I'm Moving!

 

I'm moving! I am either moving out of here (blogspot) or moving into here (SubStack). If you are reading this, please update your link to go to the SubStack. I will try and publish both places for a bit. If you are reading this on SubStack, welcome to the new abode! I was looking for a new neighborhood for this blog for a little while. I have been using blogger/blogspot since before I met Jen. So, it's been something like twenty years. (I am SO OLD!) In that time the platform has made very few updates. It's a blog platform, right? Just how many improvements can one expect? In that time WordPress came along, and it looked like a pretty good platform until it tried to be everything to everyone and got overly complex for the average Mommy blogger. Maybe that's why blogger held steady. They had a minimal product that seemed to work (I've been using it this long!), and didn't see the need to mess with it and mess it up.

From the other end, the web hosts like GoDaddy and Wix made their site creation, no-code interfaces better to accommodate your average Mommy blogger and many others. I, though, still wasn't finding the right mix of a true blogging platform with the additional functionality that blogger now seems to stubbornly refuse to do. Blogger is like one of those really old GitHub projects that you stumble upon that still has some utility, but when you email the developer of it, they hardly recall even what you are talking about. (I realize only a fraction of my audience will get that reference.)

Then last night, like around two or three a.m. I was scrolling through things, per usual, ... Actually, I am determined to write the truth here (and in a bit of irony, I am listening to Jesus Christ Superstar and Carl Anderson just sang the line, "And they'll hurt you if they think you've lied."), the truth was I had been on pornhub and in the few moments of lucid thought that I had after was wondering just how much these women and couples are getting for creating content for pornhub. Not much it turns out. Seven cents (What ever happened to the cents sign on a keyboard?) per thousand views. Hey! Let these thousand strange men watch you have sex for two minutes, and we'll give you a nickel and two pennies!

Well, I had my white rabbit in my sights and had to follow him into the hole of just how much content creators make. I read how content creators keep 90% of their subscriptions on this thing called Substack. I had heard of Substack but didn't know anything about it really. I hadn't really looked into it -- "Substack" sounds too much like a site we use in software development called "Stack Overflow", and like a cola drinker loyal to my brand I really didn't even want to taste the competition. But the article also said that these content creators were mostly newsletter writers. Do people read newsletters still? In fact, Substack is a platform for blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and newsletters.

So I'm moving.

I'm also changing addresses. This truly isn't a way to avoid my upcoming jury duty, though if I can get things done before June (Update: It’s all taken care of, and I am officially a Floridian now!), that will be an added bonus. I'm "moving" to Cape Canaveral. First of all, the state of Colorado stole a ridiculous amount of money from me last year. (Taxation is theft!) Florida doesn't have state income tax. And guess what. They still have roads and schools and libraries down here.

Please don't email your arguments about why taxation isn't theft (except that it is almost exactly like theft in every meaningful way).

Second, my mental health is much better here than in Colorado. There are several reasons why I think this is the case, but one of them is that I simply “feel better” down here. Perhaps that is because it brings me back to my childhood and visiting my grandparents in Ft. Lauderdale. That was a time before bills and appointments and work!

“What about Jen?” I’ve been asked. Her father and boys and work, particularly the seniority, are all in Colorado yet. I don’t intend on seeing any less of her, though it may involve a little more back and forth travel. That is, if I even spend less time in Colorado when it really comes down to it. Personally, when we got the place down here, I had hoped for about a 60-40 split between Colorado and Florida. In reality, it was more like 80-20. I am hoping that I can do about 60-40 between Florida and Colorado, but it definitely won’t be 80-20 – Certainly not during the summer months! We’ll see how much our blood thins out! Maybe it ends up 60-40 in favor of Colorado anyway, because being away from Jen over the past couple months has been difficult. That said, I have certainly gotten a lot written! Look for more.

Love is Awful

 

Saving Mary

The challenge this time was to write a thriller/suspense in 100 words or fewer. The story had to include the action of drinking beer and the word "beat" (or some form of that word). I love the challenge of trying to get a story created with such a minimal word count. It isn't beautiful writing. There just aren't enough words to put much window dressing on it. Anyway, here is "Saving Mary".

----

That last shot hit him like a sledgehammer. His head swimming and vision blurred, Tony missed left. He adjusted his stance, adjusted his aim. Just left again! One last shot to save Mary. Tony burped and tasted tequila.

"One dart to close out the 18!" Marco laughed, took a swig of beer, and gave Mary a wink.

What a stupid bet -- Marco's bike against a night with Mary. He had wanted that Supersport. He exhaled and threw.

“Damn! Clutch making that double to beat me.” Marco handed Tony keys, while Mary kissed him trying to hide her disappointment.

We ALL Die in the End

Another thought experiment. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and I'm an "advocate" (INFJ, apparently). I'm here to help you, so please indulge me.

Imagine you have cancer. The doctor tells you you have a 90% chance of dying in the next five years. How will you live your life. How does your life change?

Imagine a different prognosis: You will die within the next five years. No bout a doubt it. It doesn't even need to be about cancer. Maybe a gypsy fortuneteller you really respect had a premonition or a fiery bush just suddenly began speaking to you saying you were going to be called to God's side, whatever. How will you live your life? Is it different than if you have that 10% chance of living past the five-year prognosis?

Imagine you have a year tops. Now how does your life change? Would it be different if you knew you had exactly one year, like knew you had exactly 365 days to get done whatever you were hoping to do? What would you have planned for that 365th day?

How about 30 days?

What about a single day? No time to prepare. I'm not talking about the 365th day of your last year or that the governor just denied your stay of execution, and the prison canteen is about to put out the last spicy Hawaiian pizza you will ever taste because they aren't going to fly it in from Colorado like you wanted. Nope. I mean you wake up and you just know that whatever you do today you will not wake up tomorrow. How do you spend it?

Now imagine the dying person isn't you but is your parent. They're very likely to be gone in the next five years. How do you spend that time? What if you only had a year left with them? How would your life change? Or would it? Thirty days? Their last day?

What if it were your spouse? You have less than five years left together. How much time will you spend with them? Will you go somewhere together, a big trip? Would you go so far as quitting your job? What about if it were for one year? Thirty days? Do you imagine your life would change more if it were your spouse who were dying and had just a month or if it were you? What about that final day?

What about a friend, someone who means a lot to you, has been special in your life, and you don't see too often now? They have five years. Do you make plans to see them more than you had in the previous five? What if it's only a year? Do you make a special trip to see them, knowing it will probably be the last? A month? At what point do you begin telling them how much their friendship has meant to you?

About 8000 people die every day in the United States. That's a little over 330 people per hour. Five and a half every minute. None of us gets out alive.

Testes. Testes. One. Two. Three?

Just testing out a scheduled post! This was written in the early hours of the 19th and should be published in 3 days. 

Don't Trifle with all that Thrust

So SpaceX's Starship did not make it into orbit today, but nonetheless is being hailed as a success. It is definitely quite spectacular to watch it go up. I can only really imagine seeing, hearing, and feeling all those rocket engines firing. I've watched a lot of Falcon 9 launches. There are, fittingly, nine Merlin engines. I've seen a couple Falcon Heavy launches. Those are like three Falcon 9s strapped together with 27 Merlin engines. The first stage of Starship has 33 Raptor engines which deliver twice as much thrust as their Merlin counterparts. It's A LOT of thrust. Then the upper stage of Starship has another six Raptor engines. 

