Category Archives: Politics

Hibiscus Aftermath

A few weeks ago I posted pictures of the hibiscus flowers that I had taken while putting up Christmas lights. Now that the lights were taken down, I note that the flowers did what all flowers did. And, I guess, all Christmas light displays as well.

The focus and depth of field is just a bit odd on a couple of these photos.

I like it though – let’s call it “different” or “unconventional” instead of “wrong” or “bad.”

I think that’s a lot of us today – exhausted, drooping, trying to hold on, a little bit off, fading, just trying to get by another day. That’s not wrong or bad – it’s just different. As so many have pointed out, and I’ll echo, be kind to yourself these days. There’s a lot of bad shit and it seems to be getting deeper fast – it’s okay if the best you can do is just the best you can do. And remember that everyone else’s Hell is 100% – cut everyone some slack.

Except for fascists and Nazis. (You know who I’m talking about.) Fuck them.

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No Context For You – January 10th

I hope your weekend was calm and relaxing. Somehow I don’t think the week ahead will be, on so many fronts.

I don’t think I’m really giving you the finger – think of it more as sharing one with you by accident.

Breathe.

Try to stay calm.

Try to stay safe.

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Buckle Up!

Wow.

I’ve still been busier than God all day – running an accounting department for a non-profit with an eight-figure annual budget means that this time of year is juuuuuuuust a bit hectic to begin with. And then the news alerts keep coming in making my phone sound like a pinball machine…

Here’s something I read from someone I trust (over on the social media side you’ll recognize her as someone I’ve been following and re-posting for about five years or more) and it explains a lot of what’s going – it’s an Extinction Burst.

So the next couple of weeks, i.e., the next eleven days in particular, could get very “interesting.” And by “interesting” I mean that there’s a chance that it could get “dangerous.” Even if it doesn’t come to that, it will most certainly be stressful and there will be moments when our lives might fill up with anxiety.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other.

Be smart. Be safe.

Breathe. Drink water. Get some exercise.

If you find yourself getting sucked into the crazy, it’s okay to turn it off. Listen to some music. (Probably not “Hamilton” or “Le Miz” right at the moment, if you know what I’m saying.) Read a book. Bing “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.” (There’s probably crying involved with that, but it’s the good kind.) Watch the Chiefs march toward back-to-back Super Bowls.

Oh, yeah – wear your mask. Stay home whenever you possibly can. Isolate. Wash your hands. Don’t forget that in addition to the attacks on our brains and our psyches, there’s a pretty significant attack on our physical wellbeing going on.

I want all of you here, healthy, probably happier, on February 1st. And December 31st. And onward.

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Filed under Health, KC Chiefs, Paul, Politics

Hair

Because I’m still too irate to speak rationally about yesterday’s events (i.e., the attempted coup at the Capitol by the “President” and his cult) to speak without massive amounts of screaming and obscenities (which I prefer to keep off of this site and use on social media instead) I’ll instead blather on for a few seconds about something else that’s been catching my attention the last few days while my brain is trying to revolt and not hear any more horrors.

Hair.

Now, one might think that given my preferred hair style, i.e.:

…and the way I accomplish it in these now nearly ten months of quarantine and lockdown:

…that hair wouldn’t be that big of a deal. After all, how hard could it be to just buzz it down to fuzz? (“BUZZ FUZZ!!!” Sorry, Paul’s brain is experiencing issues…) You cut it all down to one uniform, short length and it all grows back and stays pretty uniform and then at some point you repeat the process.

Right?

Apparently not.

There are either some assumptions in there that I’m not figuring out or my cranial follicles are conspiring to make me insane. Since the rest of the Known Universe is demonstrably working to make me insane, I suspect the latter.

But, what in hell am I talking about?

