Between today’s news, yesterday’s news, the news of the last year, the news of the last ten years, life, the universe, and everything, simply starting to scream is high on my list of things to do. I’m just not sure that I could stop.
I did get a haircut, and I can hear train whistles. I guess things don’t TOTALLY suck.
Tomorrow might be better. That possibility is what gets me up every morning. And prevents a 5150 hold. Well, that and Diet Coke (my caffeine substrate of choice).
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul, Photography, Politics
Especially when you’re eating ice cream. Ice cream is by definition a perfect good. How come it can be turned into a nightmare, a horrible, painful thing by brain freeze?
This is proof to me that there is no kind, benovolent, loving, omnipotent God or Creator. There may be a Creator, or we may be in a simulation of some sort, but there’s no omnipotence involved. There are any number of errors or bugs in the system.
On the ultimate scale of horrors, the top billing of course goes to things like childhood cancer or worms that have their larva grow in your eyeballs and blind you for life. Not to mention the existance and ongoing lack of consequences for a whole raft of current US politicians. Despite all of the press it gets in Bible, we’re not seeing nearly enough smiting these days.
But having had a busy, stressful day and persevering and getting things accomplished and rewarding yourself with some quality ice cream, only to be BLINDED by unstoppable pain after like three bites, that’s gotta be up there on the list. And it’s very personal. (Not that eyeball larva isn’t…)
I’d like to talk to the manager, please!
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Moral Outrage, Paul, Photography, Politics, Religion
I don’t know who created the meme. The images are obviously from “The Princess Bride,” one of the finest movies ever made.
Sunday nights tend to lean towards “ugly & depressing” these days, often because A) the weekend that I was hoping would be restful and relaxing was anything but, and B) because the week ahead is expected to be Hell on Wheels, with Monday earning its reputation as “MONDAY! 🤮🤯🤬😐”
The news feeds from last night and pretty much one thing after another all day today didn’t help, AT ALL.
One foot in front of another, having each others’ backs, we will all get through it.
But would it freakin’ kill the Universe / God / Karma / {insert deity name here} to cut us just a little bit of slack? Really?
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Memes, Paul
About sixteen months ago, I wroteTake Advantage Of Your Opportunities When You Get Them:
At our old house on Pomelo, the streets were flat and we were about five houses down the street from the elementary school, so we would have the ice cream truck by almost daily during the summer, every year. I would always hear it and always be busy, so I always figured that I would go out and catch the truck and get a random, spontaneous ice cream treat some other time in the future. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Next week, maybe. Next month…
Six years ago we moved to this house, which is at the top of a really long, steep hill that the ice cream truck might or might not be able to actually get up, and we’re nowhere near a school. Thus, NO ice cream trucks here. EVER.
And something made me think about that and realize that I had the opportunity almost daily for DECADES and I almost never took advantage of those opportunities. And now I’m out of luck.
Something else to check out when we’re shopping for the Forever Home. And you can bet if I find out that we’re on a regular path for an ice cream truck, I’ll be dropping everything and sprinting out for an ice cream sandwich when I hear that tinny, electronic circus tune. If I happen to be in the middle of a work Zoom meeting? C’est la vie! A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do! I’ll be older and wiser the next time.
Today it happened. Fortunately, I was not in the middle of a work Zoom meeting.
While I’ve never heard an ice cream truck on our street before in the past 4+ months, this afternoon the sound was unmistakable. Tinny, electronic Christmas music.
I do not normally have my wallet or any money on my person when I’m working from home and time was short (our block only has six houses on each side, so he didn’t have far to go and head back out) so I broke the land-speed record getting to the bedroom on the other side of the house, grabbing my wallet, and sprinting out the front door. Fortunately, some kids from next door had slowed him down.
Mr. Reyes’ van has seen better days and looks like it’s been ridden hard and put away wet more than once. But it was chock o’ block full of frozen goodness, EXACTLY the way that I remembered it from my childhood. It was practically an out of body experience.