I have not yet seen what SpaceX is saying about the launch, but even before the launch it was being reported what a triumph this would be if the world's largest rocket even left the pad, "Other interested parties are less hyperbolic [than Elon Musk], but no less optimistic. 'As soon as that thing launches the first time, they’re going to learn so much and they’re going to be at warp speed,' says Isaacman. 'I have no doubt there will be a lot of hardware and engines just ready to go.'" I've become a big fan of the idea as stated by Mark Zuckerberg of "move fast and break things". It's fallen out of favor with some people generally, but I'm a strong believer that this is really t best way to innovate. So much will be learned -- Thousands of ways how not to build a lightbulb in a single launch.

I've been struggling with what I can only really hope is simply a mid-life crisis. Half a life spent in figuring out how not to make a lightbulb. I suppose that maybe if I knew that my life from the start was to be spent trying to create a better lightbulb, perhaps I would have made some more progress on it so far. I haven't even gotten that far in finding what it is I am really supposed to be doing with my life. Thinking about Starship, though, maybe my purpose isn't really meant to be a perfectly successful mission. Like I said to Jen tonight, I admire Elon Musk's willingness to move forward without everything being perfect. If they waited until they knew with 99.999% certainty that Starship was going to get into orbit, they would simply never end up launching anything. life isn't going to be perfect. Maybe we do the best we can and leave as much data behind for the next generation to comb through to find where things went wrong.

Jen was telling me tonight about a documentary she watched on the Cassini project. The Cassini mission to Saturn lasted twenty years, thirteen of which were spent exploring and photographing Saturn. Cassini returned almost a half-million images of Saturn and its moons. It discovered six new moons and traveled almost five billion miles. It ended it's life burning up in Saturn's atmosphere recording and sending data back all the way. It was sacrificed to the atmosphere of the planet rather than quietly landing on one of the moons so as not to accidentally pollute an environment that may hold life and may even be able to sustain human life. Cassini was a step toward life outside of our solar system. 

I have made a lot of mistakes in life. Maybe my purpose all along hasn't been how to create a better lightbulb. Maybe it is more of a data-discovery mission. I could probably write a book on how not to overcome mental illness. It isn't something to trifle with and not something to ignore. Ignoring it doesn't make it go away. I hope when I do leave this earth it can be in a rocket ship. Outside of that, I hope I can leave enough data for some forensics study to comb through and maybe shed light on what just didn't go right. And maybe have them scratching their heads muttering, "What's with all the drawings of lightbulbs?" 

A Cry for Help

You've heard that urban legend about Phil Collins and the drowning boy and the camp counselor that did nothing, right? You know, there's a camp counselor and Phil and the boys are out swimming late and one of the boys starts to drown and the camp counselor just watches him instead of helping? And then like years and years later Phil gets this guy front-row tickets to one of his shows and then puts the spotlight on the guy just as he begins to play "In the Air Tonight"? It makes for a great urban myth because we think to ourselves, What kind of monster would do that? It HAS to be fake, right? But it has just enough truth that we can ALMOST believe it. At least it has enough truth to it that when we tell our younger cousin, or he then goes and tells his little classmates, they're going to believe it. And in your mind, as a little kid you're thinking, there are some seriously messed up people out there that will watch a drowning kid just drown when it's so easy to just throw a life ring.

The book I am reading now, The Dawn of Everything, brings up this situation in relation to how we talk about egalitarian states. The authors of the book talk about throwing a life ring to someone we see struggling to stay above the surface of the water as communism in its purest form (communism as an economic system as opposed to a social system). You, the potential savior, have something I, the drowning person, need. You would certainly throw the ring even if I were someone you despised (given you had any shred of humanity in your heart), freely, of course. In that sense, we live in comparative equality, both of us come out of it with our lives. Compare this to the other extreme of negotiating a mutual price before I agree to throw the life ring in. In an absolute capitalist society, how much money would you want to extract before you threw the ring? And you could certainly extract more the closer I was to actually drowning. Probably nothing or close to, right? (Unless you were a total monster, of course.)

Now let's flip this on it's head. Suppose you are dying, but there is a treatment that could save your life. How much would you be willing to pay for that treatment? You can name any price but you have to go into debt for the part you cannot afford. What if it were your spouse dying? An elder parent? A younger sibling? A dear friend? What if it were your dog or cat? A total stranger?

How much would you be willing to pay to save your marriage? What is the maximum price a genie could extract from you to give you the gift of the job you always wanted? How much would you be willing to pay if you could instantly acquire a skill you've always wanted like to play a musical instrument or learn to surf? If you could make amends with someone who you feel wrongly despised you, is there an amount of money you would pay to be able to sit down at coffee and explain your side of the story?

Back to throwing that life ring? If you had the cure, how much would you ask of a loved one in order to save their life? A dear friend? A total stranger? If your spouse cheated on you, is there an amount of money they could pay to convince you to stay? If a friend wanted to learn a skill you knew and was willing to pay any amount of money for your time to teach it, how much would you ask? If an old friend who hurt you wanted to sit down at coffee so that they could explain their side, how much money would it cost them?

If a dear friend were hospitalized and you were asked to make a donation towards their foreseeable medical costs, how much would you donate? An acquaintance? An old high school classmate? If a friend said they were going to run a marathon to raise money for a charity you endorsed and asked you to make a donation based on mileage, what's the total you would be willing to make? Would it matter how far they planned on going, a 10k (6.2 miles) versus a marathon (26.2 miles)?

Revisiting our drowning person. How sure would you need to be that they were drowning before you helped? If you see a person choking in a restaurant at the table next to yours, how long would you wait before aiding them? Does it matter how many other people are around or at their table? What if that person WERE at your table? What if it were your spouse? Your dear friend who is there with their spouse? If a family member were having financial troubles, how much would you be willing to lend? What if it were the second or third time they came to you? What about a dear friend?

You are on a pier, a life ring nearby. You see a stranger being swept out in the current. They call out for help. How willing would you be to help? What if there were plenty of other people around? What if that person were your spouse? What if it were a dear friend? How far would you go?

My Sunrise Sermon (Read in the Voice of Jerry Seinfeld) or "What's the Deal with Easter?"

I attended not one, but two sunrise Easter services on the beach yesterday with my mother and her neighbor. I am only nominally a Christian. Do I believe Christ was a real man who taught, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?" Yes. Do I believe he died on the cross bearing the sins of the world? Okay. Do I believe he was resurrected and ascended into heaven? *Shrugs* There are much weirder things that scientists have actually discovered. (How does an election split itself in two and go through BOTH slits in the double-slit experiment until you actually try to observe it doing so, at which point it only goes through one?) So, sure. It's beside the point, to me.

I believe in the Logos, that is "The Way, the Truth, and the Light," as Jesus put it. There IS an inherent "Good" in the world and Jesus taught it, Mohammed taught it, and the Buddha taught it, each to their own audiences in their own context of place and time. I frankly really do not care how you come by the Truth, and the particulars of my own faith in it are a subject for a different blog post.

