Category: Old OD

Hopes for a calm rest of the week have pretty much evaporated. Yes, I’m writing before 0600. Why? I have to go back and get yet another MRI before the fun with this study can commence Friday.

And Physical Therapy for this afternoon after I get back from DC; it had been scheduled for early this morning.

Oh well.

Can I figure out the Dunkin app so that I can pick up an order as they wheel me out of the hospital? And make the town car smell like coffee as I roll back to Virginia.

Scouring the promos, I’m only seeing one, maybe, that might be of any interest. Lunch, maybe?

Glancing through old entries, I think the first one I have is on intoxicants. My general take on it was similar to Pelosi’s take on the 2020 riots:

My indifference is slightly different, I think. But it also fits with my writing from The Summer of Love. Things were crazy.

But I also found this one from 2010.

08/19/2010 - 8/19/2010
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So, after last night's knot, tonight's was a gusher.  Must have hit a vein or something.

My mother has discovered she likes text messaging on her iPhone.  I'm not sure this is a good thing.  Neither is my dad, considering he's having to modify their plain to support it......

Work is a mess.  I'm just not sure why I'm doing the work they have me doing.  It's nothing but frustration.  The processes are insufficient, so you bolster them, so people just ignore the processes, which means more processes are needed, etc.

Systems engineering is perhaps a bigger pseudoscience than homeopathy.  Why am I doing it?  I can read, write, and speak.  Many other IT people can't be bothered to do the first, and simply can't do the last two.  A year ago, I might have recoiled more, but at this point, I'm operating under the realization that it's something I can continue doing if my body further fails me.  But it also means I probably ought to think more about grad school.  Ugh.

I am halfway tempted to see what additional accommodations I could get as a "disabled" student.  Is that wrong?  ;-)

That one is really interesting, actually. It’s from when I was new on Copaxone, actually before Sarah and I married.

Obviously, things got a lot worse. But it’s interesting to see that there was a sliver of time when things didn’t seem all that bad.

Okay, that’s enough reminiscing. The AI reviewers are going to bitch at me for jumping around time. Whatever. Prompts!

---

What lights me up inside, even when I’m exhausted?
How can I protect time for that passion?

You know, this actually fits nicely with the past entries. The answer, sadly, is really “nothing.”

I do play along, and force myself through whatever it is. I understand I shouldn’t be doing that, Doc, but it’s how I operate.

Is there anything that’d light me up inside? No, not really. I probably ought to find something, but there’s so many dark harbingers around, and it seems like I’m so busy stamping out fires that I can’t really plan anything. Also, the almost a year’s worth of no income at all really trimmed my sails. I could be planning something fun, but is one of these other things going to cook off and ruin it?

Chilly weather. Football. Oysters. Pfft. But none of this is in my control, unfortunately.

That’s enough. Cut this all off tomorrow.

Another day of odd sleep. I tried to press through, but I couldn’t get to the 2200 news.

Pfft.

I wanted to see if there was follow-up to the one CNN report from yesterday that set Instagram ablaze..

Adm. Cooper went out to the ship, himself. Little follow-up in this morning’s check. I did catch Johnny Joey Jones‘s clip about what he experienced in fifteen-month deployments in Afghanistan. Axe Body Spray is in short-supply until the next UNREP?

My sympathy evaporated about as quickly as this story outrage, well, the outrage about it, evaporates. Though I think it’ll probably re-emerge like the infamous “suckers and losers” hearsay. Worked one, it’ll totally work again. Just like juicing economy by keeping interest rates below inflation.

I’m sure being on the ship sucks. I’m also sure that it’s far, far better than being stuck somewhere in East Africa because of other politicians’ missteps.

Naturally, this news was coming from the various Meta properties. The stuff on IG was a little less sensational when it was on Infowars or Prison Planet.

You can’t stop the nonsense. Dressing it up as being from a legitimate news source doesn’t mean you have to accept it as gospel, either. (Joke was unintended…) I S’dTFW for Alex Jones antisemitism, and found this letter to the NYT from someone at the ADL.

No, he shouldn’t be censored. And urging the men with guns to take action is wrong. But you should look askew at people who peddle these things nonstop. And you have to keep a watchful eye towards people who fall into reciting the tired tropes.

Again, for me, the big tipoffs are:

• Settler-Colonialist
• USS Liberty (And this is why I pay almost no attention to the people at Auburn at this point…)
• Epstein
• AIPAC

It doesn’t take long to hit two, but more often all, of these conspiracy theories from a single source.

You can try to validate the claims, but it’s probably an exercise in futility.

---

So, what else….

Today should be slack. Tomorrow I go for more appointments in DC. Physical Therapy first thing Wednesday morning. Try to go to this free comedy event in DC on Thursday night.

Maybe I should build in some more time to write, but I think I’ve done a lot already.

So, prompts….

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Who in my life deserves more gratitude than I’ve expressed?
What would I say to them if I wrote them a note?

Hmmm. This is a difficult prompt. I do try to remember to express gratitude as often as I can; in so many ways, I’m at others’ mercy for my existence.

But it’s very difficult given what’s happened to me to formulate what I might put in a note.

That I’m not leading with a “Fuck You!” says a hell of a lot, I think, in light of what I’ve been through.

