleece my new insurer, too.
Supposedly my wife has a new prompt she wanted to see me write on.  I guess we’ll see.
Thankfully, though, I don’t have to work this weekend.  I’m trying hard to be upset about that, though I am a bit disappointed that I can’t choose to have fun a couple of days next week.  Whatever.