This one is about Easter and all the renewal that comes with springtime. Jennifer and I spent many years celebrating Easter in Las Vegas - Mecca of all that is Good and True - since that was the time chosen for one of our favorite events, Viva Las Vegas. There were Lenten seasons when I gave up booze, at least in some form or fashion, and then would indulge (heavily at times) once Lent finally ended. And, brothers and sisters, after a good bender like that, wanting to repent all your sins on Easter Sunday came rather easily.

But I always thought that Easter was a good time to turn over a new leaf, better even than the New Year celebration. The gyms are certainly less crowded, and it is easier to get outdoors in the better weather that April brings. It has always been time of spiritual renewal for me, and I have needed it more this year than ever before. In his homily yesterday the Catholic priest spoke of finding Jesus in those who suffer. "And you don't need to look far," he added. The sick, the poor, the lonely, the broken-hearted. Well, I'm not poor, but otherwise I feel like I am batting .750 on that score. Then he said, "Don't let yourself be caught in the cave of hatred, of anger, of loneliness, of despair." Check, check, check, and check. 

Last Thursday I was as low, as depressed, as sad, and as lonely as I think I have ever been. I wrote a journal entry filled with pain, loneliness, anger, and despair. I felt lonely and abandoned. Hollow. Weak and inadequate. Depression puts these blinders on you, so that you cannot see any light, cannot see any way out of your situation. Rolls the stone in front of the tomb. How's that for a metaphor? The difference between Thursday and that day back in mid-October was the drinking. There is liquor here in the condo, and I knew it would make me feel good, for a bit. I know, too, that it is like playing Russian Roulette with bullets in 5 of 6 chambers. AA saved my life once again. The other thing, too, is that I know now that I have a purpose. Never mind what it is just now, a topic for yet another blog post. I know too, that it is something that I need to overcome my fear and selfishness before I can set out upon it. I knew I was extremely tired and that things would look different in the light of the next day.

I took a walk that night to the beach. I returned angry and determined. Yes, angry. At myself as well as others. I have become an expert on bottling up anger, bottling up emotion of any sort. What has it done for me? Left me sad and depressed. My closest friends have either abandoned me or outright stabbed me in the back. I have let that resentment build inside of me because I am selfish. I don't need Joseph to roll the stone in front of the cave I am in. I can do it all on my own.

I took that same walk the next morning as the sun rose. The sun continues to rise, people continue to live their lives, just as they will when I have long left this earth. People continue to suffer. They continue to get sick, hungry, feel hurt, abandoned, afraid, lonely, abandoned, and shattered. People will continue to feel self-loathing, selfishness, and anger towards others -- in a dark cave with seeming no way out, waiting on some miracle.

It does not take a miracle to give those people a glimmer of light. It need not come from you quoting Scripture to them. A nice compliment can change someone's day. Reaching out to someone you have not talked with in a long time may be all it takes to keep them from spiraling into a hole they cannot dig out of on their own. Simply saying to someone, "Do you want to talk about it?" when you know they are going through a difficult time is sometimes all the help they may need.

It has been a difficult winter. I do not mean that in just the literal sense, of course. Caves are dark and lonely places, but they can feel safe and secure at the same time. The world outside of them has bears and lions (and Broncos! Oh my!), but Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha did not take their truth and wisdom and hide away with it. They lived, as humans, and literally embodied that truth. Spread light. He is risen! The sun has risen yet again! It is springtime! Hallelujah

Get Yer Peanuts Here!

There is a great produce place down here in Cape Canaveral called Mater and Tater's. It's one of the first places I go when I am down here. We have a pretty Smeg juicer down here that I am determined to get my money out of. ("Smeg" is Swedish for expensive, I believe.) So, I like hitting the produce place thinking one of these days they are going to have big bags of valencia oranges for cheap. One would think that oranges were generally inexpensive in Florida and generally very available. One would be mistaken. The latest trip to Mater and Tater's yielded no cheap oranges. There was a good selection of rather expensive, easy to peel navel oranges. There was also some grapefruit at $1.50 per grapefruit. This is excellent if you want to pay $1.50 for a glass of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. I decided that I would get two of those and make a note to sell some plasma this week.

Mater and Tater's has a discount table. The selection on this trip consisted mostly of cucumbers. I figured I'd do a quick pickle one night, so picked up four cucumbers for 17 cents or something. (Probably more like $1.50 in actuality.) The other bargain I scored was a big bag of raw peanuts for three bucks. Raw peanuts in the shell look pretty much like roasted peanuts. How different could they be? I mean, when you get peanuts from the store, do they taste roasted? You can easily tell roasted pork from unroasted pork but not so much when it comes to peanuts, so I figured, Is there really that much of a difference between the two? Friends, roasting makes a difference.

Last night I decided I was going to have some peanuts. It is probably more of a texture thing, as the roasted peanuts still taste like peanuts, just a bit more, well, raw. They aren't crunchy though. I don't normally think of peanuts as being especially crunchy anyway, but the raw ones just seemed kind of stale. Like what a stale potato chip is to a normal potato chip is what a raw peanut is to a roasted peanut. I didn't have seconds.

The good news is that it is pretty easy to roast raw peanuts in your over. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, put the peanuts in on a single layer in a baking pan, and bake them around 12 minutes. Then give them a stir and bake them another ten or so minutes. Leave them for a few minutes to let them cool and finish baking. Voila! They really tasted much better and tasted better than those you get in the store or ballpark. Part of it was the warmth, but I think a big part was the freshness. Makes me wonder how long those other peanuts have been sitting around.

So why would anyone buy raw peanuts, I asked myself. I turned to ChatGPT for the answer, as I have been doing rather frequently lately. Turns out if you are making your own peanut butter, you do want to roast the peanuts first as well, just not so long as if you are eating them out of the shell. ChatGPT suggests roasting them just 10-12 minutes before putting them in the blender with a couple tablespoons of oil and blending them smooth. If you want crunchy peanut butter, stir in some chopped up peanuts after getting your batch of smooth stuff. Also add salt to taste.

If you are making boiled peanuts, you want to start with raw peanuts. Listen, I am never, ever going to make my own boiled peanuts. I've had them. I don't know why people would want to ruin a perfectly good peanut by boiling it. If you are looking to make your own boiled peanuts, you'll have to keep looking for a recipe. I'll just tell you that you start with raw peanuts.

I am going for some sort of award for the most eclectic blog in the universe. Where else can you find peanut recipes, bad haiku, and how to create a Windows installer all amongst a good amount of teenaged angst coming from the mind of a man approaching fifty? 

Even drones can fly away

The sakura bloom

Brief clouds of extreme beauty

That abandon you.

Something Fishy

Did you know that you can bring a live fish on a plane? I had read about it, but I wasn't sure how it would go down. Because I was planning on being gone for a while, Jen wanted to keep Buck with her at home rather than me bringing him with me. I understand that. It compounds my loneliness when Jen is away and the dog isn't there. The house seems so very empty. With Jen keeping Buck I decided it would be worth it trying to get my Betta fish, named W.B. Fish, to Florida. I still had a few ghost shrimp living with W.B. that I would bring as well.