Well, first of all, let’s talk about the hair around my ears. (And you thought this was going to be boring!) That’s usually my number one indicator of when I need a new haircut since when it gets long enough it starts to tickle and bother me. Now, just a couple of weeks after a haircut, when I was very, very careful to buzz everything down to a uniform length, the hair above my right ear is long enough to be tickling and bugging me – but not my left ear or anywhere else. In fact, it’s still pretty short everywhere else.

Then there’s this SPOT up near the top of my head where out of nowhere in the last three or four days it’s had some kind of bizarre growth spurt and it’s about three times longer than anywhere else. I know for a fact that it was all cut when I last conned the clippers but now out of the blue it’s just almost freakishly long in this one little patch.

WHY? I thought that the pace of hair growth would be pretty uniform, but that’s apparently wrong. Or, again, conspiracy plus Universe equals insanity.

And don’t even get me started on my eyebrows. I believe it was John Scalzi who once referred to his as the “Thufir Hawat starter set.” That’s the track I’m on.

Is it an age thing? Am I doomed to spend the rest of my years unexpectedly sprouting in odd places?

Whatever. Maybe I’ll just start shaving it entirely again. I tried that once and found that it was bizarre (particularly the part down at the end, the incident with the towel) and too much work to maintain. But faced with this madness, it might be the lesser of two evils.

And why are there always only two evils?

Wasn’t this better than talking about politics?

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Filed under Paul, Politics, Random Blatherationings

Did I Miss Anything Today?

Just yelled an obscenity as I realized it’s 23:52 and I haven’t posted today. I’ve been hunkered down with year-end and month-end deadlines from Hell.

Did I miss anything today? Anything exciting going on in the world?

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Monster Movie

He tweeted this, she finally did that, and at last over two weeks after everyone else on the planet with any contact with reality had declared Biden to be the election winner, we’re starting to see the transition given the green light. It’s insane that it took this long, and it appears the attempted coup is still going to be played out until the bitter end by the cult, but it’s another big step to being where we can exhale at last and realize that in fifty-nine days it might actually be over.

But…

Maybe it’s just PTSD. Maybe we’ve just had our emotions and fears assaulted for four years and we’re not capable of being hopeful and upbeat in an honest and healthy way. Or maybe we’ve just seen this plot in too many horror movies.

But even after you’ve blown the Terminator up, he comes back. Even after you freeze him in liquid nitrogen, the thaws. Even after you crush him in machinery, he just pulls off an arm and keeps coming. Even after you blow that honkin’ huge hole in him and drop him into the pit of molten metal…

Is he really dead?

We’ve done all of that. We’ve killed the monster, dismembered the body, buried each small piece in a deep grave covered in salt and holy water with a wooden stake through it, and…

…why is there still twenty minutes left in the movie? Or, in this case, fifty-nine days until our new Attorney General can start serving arrest warrants?

When do we get to relax? Oh, right, we can’t, there’s COVID…

SHIT!

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Adrenaline

The good news, of course, was that as expected over the last couple of days, Day Five of the 2020 election finally got enough votes counted in Nevada and Pennsylvania (Georgia and Arizona are still up in the air, even now) to push Joe Biden over 270 electoral votes and the networks and news organizations both domestically and internationally all declared him the President-elect.

Of course, the whiny, spoiled, guanopsychotic man-baby in the White House who made the last years such a shit show is threatening to sue everyone and everything and never, ever concede defeat. But so far there’s not a single shred of evidence that he has a single fact to back up his insanity (pretty much like every other day of his regime’s atrocities for the last four years) so I don’t see that going far.

In the relief and realizing that we had been holding our breath for days and days and days (“I’m going to hold my breath until either I or Georgia turn blue” was one comment I saw), there was a tremendous release of adrenaline in the celebrations. Watching the outpouring of joy across the country made me truly realize just how much stress we had all been under. Even though it’s not over, I think we can see the finish line from here. Please, sweet baby Jesus, let us be seeing the finish line from here…

An hour after getting that great news, because of course life has to be a freaking roller coaster ALL THE TIME, I got this on my phone:

Again, the adrenal gland is designed for speed over accuracy, that whole “better to ask forgiveness” thing in a wetware implementation. The brain took a second to go, “Oh, his phone just got triggered and went off after detecting an ‘accident’ because he’s riding roller coasters at that theme park there.” (See, I told you it has to be a freaking roller coaster ALL THE TIME!) I’ve had my iWatch detect an ‘accident’ when I was hammering on something and set off my phone’s “ARE YOU OKAY??!!” response. And yes, that’s what happened and he’s fine.