I tend to just leave, and say nothing further. There’s lots of places where you can place blame for that, but it’s been how I operate as long as I can remember. It also fits with my nomadic upbringing..

---

Because I’m looking at old stuff while I’m doing this, from 2011.

8/17/2011 - 8/17/2011
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Pffftbt....

So, the nurse lied to me over the phone last week.  I have two new lesions since December, one of which was active during the scan.

Staying on the Copaxone for three more months.  Anotehr MRI in November.

There's now a blood test for the virus that causes PML associated with the Tysabri.  I guess about half the population have been exposed to the virus, and, therefore, shouldn't use Tysabri.

Pfffftbt.

I don't really know what more to say.  Don't like waking my wife up with less-than-good news.  :-(

MS has been such a wonderful journey.

Out of morbid curiosity, I decided to see what else I’d written this day.

The 2020 entry has stuff from waaaay back.

Also found this old OD snippet.

8/14/2012 - 8/14/2012
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It's Tuesday.  My redone work is redone.  I'm waiting until the last minute to send it.  Partiallly, that's the prove a point (although I'm certain their heads are too far up their asses to get it), partially it's so I can GTFO, and not field any calls about it.


My wife is off shopping and doing laundry with her mother again.  Figure she can take advantage while we're still close.  

She desperately wants to move to DC now.  I'm not sure what, exactly, to make of it.

She was disappointed I didn't find this letter her cousin posted.  It was something to Dr. Laura about Leviticus.
1.  Dr. Laura is Jewish.  I'm not sure what her faith still views as law.  Regardless, they're not using the same Leviticus that's in KJV.
2.  Doesn't a professor have better things to do?
3.  Dr. Laura isn't nationally-syndicated anymore.  She may still be on the air somewhere, but she's not what she onece was.  
4.  This is the big one -- the majority of <u>Christians</u> view Leviticus (and the rest of the Old Testament as <u>allegorical</u>.

I would think someone with a terminal degree would fucking take those things into consideration.....

"Are you going to resent me if I end up as a professor?"
"No, of course not.  But if you waste your time writing something so nonsensical, I'm going to call you on it."
"How did you trick me into marrying you, again?"

<font color="black">Then make-up nookie</font>

*yawn*<hr>**EDIT 1**

Couldn't sit on it too long.  *sigh*  I'm such a sucker.  Why the fuck do I fail to exact rightful revenge?

There was another one from 2000 that would require quite a bit of trimming to put up publicly. Still, it had many grand plans that didn’t happen. Maybe my experiences there show why I really try to avoid planning too far in the future. The 2000 one was about my planned push to really change my situation. A lot of that really had leaving radio as a pre-condition.

But that didn’t happen.

I should check to see if there’s any insight about why, exactly, that didn’t happen. I suspect that I fell into more responsibilities, and things were turning very strange after the USS Cole, and the insanity regarding the 2000 election.

The plowing back through old prompts, along with something on another Substack outlet, could have been TheFP, could have been Blocked and Reported, I was reminded of someone I knew back then. I was intrigued by her intelligence; we’d been in several classes together, and she was in a few of the same student activities.

For a variety of reasons, I’d shied away from finding more reasons to spend more time in her company. The most notable one was that she had a kid.

God, I can’t even remember her name….

So much Searching TFW, I finally found her. Yeah, that’s her name. Oh, she went to Marshall-Wythe, my brother’s Catholic high school, and is practicing law in NN. But she’s not at that kind-of ubiquitous firm anymore. Yeah, she started her own thing. Um. Cool, I guess?

Strange interlude.

And I feel really old knowing, now, that her kid is probably close to 30.

So, prompts

---

What are my thoughts about social media?

Instagram, along with some of the other Facebook properties, are open sewers. I didn’t understand the term “doom scrolling,” but I think I get it now. Twitter X is similarly-bad, but it does provide information that seems to get buried other places.

BlueSky is a leftist echo chamber. I only set up an account there because I was curious about what they were doing to Jesse Singal. I was also worried about what they were trying to do, so I only installed it on a rarely-used Android tablet.
But even when I fired that cheap tablet up, I rarely see anything interesting. I complained to Cato when they were pushing its use.

But I don’t think I’ve even glanced at it in probably two months.

I do more with Facebook than I used to, but it’s primarily to cross-post my ramblings, and see what some older friends are up to.

How does it impact how I see myself or others?

I mentioned that IG is a cesspool. There’s lots of really bad ideas that get pushed to the top of people’s feeds while other things are ignored. If you asked your average IG user, she’d have a lot of information about ICE operations, but know next to nothing about the tens of thousands of people killed by the Iranian dictators in two days in January.

I also ended up searching the USAF Major who was doing his song-and-dance on the steps of the Capitol earlier this summer. There actually isn’t a lot of news on him, and that’s the way that the system’s supposed to function under the UCMJ. You’d think that the people who were building shrines to him in July would still be talking about it in August, but you’d be wrong.

Some of the other also-rans are still around, but barely functional.

*glances at Social group on phone*

Okay, I still use X, IG, Facebook, Locals. Rarely even look at Telegram unless there’s someone trying to rope me in to another crypto scam. Discord still gets a look every now and again. Parler finally got 2FA turned on, but there’s rarely anything interesting there. GETTR I have no idea when I last looked. TruthSocial, well, I just don’t care.

And I think that’s enough for today.