I had bought a small gallon and a half aquarium to carry my fishy friends. It isn't watertight having some slots on top to allow for air. In case TSA or the Southwest crew insisted on everything being watertight, I brought a gallon ziplock bag as well. I also came prepared with chocolate bars in order to bribe the flight attendants. "Is that a fish you are carrying in there?!" "Would you like a chocolate bar, ma'am?" I had also ordered an aquarium on Amazon to be waiting at the condo when we arrived.

Before the fish became an issue, though, I had to deal with getting through TSA without a different sort of incident. As I stuffed everything I had on my person into my carryon bag -- phone, wallet, loose change, a tin foil-wrapped cucumber -- I must have hit the emergency call button on my phone. Suddenly a loud alarm began wailing from my bag as if a nuclear reactor were melting down. Luckily the hum of the hall where security is at DIA was so loud that only myself and the kid standing next to me heard it. His eyes got like saucers as I hurriedly reached into my bag to shut it off before the phone, or someone else, dialed the local authorities. An inauspicious start to the trip.

(Actually the inauspicious start began when the flight I was trying to fly standby on went from fourteen seats available to none overnight. The rest of the flights that day also had either one or no seats available. Being all packed on already on our way to the airport, I bought what the site showed to be the last ticket on the last flight out on Saturday.)

With my phone silenced and stowed away, I got to the xray machine and held up the reusable shopping bag that held the little aquarium. "I have a fish in here!" I proclaimed. The TSA agent at the metal detector gave me a look as if this was not at all usual nor was it completely unheard of. "Hey, he's got a fish here," he said to the guy running the x-ray scanner. "Just put it through."

Could a betta survive a little zap of x-rays? Could the little ghost shrimp? I guessed we were going to find out. Before that could happen, though, an agent with a little better head on his shoulders came over. "No, no, no. He just has to show me the fish." On the other side of the scanners, I was handed the bag. Could I take the aquarium out so we could make sure the fish is alive. So I pulled it out and W.B. was still swimming around. "One agent leaned over to his more experienced counterpart. "What if the fish hadn't been so... fortunate." "Well, then he couldn't bring it through." "Nor would I want to," I added.

There was a bit of water leaking from the bag due to some sloshing that had happened, so I made my escape quickly. I had a long wait at the gate since I had shown up for the earlier flight. When we finally got lined up in Southwest's cattle call line, I heard over the P.A., "Would standby passenger Benjamin Rice please come to the podium if you are in the gate area." Aw geeze. I hadn't told anyone that I had bought a ticket and should be taken off the standby list. "I have your ticket here. All I need is your i.d." My name had rolled over onto the standby list for this later flight after a ticket was not issued for the earlier flight. I had to sheepishly admit that I had already paid for a ticket since I didn't think I would make it on standby. Live and learn.

I gave the chocolate bars to the flight attendant as I boarded. As I moved down the aisle, she came on the PA to announce that the guy "in the cool hat" had brought chocolate. I had on a dark straw hat that is of the type that can really only be worn by the beach that I was taking down. No one noticed my friend swimming away inside his grocery bag.

"Oh, chocolate! You know how it goes then. Everything on us," said the flight attendant standing in the exit row. I gave her a grin and took a spot in a window seat. The bribery concept has made its rounds on TikTok now so is no longer a secret for getting free drinks on a flight. I was looking forward now to turning down those drinks. Hopefully they wouldn't find out the real reason that I wanted to win favor was so I wouldn't get a hard time carrying on live aquatic creatures. I had made sure that I could find even on Southwest's website their policy on bringing fish aboard, though.

The flight was really uneventful other than a bit of concern with the tilt of the grocery bag on take-off and landing. When I ordered my coffee, the flight attendant asked if I didn't want anything else with it, and when she came around with snacks I was offered extra but turned it down. Of course I really am appreciative of the fact that these women and men are working jobs where they have to be away from family, pets, and home for days at a time.

Back on the ground in Orlando, I checked on W.B. and friends all of which seemed to have made it without too much problem, though they had lost about a third of the water in the process. We got into the condo late that night, all a bit weary. The box with the aquarium was waiting for us as predicted. The water in the little travelling aquarium was looking cloudy, so I added some new, conditioned water to top things off before bed.

I sadly must report that in the morning, the shrimp had not made it through the night. I suspect that the cloudiness of the water came from the new gravel in the carrier. I had rinsed it before putting it in, but perhaps not well enough. Of course there was the stress of the entire ordeal and the temperature in the condo was below ideal, but still relatively warm. No autopsy was done, however, so we are left to speculate. W.B. did come through swimmingly. My top priority for Sunday then was to get the aquarium set up, though I did take the immediate step of fishing out his deceased crustacean friends, so he wouldn't be subject to that any longer.

Exeunt, Pursued by a Bear

I need to add a little bit of context to this one as well. I started it a few nights ago, and then my class assignments took over. I'm just coming back to it now, and like anything I've written my thoughts about it have changed just over the past couple of days. I thought I would come back to it and write a lot more, but I don't think there is a lot more to say about it just now.

The title of this is probably one of Shakespeare's stage directions. It comes from yet another of Shakepeare's plays that I have not read, yet. As a former English major it is embarrassing how little of the Bard I have actually read. What's funny about the line is that there is no mention of a bear in the play prior to this. Apparently, the Bard just was having some writer's block or something trying to figure out a way to kill off the character, Antigonus. Maybe he figured he would catch up on some sleep and come back to it.

Anyway, the title really has very little to do with this post except that the death of Antigonus occurs offstage by said bear. Really I have been thinking not about The Winter's Tale nor even about a play written by Shakespeare, exactly. I have been thinking about Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstren are Dead. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Spoiler alert: they die. Stoppard, though, wrote his play that mostly takes place in the wings of Hamlet. He makes them into the main characters of the play. Indeed they are the main characters in their own respective tragedies, though much of their play occurs in the wings of Hamlet. I have been thinking about that because I have been thinking about being my own main character in my own play.

I am going to go down to Florida for a little while. I want, need, to have a bit of escape from the main action going on stage here to take a moment in the wings. I need a pause to think about the direction my life is headed and take some control, at least in my own mind, of what Act Three is going to look like, now that I have mostly coasted along in the first two acts.

I want to be the main character in the story I am writing. A friend put it to me this way before. We all should be the main characters in the life stories we are writing, I have been the main character at times. I have made some important, life-changing decisions. In high school I decided that I really wanted to go to school in France. I decided to leave the state of Michigan to go to school at Northwestern. I have proposed and been married twice. I have decided on job offers that led me to the career I have. Along with Jennifer, we decided to buy a place down in Florida. There have been smaller decisions. I have taken up surfing and bought a surfboard, for example.

There have been some life-changing decisions made for me. Those I do not want to broach here, Our main character has to face a number of adversities at times, things he or she does not have control over. The story would not be particularly interesting without them.

It is those uninteresting times that I have struggled with, the times where I have felt, not like some other person were necessarily directly affecting me, but more like I was a helpless plastic bag being borne through the city, through my life, on a breeze. Floating from one day to the next, marking time by the passage of television series that I binge. I think it was mostly those times that led me to self-destructive behaviors, actions that allowed me to take control of my life again despite their very negative consequences.