But between the stress of this entire week and the stress of this year and the release of relief and then this shot of adrenaline, well… I’m sure there are a fair number of you out there who will agree that the whole country could really, REALLY use a good night’s sleep.

Sleep in tomorrow, forgive yourself any tasks that you think are critical and don’t get started early enough. Skip church if that’s your thing, or at least allow yourself to be late. God will understand – tell him I said it was okay. If you have to watch the 10:00 football games (the Chiefs are an early game tomorrow, damn!) maybe watch it from bed instead of after being up and running around doing errands and housework for four hours already.

EGBOK – Everything’s Gonna Be OK!

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Filed under Family, Politics

2020 Election Day Five

We’re in Hell, aren’t we?

Thank god we’re getting all of the really good memes out of this. And Gritty, the mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, is our new national hero.

Yet another one of those occasions when I would probably have a much easier time of it if I simply didn’t give a damn.

Maybe tomorrow. I mean, really, second grade math says that when you get to 99.99% of the votes counted, there can only be maybe 1,000 to 5,000 left, and someone has a 40,000 vote lead, you can decide who won, right?

Maybe tomorrow.

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No Context For You (November 05)

Day Three of the 2020 US Election FROM HELL!

How are we all doing? I’m still breathing, but the stress, the uncertainty, the sore shoulder, the swarm of deadlines coming at me like locust, and the bad piece of salmon tonight are taking their toll. Still, dare I say it, it could be worse.

I don’t think we’re QUITE going to get to the point tonight where the networks will declare Biden the new President-elect – but I have no doubt that it will happen. The math is too straightforward and there are way, way too many ballots still to be counted, the vast majority of which are still coming in for Biden. It’s just a matter of time.

So while I crash and burn and go to bed, have a picture of…something…

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The Day After – Maybe

Four years ago I was still stunned but trying to regain my psychological balance. Humor, sarcasm (I tried to spell that “scarcasm” and it occurs to me that it might not be that inaccurate), and snark seemed to be my primary weapons (BIG surprise:)

When in doubt, do something really outrageous responsible, insane adult-like, and over the top mundane! That’s the way to stick it to the Man be boring as dishwater! George Carlin My mother and Abby Hoffman Sister Mary Thecla would be proud!

Well, this time around it’s better, in large part because what my brain and about a zillion pundits had said would happen has and a shit-ton of mail-in ballots got counted and more states started getting declared for Biden and very few for Beelzebub and as of the moment we need one more state of four outstanding to fall for Biden and it’s over. Well, except for the bazillion lawsuits and the threat of martial law and an actual coup…

So let’s all breathe. Drink some water.

Let’s watch something fun and/or funny – we watched the “David Byrne’s American Utopia” special on HBO (fourth viewing for me), then I caught the last 2/3 of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” which was funny and wonderful, then I caught the last 2/3 of “Good Will Hunting” which was gut-wrenching and wonderful.

Tomorrow may or may not have answers. But we’ll get through it. Maybe we’ll even go to space again tomorrow – there’s a SpaceX satellite launch scheduled, you can watch online in the afternoon.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of the almost-full-ish moon and Mars from Sunday night, through some high clouds. It was taken with my iPhone and a nasty blue lens flare from the super bright moon edited out in Photoshop, but it’s still a pretty cool photo for an iPhone 8. I’m trying a new app (Halide) that someone recommended for über low light and astrophotography.

We’ll get through this, together.

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