Category: Musings

Posted on

Okay, Not how I planed to spend this week.

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there are multiple fires burning in Southern California.

Tuesday afternoon I got an evacuation notice on my phone. Then, there was a helicopter flying overhead announcing mandatory evacuation. Then there was another evacuation notice on my phone, and finally there was the sheriffs department driving up & down the streets announcing evacuation on their loudspeakers.

Hmm, says I, they must want us to leave.

I suspected it was coming and I’d already planned to stage stuff in the event there was an evacuation. I didn’t get a chance to execute my cunning plan before the evacuation was upon me.

So I grabbed some stuff, put the dog in the car and away we went. 

By the time we left the house, it looked very much like somehow the neighborhood had been relocated to Mars on a very bad day.

Jesse was freaked out and would not settle down.

I was annoyed by that and of course the usual California driving skills or more properly lack thereof.

I made a brief stop, or what was supposed to be a brief stop at a storage locker where I unloaded a bunch of stuff in an attempt to give the dog more room to lie down & relax. This as it turns out was an error.

While I was able to offload, I wasn’t able to get back on the damn freeway. Either the exits were closed, or they were blocked by the aforementioned Excellent California Drivers. Many of whom wouldn’t allow a change of lanes. At least one of whom used the emergency lane to “get ahead” and forced me out of the lane so I was unable to get on the freeway safely. 

Mind you by this point we were 15 – 20 miles away from the evacuation zone and in no danger whatsoever. This was just normal California assholery. It is also the kind of behavior that begets freeway shootings.

I figured “Screw it” and stopped for gas. Then I found a whole string of entrance ramps blocked off forcing me to take surface streets parallel to the freeway until just before Pomona.

Once on the freeway it was a simple matter to get to Orange County and stay with some friends. It’s good to have great friends that will put you up in a pinch. It’s even better to have friends that will put you and your big ass dog up when they have a lovely pet free home and it is pet free for a reason.

My friends have gone above and beyond in this instance and I truly have no idea how to thank them.

At this point I know the firefighters are doing all they can do. I know that there’re no guarantees but I hate not knowing what is likely to happen. Is my house going to burn? Is it not? If it burns, then I have a clear direction. If it’s not going to burn, I’d really rather be home and not imposing on my friends like this.

In an attempt to minimize the mess and stuff that a dog invariably brings into your life, I had Jesse groomed today, while I was at it I had my car washed and my hair cut too. My hope with Jesse being groomed was that he’d shed a little less and wouldn’t be in any way offensive in terms of dog stink.

He’s been sleeping since we got back and I know I’m going to have to take him out on at least one, maybe two more walks tonight.

I don’t really think about it, but having a fenced in back yard is super nice. Their yard is not fenced in, so I’ve been walking Jesse on his leash a lot. Normally Jesse & I go for our morning walk, then I leave the sliders open so he comes and goes as he wishes the rest of the day.

If I move off the mountain, either because of the house burning down, or just because It’s time for me to move on, I will be looking for new digs that have a fenced in back yard after this experience, I’ve decided that is a must have.

Posted on

Saw this Venn Diagram on Twitter

I don’t know who created this diagram but I’d like to tip my hat to them.

It accurately explains how I’ve been feeling lately.

I’ve been trying to write but have experienced severe writers block.

On the plus side I’ve been making progress cleaning out the house, so there’s that.

It seems lately that every time I turn around there is some fresh stupid hell created by humanity because collectively humans are bored.

I find that I’m looking forward to some extinction level event, for a change of pace.

I strongly suspect this sort of boredom happens all over the universe in every sentient species. It’s probably why we’ve not detected conclusive signs of other life.

I’m betting that all species get to a certain technological level, things get too easy, they get bored and start making shit up to terrorize each other. It’s not out of cruelty, it’s so they feel something, anything…

Species probably need a hit of adrenalin that they get from pursuing or being pursued in a forest. They need to have real danger, real life & death consequences, and real mysteries to confront.

Had we made it into space, we might have had a decent substitute. Death being less than an inch away in the cold vacuum of space, may have provided the stimulation to drive our creativity and invention forward. We all know we’re not going to make it into space in any realistic way.