With a new medication the urge for self-destructive behavior has been blunted, but the urge to control my own life and be that main character has not. The question is, how do I row through the doldrums of life rather than simply letting the current take me where it will? I know that it doesn't matter which way the winds blow or current runs if I have no destination in mind. I think that is how others deal with the doldrums. In those relatively quiet times, other people have something to row towards. They appreciate the times when the winds are at their back, but they also appreciate the quiet times where they can row towards their destination (albeit still hard work) and take a break from tacking against the winds that blow in their faces.

I had no destination in my mind last fall. I had no destination in mind for many years before that even. Last year I weathered a tropical storm, literally and figuratively. With the storm winding down now, I again face the fact that I still have no destination. I feel very selfish for even saying that I want to chart my own course or be the main character in my own play. (Re-reading this post makes me realize how selfish it is and really how selfish this blog is even.) It is much less selfish, though, than the ways in which I tried to gain control of my life in the past. What I really need to work on is becoming more self-less. Some people get away to find themselves, and I need to get away to lose mine.

Did you know Florida has over 4,000 bears?

Hard Battles

I had posted the following on LinkedIn, thus the focus on work, but thought I might share it here too:

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

I have been reminded of that quote often in the past several days. It has come up in several completely unrelated contexts. Maybe I am just more attuned to hearing it at the moment. (Apparently, there is a bit of argument as to who said it first, which is why I did not attribute it here.)

We are all fighting hard battles, and, though I know it is difficult to believe, not all of those battles are going on at work. There are people every day who were up with a sick child all night or have some financial worry or struggling with mental health issues, who wake up and put on a happy face and come to work to deal with relatively minor issues if only to take their minds off the very heavy battles they left at home.

I am reading When Breath Becomes Air right now and amazed that someone, a doctor, knowing his time left on earth is not being counted in months decides that he is going to go back to work. I wonder what his patients thought, maybe not knowing the courage their surgeon had in even showing up that morning. "Wow! Doc looks awful!"

I especially have a lot of sympathy for those working in customer service or other customer-facing jobs. My wife is a flight attendant, and I know there are many who have to leave a sick child or spouse to leave on a three-day trip and deal with customers who have had their "lives ruined" because their flight was delayed a couple hours and now they are going to be late to the bachelor party.

Some of your coworkers, some of your vendors, the person making your Subway sandwich at lunch -- they left the heavy battles at home today. So be kind to each other.

Onwards!

"Onwards!" was a saying that Nordstrom's former CTO Edmond Mesrobian would use. It seemed pretty forced, but after hearing it enough, it gets kind of catchy.

"Move fast and break things." That is another saying. Not one of Edmond's but one that Mark Zuckerberg used at Facebook. It was kind of the subject of the final paper I just wrote for my first class of my master's program. I used it at Nordstrom and I remember a program manager saying, "Okay, but please don't try and break anything." It wasn't like we were trying to break things. The idea was to push the technology as fast and hard as possible to its breaking point. Then find what changes you can do to push it past that point.

"Move fast and break things," has fallen out of favor recently in the tech. industry. Too many people are too aware of disastrous failures like Theranos. That was so bad that its leaders were charged with felonies and Hulu made a mini-series about it. My paper argues that moving fast can work when teams are led by servant leaders and backed by ethical behavior. The examples of where "Move fast and break things," failed are either because it was tried by hardware companies that cannot recover quickly enough or because of bad ethics that permeated the company (or both).

I fully believe that a software organization that delivers small, incremental changes and is led by ethical servant leaders cannot only deliver quality products faster but can also build good citizens and have a beneficial impact to society as a whole. 

My friend, Josh Maletz, taught me what good servant leadership looks like. Servant leadership helps not just those being led and not just the organization in which it is used, but aims to help society as a whole. Research I read showed that servant leadership aligns with consequentialism, the philosophy that what is moral is that which is good for humanity as a whole. It also showed that the environment created by servant leaders inspires those being led to also become servant leaders and the effect snowballs.

[Note that at this point I realized the time was 11:53 PM MDT. I think I mentioned before that I do a lot of these blog posts within a website 750words.com that kind of gamifies sitting down to write each day. I had written a few hundred words last night and this morning, but hadn't hit the 750 word mark yet. So I switched over to write there. I include it here, misspelled words and all, to give a little insight to what a shitshow my mind can be.]

You know, I keep doing this to myself, trying to bang out my last few hundred words with little time left on the clock. Tonight I have about six minutes left to try and get in another 300 words. I am not even sure that I can type that fast, but I am about to give it a shot. Please forgive the misspellings.

I have another idea for a story. A short story this time based on the 7k I tried to run with my brother a few years back, before Covid. I wanted to get him off to a good start because I knew he wanted to do well in the race. So I started off fast. Too fast. Just about the one mile mark I got a bad charly horse in one of my calves. i tried to massage it out, but had trouble with it all through the race. I had not really trained well enough. Plus it was excrutiatingly hot! I was probably already dehydrated by that first mile.

So at that point I knew that I wasn't going to have the race that I had hoped for. All I could really do was soldier on as best I could. If you've ever run any distance that you are really not in shape for, then you will understand this next part. I began picking out milestones, saying to myself, just make it to that next tree. Just make it to that next signpost. Just make it up this hill and you can walk the rest. It was so hot that some of the milestones I chose were shade beneath the sparse treees along the roue in Fort Collins. I would say, just get to the shadow of that next tr...

[The clock hits midnight.]

e next bit of shade und3er the next tree. There were so many times ... Ugh! I missed getting in my words by like two words because the damn site would not save it. Ah well, Today (Thursday) is another day.

Okay, so here I am going to switch gears. I'll come back to the 7k story later when I write out the short story that I have in mind. For those wondering, I did finish the race. It was brutal. I am not sure that it was worth it, but Rob did well. So I guess that made it worth it. It was hellish for me, to be frank.

I want to get back to "Onwards!" though. So I just finished my first class. I had a 98.8% going into the last paper. I was about halfway done with the paper and thought I had managed my time well and then realized that I really had not done what the question asked. During this class I have had the habit of plowing forward with an assignment before reading all the assignment materials and asking any questions that I should. In the first assignment I had banged out a beautiful 2000 word essay in no time at all and then found that the assignment was for 500-700 words. Now, I don't know how someone could have answered the question being asked in fewer than 700 words, but I did spend half the time on the assignment trying to parse my ideas down to 1200 words. It turns out that I had far too many direct quotes from the sources I was citing. If I would have summarized those instead, I could have gotten down to under 700 words (maybe), but still half my wonderful ideas would have stayed on the cutting room floor. Just a couple lessons I learned from that first class.

So, I know I passed the class. I would have even had I not done the last paper. I want an 'A', though. I read through the paper late last night after putting it together. I was going to have the entire night tonight just to do the citations for it. I read it over and wanted to completely start over. I can't exactly say what was wrong with it. It just wasn't good. There were lots of little things wrong with it: it wasn't researched as well as it could have been, it was too wordy in parts and had no depth in others, and it really didn't answer the question being asked. I spent part of the night tonight re-writing it before working on the citations.

I am not a perfectionist. I understand that we are not all perfect human beings and don't expect myself to be one. I do get horribly disappointed, however, if I feel like I am not doing my very best given the circumstances. I have been feeling that way a lot lately, that I am not living up to the best person I can be. I hate feeling so disappointed in myself. I hate that I can't enjoy any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Michael Jordan once said that his achievements didn't come from his desire to win so badly. They came through his hating to lose. I understand that.