I got a Blue Bunny Chips Glaore! Cookie Sandwich, 300 calories, 12g of fat, 15mb of cholesterol, and 46g of carbohydrates, all of them delightful. For the Long-Suffering Wife I grabbed a Blue Bunny Drumstick. I asked the driver (perhaps Mr. Reyes himself?) to remember us and come back soon, I would be listening for his signal.
Then, planning for the future, since I almost missed him while sprinting through the house for my wallet, I grabbed some singles and have designated them as “Emergency Ice Cream Truck Money.”
When singles pile up I normally stuff them in a drawer and try to remember to take them when I travel for tips, but now I have a stack right where I can grab them quick and head out the front door. My office is at the front of the house, right by the front door, so when he comes back, next time I’ll be ready.
Just because it’s a simple, fondly-remembered experience from childhood doesn’t mean that the adult can’t stack the deck to make it successfully happen again!
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Forever Home, Paul, Photography
Mondays! Am I right? Ho, ho, freaking ho, Merry freaking Christmas!
If I’m letting my brain burble for a moment and I’m surfing through videos of sunsets and planes and loons and wild critters and so on on Instagram and you and your mind-numbingly STUPID product interrupt my flow with an ad, I will hate you with the white-hot fire of a million suns.
If on top of that the audio on your ad starts with, “Whoever invented this deserves a raise!” then I hope that they’re excavating a whole new level of Hell for you and I hope you’re there soon.
If the audio on your ad starts with “How did it take until 2025 for someone to figure this out…” then I’m wondering why YOU didn’t figure it out and get insanely filthy rich last year, so YOU get the next level of Hell underneath that one.
If the audio on your ad starts with both, I will break the land speed record hitting the “mute” and “delete” buttons and I will make a voodoo doll of you to make sure that every time you think about sex you get kidney stones instead.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Farce, Paul, Video
We all know what it is, that time and space between Christmas and New Year’s, when especially in terms of work and our daily lives and schedules, we’re all just sort of drifting freely and aimlessly.
What day is it? What day of the week? Do you know without checking your phone or smart watch? Even when it tells you, do you believe it?
Did you have one day off this week, two, or more? Did you have off last weekend, work Monday, off Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, yesterday was a toss up, back at work for one day today, off for two more days this weekend, back for one day on Monday, then do it all over until next Thursday when the new work year smacks us like a wet mackeral across the face? Or did you take three or four strategically placed vacation days and end up with two full weeks off?
The pressure of Christmas decorations and cards and presents is all gone, but it’s days before we can celebrate the New Year. Even the old ways are gone, when we could lean on the NFL schedule with games on Thursday Night, Saturday, Sunday, Sunday Night, and Monday Night while the NBA filled up Chrstmas Day – all gone with games (including my beloved Chiefs) on Wednesday, Christmas Day, and damn near every other day all week.
Chaos, pure and simple.
Tonight I realized that the chaotic space-time continum disturbances were working in reverse, leaking upstream into the physical systems that I was using to keep track of my position in the timeline. I have my meds set up in advance for convenience, and I can also use them as a reminder of where I am in the week. Unless of course I’m so wacked out that I forget to take my meds, and then this simple system starts giving me inaccurate feedback.
I might be doomed.
I blame 2024. Stupid fucking 2024.
Filed under Critters, Deep Thoughts, Paul, Photography
Yesterday while taking down the Halloween decorations, I found an odd little lump or pod in the front yard.
Hand for scale.
It stood out and I’ve never seen one like it before, so I was curious. Was it some sort of larva or bug? Some piece of scat or critter poop? No clue! It seemed to be dry and light, but that’s about all I could tell.
Then today when I was bringing in the weekly groceries, I found another.
Now that I was alert to their existence, I found a third one.
And a fourth on the driveway.
This one has some sort of a stem on the left side, and it’s in a huge pile of debris from the Italian cypress trees along the side of the garage, needles and small branches blown down by that tremendous wind storm here earlier in the week. And there’s the clue that solved the mystery!
I did a Google search for “Italian Cypress seed pods” and got this:
I don’t see any on the eight or ten trees we have growing there, but it’s obvious that’s what they are and where they come from. Mystery solved!