The 1960s & 1970s was our window.

We had loads of men who were tough enough, for whom hardship and discomfort wasn’t a big deal. We had role models and heroes that every child wanted to emulate. Big men, doing big things, not for clicks, but because they believed in the potential and dreams of humanity.

The window has closed. 

All we have left is a long descent into barbarism. The herd will be thinned out due to disease, war, and stupidity. The surviving humans will forget, except in legends about all we accomplished. Maybe we’ll have another ice age and the glaciers will scour most of our cities and infrastructure from the land.

Ancient aliens meme.15 – 20 thousand years later when odd looking bits & pieces of our civilization and technology pop up they’ll be completely unknown and unremembered. So… those future humans will think of us as Ancient Aliens.

That’s more than we’ll deserve. The reality will be that we were a bunch of morons who contemplated our navels too much, demanded to be accepted while not accepting others with differing opinions, who lost the ability to think our way out of a wet paper bag, then turned our maintenance over to artificial intelligence, while eating bon bons on our overstuffed couches, waiting for our rudimentary service droid to come rub our feet or give us an orgasm that we were too lazy to work toward ourselves.

When the end came, most of us will have denied the obvious truth, instead of getting our fat asses off the couch and actually doing something useful.

This line of thinking has made me wonder how many times before this kind of thing has happened on this planet. Likewise, I wonder if it’s actually commonplace throughout the universe, and a function of technology. 

I’ve thought that perhaps there’s a very narrow window where a civilization reaches apogee. The only way a civilization survives is if they reach a point in technology & science that they realize their planet is about to undergo some cataclysmic change and this knowledge galvanizes the sentient species to focus on creating a solution to the problem.

If they fail, then they fall back into the muck, after some period of time they rise again with half remembered legends spurring them forward again.

To be clear I’m not even thinking about “Climate Change” as our moronic people think about it.

I’m talking a meteor impact like the one that may have snuffed the dinosaurs.

Consider this, the meteor needn’t actually hit Earth. Suppose something big came in at a fraction of the speed of light and hit the dark side of the moon? Say it splits the moon into pieces. Those pieces needn’t rain down on Earth. Just them spreading around in the moon’s orbit dissipating the gravitational effect on our tides and weather would be disastrous. There’s impressive climate change!

Or let’s say it was a large enough object that it changed the mass or orbit of the moon? What then? Destructive tides becoming the norm. Earthquakes and volcanoes restructuring continents over a thousand years instead of millions of years. Imagine that. What about the moon ending up in a decaying orbit?

Now imagine that scientists figure out the impact will happen in 300 years. Do people keep squabbling, or do they turn all their abilities, resources, and effort toward preparing and saving themselves? Ideally, if a civilization was at the right point in it’s development they’d figure out how to advance their technology to save their species.

The way we are today, we’d argue about what color the paint on a starship should be before we built the starship. We’d be arguing if there would be an appropriate amount of transgender representation on board the ark ship, completely ignoring that puberty blockers 10 years before rendered those folks incapable of reproducing.

Douglas Adams might have been more right than he ever imagined in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We might really be the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.

Thinking along these lines is why I think we’ve missed the window.

We’re so caught up in irrational trivial matters that we’d squabble for 300 years and be squabbling / assigning blame right up to the impact.

Looking at our colleges today, it’s painfully obvious our youth don’t compare to the builders, dreamers, creators, and makers of just 40 years ago.

I suppose that’s why I’m not writing as much. It’s too easy to think, “People might be able to read the words that I write, but they’re not going to understand the meaning.”

Thinking like that makes walking the dog, & tossing stuff out of my life, far more productive activities. I need to get small, agile and light.

Then I’ll be ready for what comes next.

Posted on

When I was young, and my life was an open book…

I’ve lived a few places. I’ve spent way too much time in California. I ended up in the California town I live in for two reasons. 

1) It was where my love, wanted to live.
2) It was, 30 some odd years ago a compromise. Living here allowed me to stay in California without losing my mind, be able to work. & provide for my love.