I hate so much the disappointing things that I did in the past. I ruminate on them. I can't shake them. They drive me as well. I want to run further this year. I want to write more this year. I want to stop disappointing people including myself. I want to leave this world having made one little contribution to the betterment of it, no matter how small. However, I feel like it's miserably hot and that I really have not trained for this like I should. I am picking out signposts. Make it to Mardi Gras. Make it to St. Patrick's Day. Make it to Easter. Get to the top of this hill (Christ! This is a big fuckin' hill!), and you can have a little bit of a break. What else can one do? Onwards!

The Gift of the Muse

I am starting to get the hang of this writing thing. The books I have been reading have just advised over and over that to be a writer you just need to write. Write and write and write and write some more. So, I started to, but it is just hard to be motivated when you are not writing anything good. I started making more use of this site, 750words.com. The idea behind 750 Words is to just get you writing every day. It was inspired by a book I like, The Artist's Way, in which the author advises anyone who aspires to be any sort of artist to write three pages every day. The makers of 750 words figured that was about how many words would end up on three notebook pages.

I had been using the site in the past, mostly to journal. I would get on a little writing streaks going. The site gamifies things, giving you points for writing, but more points for stringing together streaks of days of writing a little like scoring a bowling game. 

Over the past year I have been trying to write more and more. It was still mostly journaling, though I would use this other book of writing prompts when I wanted to write but could not think of anything. Of course, in September and October of last year I ran off the rails. I came back to it in November and then especially at the beginning of this year. Incidentally, it is no coincidence that my writing output has mirrored my sobriety. Knowing that I had a decent year writing last year, I have sought this year to consistently write more than the same month in 2022. And that has just been on 750 Words. I am writing other little things. I started a novel that I really have no idea where it will go, if it even does. Now I am also writing papers for school. The writing for school has been maybe too easy. Our first assignment was a paper of 500-750 words and after a couple hours I had over 2000 words! I had to spend another couple hours cutting it down in half!

I worked away at writing more and a lot of it, at least 90% was still crap or it was just journal entries that are not all that creative and not anything I want to publish, and by publish I mean even just put it in my blog, my own little hidden corner of the Internet. There were glimmers here and there though. I began entering contests, and had a modicum of success, though I was also getting to compare my writing with other more successful contest entries and getting feedback from professional editors. My writing is not as good as those other writers, but I also know that I can get better. I can get better by working at it.

So I have been working at it. I have been experimenting. I have been applying the lessons I am learning from Stephen King and others who have written books on writing. I have been reading good books and studying what is good about them. I have been reading some really crap books and noticing what is crap about them! Most of all, I have been writing, writing, and writing. It's after 1:30 AM now, and I really should be going to bed, but here I am writing.

And after all this writing and reading something begins to happen, and it happens quickly, like getting hit with Cupid's arrow. I was about to say that it is like getting hit by another car as you are making a turn onto a street and you were sure that car was not just there a moment ago. Without the whiplash, of course. It is sudden like that. It was not there a moment ago, but suddenly it is. But getting hit by a car... you know, that is not all that positive a thing. so I changed that to Cupid's arrow. It is wonderful as well as sudden like that. Maybe not all that sudden though. Probably more like when you are going to the gym consistently, making little gains, and then one day you look in the mirror and think, "Hey, that doesn't look half bad." After all this practice I looked in the mirror the other day and thought, Hey I might just be a writer.

And then this other thing happens. The gift of the Muse. That's that sudden creative inspiration that hits. That's the inspiration we think just suddenly overcame Dickens and Hemingway and Stephen King. Where did they come up with these things? we wonder and figure they must just have been blessed with some angelic touch. So when we just begin writing we wonder why that inspiration will not come to us? Where is our creative fairy Godmother, and why isn't she waving her little magic wand over our heads? We get frustrated and quit. 

Well, your creative Godmother comes after you put in some work. Tonight I was just watching some sportsball and the Muse came. A novel. Twenty-five chapter's worth, in my estimation. Of course, I still need to write it. She doesn't just hand you a couple hundred completed pages. I could write it, and it could be complete garbage. I am going to write it, though, and if it is garbage I will see if I can make it a bit better. And if I can't make it publishable, at least it will be something that I can submit and get feedback on to make something less garbage-like. 

Night

Just past the witching hour, and I am dragging the trash bin out to the curb at 61 S. 5th Avenue for tomorrow's pickup. The plastic wheels of the bin rumble along the pavement. My shoes make a combination of a clicking and scuffing sound. There is a train horn sounding somewhere between here and Denver to the south. It will get louder with each successive crossing as it comes north to rumble through town as well.

It is cold as it is only early March. It would be colder, but a blanket of clouds hangs over the metro area as evidenced by the lack of stars in the blue-black sky. I have on a leather jacket perfect for this time of year, but even my bare hands and face are not bothered by the brisk air. I hardly notice the cold at all. 

The cold night air carries the warm smell of a far-off wood fire. It seems as if the darkness is a better conductor of both sound and smell. As I walk back up the walk, I ponder for a moment just how much that could be true, how much of it owes to there being few smog-belching, growling, clanging cars on the road, and how much is my imagination. 

Once back inside it isn't that I so much notice the warmth of the house as it is that I now notice the absence of the chill on my face and hands. I scramble out of the jacket and find its hanger in the front closet. It's just cool enough in the house now that I leave the rest of my clothes on, including the soft, warm cashmere cardigan I am wearing. There is something about the night that already makes me feel unfettered anyway. A certain freedom comes over me that is not there during the day. With the whole rest of the world in bed, I have the feeling that I could completely disrobe if the notion overtook me. I could pick my nose or rob the bank down the street or rob the bank in the nude while picking my nose were I so inclined. I am not, but the feeling of it remains even while my clothes stay on.

I come back to the nest I have built for myself on the couch, throwing an afghan across my lap. My books and journals are piled around me, not so much as a fortress wall, but as the lint and papers and feathers that a bird uses to line its nest. Next to me a book on fiction. At my feet a book on writing software. In front of me several journals, a fountain pen, a mechanical pencil that is a pleasure to hold, a highlighter, an eraser. Other detritus of the night clutters the end table: my wallet, another highlighter, a used one of those plastic flossers for your teeth, the ubiquitous USB cord. The lamp on the end table at its peak brightness.

The only sound in the world is the clock ticking on the mantel. If my wife existed I might even be able to listen closely to hear her soft breathing in bed, She was gone though before the mantel's clock showed ten though, the only evidence of her now another throw crumpled in the place she had dozed on the couch.

I am completely alone in the world, but it feels okay to be alone at night. There is no loneliness because there is no one to miss. No one to share my thoughts and ideas with except for this page, and that is all that is required. 

Daytime, my nemesis, will come and I will be alone, alone, and exposed. The people and the cars and the clouds will all reincorporate. The worry and stress and confusion of the light will re-emerge. And if I am lucky, I will get a free hour to pull close the black-out curtains and slide my nude body into the sheets, close my eyes and dream that it is night once again.