Next question – can I grow new trees from these seeds? One thing about many of the houses we’re looking at in the High Desert is that they’re a bit on the barren side from a landscaping perspective. Almost all have fencing, mostly chain link, but it would be really nice to line those long fences with Italian Cypresses eventually, both for privacy reasons and for esthetic reasons. If these four seed pods or pine cones are full of viable seeds, can I get a stack of small pots and potting soil and start my own personal forest now, then have them ready to go (albeit small) for transplant when the Willett Forever Home is secured?
Why, yes, I can!
My own little minion/Ent legion! It might not be as straightforward as winning the lottery and paying a gardener or landscape designer to buy them from a nursery and plant them for me, but it will probably be more interesting.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Forever Home, Paul, Photography
When bored, I will sometimes flip through videos on Instagram and the other social media sites, and since the algorithms will feed you more of what you have already liked, I tend to get a lot of videos of roller coasters, bunjee jumpers, skydivers, BASE jumpers, and so on.
That’s the feeling tonight. Or, as the meme my daughter shared said, “Srong night-before-Helm’s-Deep vibes today.”
Fledgeling birds learn to fly by leaping and having faith that they’ll figure out the flying thing before they get killed. I’m optomistic by nature. I want to believe that we’re not staring into THE abyss, just maybe AN abyss. Maybe this time we’ll learn to fly before we crash and burn and die.
But I remember 2016. I remember after the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape and the mocking the handicapped video and the porn star payoff and all of the THOUSANDS of other offensive, disgusting, ignorant things that TFG did, any one of which would have permaently eliminated him from the possibility of public office, and then after he left office in 2020 the top secret documents and all of the illegal activities he’s been caught doing and the coup on January 6th, my god, THE COUP! And yet he’s still here and there are ways for him to win and I never, EVER thought that he could win to begin with and now I swear I’ve got PTSD from being exposed to him for all of these years.
And just about when I’m about to have another panic attack thinking about another 4 years of him, or more likely 4 weeks of him and then who know how many years with Vance and all of the Nazis behind Project 2025 and the horrors that are lurking, I think about how incredibly ANGRY women seem to be now. And kids, the generation that are voting for President for the first time, who grew up with active shooter drills every month the same way we used to have tornado drills in Kansas City.
Back on August 18th, when the Democratic campaign was energized and reinvigorated by Harris’s entry, I went on http://www.270towin.com and created my “aggressive & hopeful” map.
If I’m in my good head, if I’m not listening to the demons of my TFG PTSD, the only thing I would change tonight is that I think Iowa will turn blue. I think it will be something like 456-82 to Harris. But I’m mentally prepared (I hope) to be more disappointed than I’ve ever been in my entire life.
Get out there and vote tomorrow if you haven’t voted early. In so many ways, this truly could be the end of the world as we know it.
I’m really not feeling so fine.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Politics
And on into September…
Sometimes your phone will even take pictures of that next step, without telling you or without being asked to. Not sure why Skynet became aware at that moment or needed that picture, but something triggered it. Perhaps it was just a random static electrical charge triggering the phone accidentally, caused in turn by cosmic rays entering the atmosphere high over Los Angeles and impacting a memory chip in my phone after first going through my skull and killing the neuron that held the memory of my 3rd grade best friend’s name.
Perhaps.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Photography
Two weeks ago I “glitched” and missed posting because I was working late to hit my payroll deadline. Tonight is more of the same, with a re-listen for the 9,831,573th time to “Hamilton.”
And suddenly it’s 23:35. Isn’t there something else I need to get done?
And, of course, let’s not forget the emergency return visit to the dentist because a big chunk of the temporary crown I have (following three root canals and oral surgery) decided today was the day to fall off, snap in two, and leave a gaping hole in my head.
It fell off when I was eating a freaking banana! Nuts? Cereal? Caramel? Steak? All of the things I’ve been told not to eat with a temporary crown for weeks and weeks? None of them were my downfall, but a freaking banana caused a warp core breach in my mouth.
I figured Karma owed me one, so I bought lottery tickets from the liquor store next to the dentist’s office. We’ll see how that works out.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Health, Photography
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 