In truth way back in the day, I was on my way out of California. I got sidetracked for 30+ years. Oops!

I visited this little town originally because I was gonna get laid and figured it would be a fun diversion for a weekend. Strangely, a relationship bloomed. We dated for 3 or 4 years, then I moved up to this picturesque mountain town.

When I first got here, we had a police substation, the fire department, a general /hardware store, grocery store, several bars, more churches than I thought reasonable for the size of the town, and an odd collection of shops & services.

It was the hardware store that always caught my attention. It reminded me of the general stores of my childhood. There were always older men sitting in front of those stores smoking pipes or cigars discussing the events of the day. 

This hardware store often had similar older men sitting on a bench chatting although they weren’t usually smoking.

At the time, this hardware store sold ammo, and snake rounds. They sold hunting slingshots, a couple brands of arrows, & I think one model of recurve bow.

Wandering around the town in those first few months, I felt at home. I told my love, “This is country enough for me,” and it was.

We built a good life here.

Now that I’m older… Okay much older, I find myself thinking about those older men from my youth sitting and chatting amiably in front of the old country store.

They knew everyone coming & going, the rare stranger to whom they’d provide accurate directions. (It might take a while, if there was a discussion about which landmark was best to turn left or right at.)

Cows grazing.It was quiet at the country store, sometimes the men would sit contemplatively lost in their thoughts, looking out on green fields with cows lowing in the distance.

At the time, I didn’t understand them. Now, I begin to, and wonder if they were looking at the fields, or out over the years of their lives, recollecting and thinking what they’d might have done differently. While appreciating the luck or divine intervention that informed the parts of their lives they’d not change.

I’m not ready for the chair in front of the general store quite yet. I do however want a country store close at hand. It’d be nice if that store had a “guest chair” that I could try on.

My town still has a hardware store that’s a lot like a general store. They no longer have a porch with benches or chairs.

Times have changed, even in this little town. We have homeless people, they’ll create makeshift camps in odd places. They’ll sleep on benches or stairs here just like they do everywhere else in California and perhaps other states as well.

The response is to remove the benches and put gates over vestibules to encourage homeless people, vagrants, and drug addicts to move along. I don’t think this response is a good one. I think a more proactive approach is needed. Unfortunately, I know that my little town will never adopt one.

Over the years, my little town which used to be very conservative, has become a pretty liberal enclave. Now it’s about using the “Approved” names for things. Homeless should now be called “Unhoused” and that sort of thing.

278975855 Arrogance.More power to them!

None of their Neo-progressive crap is of any interest to me at this stage of my life. I’m looking for a country store.

I’m looking towards shedding this California persona I created to blend in. Due to my Southern accent, Californians treated me like a moron when I first got here. Well I was smart enough to see the problem and correct it, you arrogant pricks. Most of the people I dealt with in my career never knew I was from (gasp!) a flyover state in the South… 

I know, scandalous!

Now in the years that I was hoping would be calmer which have turned out to be more contentious than the Vietnam era, I’m longing for a little country store like those I remember from my youth. 

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

 

Posted on

I thought I was bored with it all. That’s not actually true.

I should be doing other things.

Right now my mind is drifting through all kinds of things. There’s sort of a theme, it’s all kind of connected. But there’s a randomness to my brain right now. Perhaps getting this stuff out of my head will help clear the static.

I could do with a massage, but I don’t want to spend the money and gamble on yet another massage person. I could change my mind but for now nahhh.

Justice 2bpblogspot.I was writing a post about the justice system, the news, Biden’s corruption, and lamenting that I’ve gotten bored by all of it.

Then I realized it’s not boredom. It’s overload, disappointment, anger, fatigue, and I just want it all to stop.

I haven’t felt like this since Obama’s second term. I felt so disenfranchised & the government was not representing vast swaths of the American People.

I felt lied to, and generally hopeless. I was genuinely looking for another country to move to. I was investigating asking for asylum. It wasn’t that I hated my country, It was that my country felt more and more like it hated me.