Appropriated Culture

I can't remember why or when I got the gift of the afghan from my grandmother. We all received one eventually, all of us grandchildren, I mean. Jessica, my first wife, got one too. I am not sure now if all the spouses of grandchildren also received one or if Jessica had commented on how much she liked mine. That kind of narrows the time frame for when I got mine as I do not think I had it in college when it would have been nice to wrap up in to read with, as, being an English literature major, I averaged reading two novels a week. Some years after we had divorced and Jessica already had children with her new husband, she found her afghan hidden away in some closet and called me to see if I wanted it. I told her to keep it and give it to her little girl someday. Jessica passed away from cancer several years ago. I hope now that her daughter wraps up in it at night reading one of Jessica's favorite books.

I think now that I must have received my afghan as a birthday gift. My birthday is in August and I vaguely remember there was some slight incongruence on opening up a gift on a sweltering summer day to find a crocheted wool blanket. Looking back on the use I have gotten out of it and how important this blanket has become to me, my face should have been one of delirious happiness. Instead at the time it probably said that I thought my grandmother delirious with heat to be gifting such a thing. Thinking back, it might have been that I received it while I was in college yet, but that it got put up in a closet since it was of no immediate use and did not get pulled back down until sometime when I was at home at Christmas thinking about how between home in Chicago and my former home in Michigan finding as many warm layers to pile onto myself would be smart.

An afghan, if one hasn't heard the term before, is simply a throw, usually knitted or crocheted and usually in bright colors. The term entered the English lexicon after wealthy travelers and soldiers brought back colorful, hand-woven blankets from their travels to Afghanistan in the 10th century. American women began making their own versions as alternatives to quilted blankets. I had to go look it up to ensure that I was not just using some esoteric term that only my grandmother seemed to keep around from days of yore. (Like "snot rag". I swear that the Kleenex people got to Grandma when they became afraid they would lose their trademark to the common use of their name for their facial tissue and convinced her that she should keep using "snot rag" to refer to their product.)

Mine, having been created by a little woman in Saginaw, Michigan, who understood my own sensibilities and not by some Pashtun woman thousands of miles away, is not brightly colored. I think one would say it is of a natural wool color or something like cafe au lait, heavy on the lait. It is done in a pattern of alternating two inch by two inch squares, one where the pattern seems to go up and down and the other where it appears to go left to right, giving the entire thing a sort of basket weave appearance. Over the many years of use it has become pilled and some of the crochets have slipped out and developed holes like runs in a woman's nylons. But it has also become softer, and, though I am certainly biased, has an appearance more of being well-loved than ratty.

Grandma was constantly knitting or crocheting while we watched Barney Miller or Wheel of Fortune together. Like I said, each of us grandchildren got one, and I am sure that many other people have one as well. Of course, it took time to make one and probably more and more time as she got older and her eyes got worse and her hands became arthritic. I honestly couldn't say how long it took Grandma to make one, Some ballpark of several weeks to several months, but it was why you just got your afghan when you got it. She couldn't churn out a couple dozen like some sort of Nike factory worker to hand out all at once at Christmas. If yours was coming up on her list and your birthday was coming up in August, she was going to do it and not worry about the weather. She had other orders to be filled.

I said it is well-loved and it is. In today's world of the commercial fleece blanket and (ugh) the Snuggie, the hand-made afghan is worth its weight in gold. (Okay, perhaps not literally because gold is like $2000 per ounce, and every man has his price. Sorry, Grandma.) I wrap up in it every night as I leisurely read or watch "The Last of Us". It doesn't even need to be cold out. Now that we have central air here and Jen has the occasional hot flash, I am more than certain I've used it even on hot August nights. Jen says she knows when I am sick when I drag my well-loved security blanket off behind me like Linus as I head to bed. Then there are those days when one feels alone and is alone. Those days when even those of us who are non-huggers could really use one, but no one else is around. On that kind of day, I can still wrap myself in love. 

Thinking About Art

I am listening to Lincoln in the Bardo, a fantastic (fiction) book about the death of Willie Lincoln at the outset of the Civil War and its impact on Abraham Lincoln. I am almost finished with it and was talking about it with my therapist this morning. I have read literally thousands of pages about President Lincoln (Thank you, Doris Kearns Goodwin!) from non-fiction sources. Though Lincoln in the Bardo is a work of fiction and what the President must have been thinking is largely speculative, it shed more light on and opened my mind to the impact of that particular event in Lincoln's life more than any non-fiction book has.

It's as if one were comparing a single Albert Bierstadt painting of Yosemite compared to a 12-hour documentary series about Yosemite. You are sure to learn a lot about Yosemite from a 12-hour documentary, but from which will you get a better idea of the beauty and splendor of Yosemite? Lincoln in the Bardo has made me think a lot about art and literature as art.

Allow me to sidetrack for a moment here. I am also reading Tibetan Peach Pie by Tom Robbins. Robbins states that he didn't intend for Tibetan Peach Pie to be a memoir, but rather a collection of stories in his life that he has related multiple times to friends and family and wished to share them with a public audience. One of those stories is about an LSD trip he took in 1963 (Maybe 1964; I don't remember.) at a time when LSD was still legal and was being experimented with at universities. Robbins calls the experience life changing and a huge impact on his work since. The story doesn't focus so much on the trip itself, though, but rather on his experience afterwards. 

Robbins laments that he had this life-changing experience, but now there is no one he can really talk to about it without sounding completely crazy. Of course, at the time very few people in the United States had tried any sort of psychedelic substance. It made him feel incredibly lonely. Here is someone who is a magician with the English language, someone who has studied the craft of putting the human experience into words, someone who was working as an art critic at the time, who simply couldn't find the words to describe the experience.

And here's where I bring it back to art and literature. For those of us who have never done LSD (and I will state for the record here that I never have), we can't even imagine what such a mind-bending experience would be like. We can watch documentaries on LSD or read about its effects but we can't get from those the "feeling" of LSD. If you've read any of Tom Robbins's novels, though, you can get a glimpse of that "feeling". You won't come anywhere near understanding the entire experience, just like you can't get your own experience of visiting Yosemite from a Bierstadt painting, but somehow art conveys a glimpse into the artist's own feeling about the subject for us to appreciate. It shines a very focused spotlight on just a dot of the human experience.

Georgia O'Keeffe is another example I like to think of in how art illuminates the human experience. O'Keeffe didn't paint an orchid as we would see it if the plant were placed before us. She captured the essence of the orchid. She captured the feeling of what it is like if we were intensely focused on the flower. O'Keeffe did at least twenty paintings of the doorway to her New Mexico home and still felt she never quite got it right.

I know that Robbins in his writing is doing much more than trying to describe one acid trip he took in 1963, but it is almost as if he is repainting that doorway over and over at slightly different times of day and from slightly different angles with each novel he writes and each story he tells. I think about Mark Twain's giving us a glimpse through his writings on how it must have felt to be American in the late 1880s as the industry of the east met the frontier of the west along the Mississippi River. Dickens gives us a glimpse of Victorian London, the gothic horrors give us a sense of what it must have been like as a layperson witnessing how scientific breakthroughs were transforming the industrial world, and Hemingway and Fitzgerald help us feel that post-Great War disillusionment of the Lost Generation.

I'd be remiss if I wrote something on art and LSD and didn't mention the work of Ralph Steadman, another artist who asserts he only dropped acid once but it influenced all his work from that point (rather heavily, I would add). I also haven't mentioned the musicians and sculptors whose works shine light on the times and places in which their pieces were composed. I'm sure I could go on with this subject for a good long time and i know a number of books have already been written about it. I would like to hear your thoughts, dear reader, on how art trains a spotlight on tiny aspects of the human experience.

Post-script: The cast of the Lincoln in the Bardo audio book is phenomenal. Nick Offerman and David Sedaris have significant roles along with a number of other voices you will recognize. Offerman is a natural fit for an audio book. If you've ever heard David Sedaris speak you'll agree that he seems an unusual choice to cast in a major role for an audio book, but he is really outstanding.

You Make My Heart Go Pew, Pew, Pew!

Happy Valentines Day!

I used to live just a couple blocks from 2122 Clark St., the site of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. I'm not sure why my mind always goes to that event when Valentines Day rolls around. I'm sure living in the vicinity has something to do with it, since I don't remember having the sort of fascination with it previous to living there. Part of my interest is probably the same that caused such an outcry from the public back in 1929 when it occurred. This wasn't some singular drive-by in the middle of the night in Cicero. This was a brazen execution of seven men in the late morning hours on the North Side of Chicago. Two of the killers were dressed as police officers. I'm not sure how busy Clark Street was at the time, but it certainly is busy now. It's hard to believe that such a crime could be pulled off in such a busy area, showing the power and brazenness of the Mob in Chicago at that time.

I'm not sure how the massacre is related to my lack of sentimentality for Valentines Day. It isn't that I'm not a romantic person; I suppose I just don't like the romance to be foisted upon me. A hint of mystery, a bit of surprise. Not $40 for a dozen roses that would cost $10 any other time of the year. Still, it's nice to have at least the one day set aside for a bit of love and romance. Maybe all Al Capone needed was a
hug.

Go, 'Lopes!

I decided that I didn't have enough sports teams to root for, so I decided I would adopt the Antelopes of Grand Canyon University as my representative team to root for in the WAC. Just to show how much I support the 'Lopes, I decided I would enroll in GCU. Rather than go for a third bachelor's degree in some other field that has nothing to do with the actual work I do, I decided I would change things up and go for a master's in something that I can actually use, Information Assurance and Cybersecurity.  Having done voting machines, then credit cards and now securing government systems, I somehow fell ass-backwards into a career where information assurance and cybersecurity has played a large part of my job the last fifteen years.

When I went to Northwestern I never could have imagined that my career would have turned out like this. The Internet was something that existed only so much as it connected the Department of Defense and universities and Matthew Broderick when he wanted to play a nice game of chess. The World Wide Web as we know it now didn't exist at all. I was going to be a journalist, and in my freshman year the TA scoffed at my essay that asserted that relatively soon people would be getting their news on their computers. "No one's going to want to carry their computer on the El." Boy, did I show him!

I like computers, I like solving problems, and I like solving problems with computers. As much as I wish now that I had become an astronaut, I fell into a career that has suited me. I also feel now like my career path has opened back up. At Nordstrom, particularly in the last year, I felt like my career path had closed up tighter than an earthworm's butthole in January. I am an ambitious person and not used to sitting in the same role for four years. I love feeling now like I have the chance to build on myself while helping to build a new organization at RVCM. I love feeling like I have the chance to advance in that organization without someone having to die first.

As I write this, I am watching GCU men's basketball team on their way to their fifteenth victory of the season. With Northwestern's basketball also having fifteen wins, will this be the year that I actually get to see not just one, but two of my schools in the Big Dance? March madness indeed!

Making a Habit of It

I'm having a difficult time lately. It is difficult to admit, and I have been trying to hide it because I don't want people to worry. I am battling through with the skills I know I have and leaning on outside support more than I have in the past. I switched medications because I was recently diagnosed with having a mood disorder. That is that not only do I struggle with the chronic depression, I also have manic episodes mixed in. I've suspected this for a while, so it comes as no big surprise. I suspected that I have cyclothymia - think of it as a lesser form of bipolar disease. But you treat it differently than depression. In fact, the depression medication really just exacerbates the mood disorder. So I suspect that changing up the drugs plays a big part in how I've been feeling. I will say, though, that I am sleeping much better. I had horrible insomnia before, and was averaging three or four hours of sleep a night. Now I'm getting six or seven, so that makes a good deal of difference.

I just returned back from Florida, though. Back to Colorado and some frigid temperatures! I experienced going from eighty degrees to minus 10 in the matter of less than twelve hours! I was getting outside and getting sunshine in Florida. When I got breaks in my schedule, I'd take a short walk around the block. I am still recovering from bunion surgery, so had only worked up to about 5000 steps per day while in Cape Canaveral. Still, I was getting out. The sun is shining nice and bright here in Denver, but I have no inclination to get out in the cold and snow. That rat bastard Punxsutawney Phil did not improve my mood any on that front this morning! So, the weather along with the constant nose bleeds certainly has something to do with my mood.

It's more than that, though, being back in Colorado. In Florida the possessions that surround me are fairly sparse. We live in a small space, so there is not a lot of room for having extra "stuff" just lying around. There is less to distract my attention from what the ambitious side of me wants to be doing. My fat, lazy self is perfectly content with finding distractions here in Colorado, not to mention sitting and watching television or scrolling through social media. Those last two are in no short supply in Florida, so I have to think it is just not the "stuff" that distracts me. There is even more to it.

Some, I suspect, is Covid-related. Something about getting into bad habits at the outset of Covid that I haven't really broken. I didn't need to shower and get dressed if I didn't want to. I could go to the fridge and snack any time I wanted to. I could make my workspace as messy as I wanted without annoying any coworkers other than Buck who I annoy by not having a space on the futon in my office for him to lay down on.I suspect some of you had a similar experience.

Those bad habits have been tough to shake, but I made new habits in Florida. Healthier habits, like taking a little walk when I had a break in work. Or like sitting down with a book rather than flipping on the television. Our habits definitely have a contextual element to them. Our surroundings play a big part of the habits we create. I need to shake off some of those bad habits that I created here in Colorado. It's tough to do!

I have gotten very interested in habits in the past couple years. Habits are mental shortcuts we make. Without them, our brains would be overloaded with what action to take next. Can you imagine how your drive home from somewhere else would be without habit? Not only would you need to be thinking about which direction to go and which turns to make, but you would have to consciously think about turning the key to even start the car and think about buckling up. 

I was reminded of this being back down in Florida and driving the Ford Fusion again, a car we keep down there now, but one that I was driving to and from work every day pre-pandemic. To connect to my phone's bluetooth and start an audio book requires a series of button pushes on the audio system. I could literally do this in my sleep previously. Last week I had to remind myself of which menu items I needed to find in order to keep listening to American Dirt. We carve paths through the jungles of our minds with habit. It makes our drives home so simple that we often can't even remember details of the drive at all. It also makes it easier to scoop a bowl of ice cream or pour a glass of wine in order to make ourselves feel better as opposed to going to the gym or taking a run.

Anyway, I need to work on better habits here in Colorado. If you are interested in better habits, this is a great video on them. I also highly recommend the books that got me interested in them in the first place: The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits. Let me know if you have other recommendations!