Obama hope poster1 1615971418935_1783f670338_original ratio.Jerry was happy, and pointed out that part of what I was feeling may have been the employment situation. He asked me to be patient and keep working toward getting a job. I told him that me getting a job in California was becoming more impossible every day and asked that he consider moving to another state.

He agreed, then I got the job in San Diego.

That job did me more emotional harm than I realized.

Obama Change poster.

A lot of the bosses were vindictive and needlessly cruel. The job provided some income but was honestly not a place I should have stayed. Looking back, that place may have set me up to fail with them from the beginning. It certainly instilled in me a major mistrust about any future employer.

These days, with the pronoun police, DEI, and all the other non productive work rules. I might not even be employable. What the hell happened to just going to work, doing your job, and going home? When did that philosophy get chucked in the bin?

Cubicle9 grid.

I was looking for a job during my time in San Diego but didn’t get any traction. Then they laid us all off, & guess what? Employment wise I got fucked again trying to do the right thing.

Working in San Diego, I did get an opportunity to watch a cross section of people react to Trump being elected. Initially I thought maybe things would get better. I was mistaken. The company enacted more draconian rules and those rules while directed at “everyone” were only enforced against white males.

Selfish boss meme.

The guy that had to lawyer up so that he could take allowed company paternity leave, was epic. The company tried to deny him leave that had been pre-approved 5 months before. As if he could stop his child from arriving. Their excuse was they were short handed because 3 women had gone out on stress leave.

The guy’s attorney presented that the company staffing issues were not the fault of the father to be & that effectively the company had entered into a separate employment contract with him 5 months before. The company attempting to re negotiate the contract 1 month before it was to be executed simply because it was no longer convenient for the company imposed a hardship on the guy that was unfair. The court agreed.

Perfectionist boss meme.

The guy took his 6 week paternity leave. While he was out, the company revamped corporate policy to remove paternity leave as a benefit for our department. I guess they wanted the virtue signaling credits, but on the down low no man, especially no white man was supposed to use the perk.

The company also couldn’t keep a director of our department for more than six months. One director came in for 6 maybe 8 weeks and stopped his cross country move. He & his husband chose instead to stay in Texas. No-one ever got a straight story about that one. The last week or two with that Director, it was obvious that he was angry. In one angry conversation that echoed through the office he said his hands had been tied from the beginning and that wasn’t what he’d signed on for.

I don’t know if any of this was a response to Trump, I do know that 80% of the staff was constantly bitching about stuff the media said Trump said, but actually hadn’t. The higher ups int he company seemed to be really pissed off about anything & everything all the time. 

Facts didn’t matter, truth didn’t matter, and dismantling one lie or misrepresentation simply led to people seizing on the next media lie or misrepresentation.

I will never forget the customer phone call I got after Trump was elected. It was a person from Canada who said, “My condolences regarding your election.”

It might have been at that moment that I first thought the world was going mad. On the plus side, the Canadians got Trudeau. (Vengeance is a dish best served cold.)

I try to look at the brighter side of the situation. When those assholes laid me off, it meant that I had time to visit my mother in Florida, see my Brothers, see my step mother, and spend the little remaining time Jerry had, with him. Jerry’s death came out of the blue. There’d been signs for a while, but like everyone I thought we’d have more time together. I’m glad that I was with him, not working at some other shithole company god knows where.

Black lives matter protest nyc.Flash forward to the goings on of today and it’s all too much. I’m overloaded with crap from all sides and that means I’ve been reading, watching, or listening to the news or social media too much.

I feel the same despair that I felt during Obama’s reign. Once again I feel that there is no place for me, and this time, that feeling is worse than before. Obama’s motto was “Hope & Change” at the beginning, at the end of his term I secretly thought “Hopeless and changed”. 

Then, as now, I wanted to just disappear, to walk away from all the noise and confusion, the politics, and stupidity. At that time my opinion of humanity in general was one of disdain and that a meteor strike couldn’t happen soon enough. The intervening years have left me more convinced that an extinction level event would be a welcome occurrence.

O DTE ENERGY POWER OUTAGE SOUTHEASTERN MICHIGAN facebook.This morning a few minutes before 6AM the power went off. Had it just gone off, I probably would have slept through the event and woke up to a dark house, or maybe woke up when the clock on the stove chirped.

It didn’t work out that way. The power thunked 6 times, (chirping the stove clock each time,) and that woke me up. Then I thought of the electronics, the NAS, the PlayStation, the smart lights, and all the other devices. None of these devices like having the power stutter off & on like this.

That realization woke me up. I walked around the house flipping power strips off so that Edison’s follies didn’t royally screw me. The NAS was already going to require my running a maintenance routine on it, since the power dropped while it was powered up. Nonetheless I protected it from further power surges and god knows what was coming down the line. 

I was annoyed but not angry. Damage was already done so no reason to get spun up, just gotta deal with it. Then I went back to bed. Jessie was stretching across the bed but allowed me a small corner of space. 

It was at this point that I noticed the predawn silence. The sun was cresting the hills but we were still in shadow. Without all the machines running, the silence was really nice. Jerry’s pocket watch was ticking on my night stand, but there wasn’t a droning of machinery.

It was nice & I fell asleep after briefly wondering if the power had gone out due to an EMP bomb from Russia or Iran. Given the way the power was thunking, it could have been 5 or 6 EMPs and the country was toast.

Ah well, nothing I could do about it, so a nice nap claimed me. I’d do what needed to be done when I woke. Strangely, that nap was more restful than my night’s sleep.

I woke when the power came back on. The stove clock chirped about an hour later.

Since then I’ve reset clocks and devices and thought to myself, perhaps I need to simplify my life in significant ways.

What do I really need? Perhaps a better question is what do I want & actually need? How much crap do I have that is pointless? That thinking extends to non-physical things as well. Things like politics and trials and the news in general. Do I really need this blog? What do I care about and what future do I want to paint for myself?

Burned down house ruins.There are tons of mementos of day life here, my life with Jerry, and my whole life. Those I’ll keep but in reality if I’m just going to pack them away in a box and never see them, then maybe I don’t need to keep them.

Alternatively, if I thin everything out to the point that what I keep is actually stuff I’ll use or that I want to dust occasionally on a book shelf, that’s probably good. I need to be lighter in all kinds of ways. I was super light, after the fire I’d like to get back to that place. Although in a less dramatic fashion.

Posted on

Another one of those days

I keep trying to write, but the threads I weave together turn into a tangled mess.

I’m giving up on any intelligent or thoughtful post for the day.

I even scanned the news. That might have been a mistake!

The cacophony of stupid becomes more overwhelming each day. I personally find it supremely irritating and it feeds an anger that I can’t really describe.

I suppose I need to lower my standards on human behavior.

I worry that if I lower standards too much more then I’ll see humanity in general as nothing more than vermin infesting an otherwise beautiful world.

If I go too far down that particular path, I’ll be joining Thanos in the belief that losing 50% of the population (or more) would be a good thing. That kinda puts me in the WEF / Bill Gates / Soros / camp. If you believe in conspiracy theories that suggests those guys are actively trying to kill off a large chunk of humanity.

I find myself wondering often, if humanity is in fact devolving. I’ve run into a few men who paid for abortions, not because they didn’t want children or that the child was conceived at an inconvenient time. They paid for the abortion because they realized having a child with that particular woman would weaken their family line genetically.

So yeah, they were screwing the wrong woman, for the fun of it but not to have children with. Once they made that connection, they were a lot more careful about the women they slept with and birth control.

They started looking for a woman whose genetics would compliment and enhance their lineage. They sought to sire prettier, smarter, stronger, children.

One guy said, “Anybody can sire a moron. Men should be a lot more choosy about who we dump a load in. Men need to stop feeling like the woman is doing them a favor by sleeping with them. We need to recognize that our seed, physicality, personality, and earning potential, are much more valuable than we’ve been taught. Men need to realize that our sleeping with a particular woman is just as much a favor to them.“

It’s interesting that the men who think like this have beautiful, smart children and their marriages appear to be very happy.

Perhaps more men should’ve chosen wisely before siring children who are clearly defective.

Just a thought…