It's not what you think

It's much more benign.

And in some ways it's much much stranger.

And no, not in a bad way for either of us.

I'm still here.

You're still there.

We're all still breathing.

And I miss you.



Give me a call sometime, I'd really love to talk.
(and to the best of my knowledge, there's only one person living who knows I write this blog AND knows my phone number... well, one person and the NSA, but they don't count). 

Rambling Transference

So we've all heard of or know people who keep having the same relationship over and over.

You know, the one who's always dating the guy who beats the shit out of her, or the girl who cheats on him, or the player of either gender or whatever.

Doomed to unhappiness and repeated failure, and we all say 'aw, he/she just can't seem to catch a break' and secretly feel just a teensy bit superior because we don't notice those same patterns (all be it in a less volatile and easily recognizable paradigm) in ourselves.

That's one of the reasons I think I tend to go a while between relationships (that and I'm not terribly attractive, fun to be around, or wealthy... But I'll go with the more flattering reason for the purpose of this rant).

So anyway.  After several months of reflection I noticed something different about the last relationship.

I don't think we were playing out our usual relationship type.

On closer inspection I think we were playing out the opposite end of the last relationship we were both in.

Example (sanitized of course).

The relationship I was in before this last one, I left the area to take a more interesting job (she was planning to follow but never found work, and eventually we gave up).  She introduced me to some new experiences that I'd never had before.  She was a steady person in my life when I needed one, and I wish we could have stayed in touch.

The relationship I am (not so) freshly out of.  She left the area to take a more interesting job (I was planning to follow but never found work and eventually we gave up).  I introduced her to some new experiences that she'd not had before, and tried to offer steady support when I thought she needed it.



Her relationship before this one.  He had been talking marriage and children, and while she wanted that she didn't think it was the right time.  Ultimately he left the area to take a more interesting job and she was going to follow (but eventually they gave up, and he left her for someone new who he'd knocked up).

With me she had been talking marriage and children for a while ( and though she'd convinced me that a child might someday be an option, I didn't think this was the right time).  Ultimately she left the area and we eventually gave up.

These aren't the only parallels, but I don't have the time or inclination to go through the entire list.  There are others (and no, I don't spend every spare moment obsessing.  It's just that sometimes when I'm performing some mindless task or another a random connection pops into my head.

I keep waiting for the email where she tells me she's pregnant.

I already know how it'll read.

'Hey, so I just wanted to let you know that I'm pregnant.  I didn't mean for it to happen, it's just that I was kinda seeing this guy and, well, one thing lead to another.  I'm so glad for the time we had together, and I wish things had turned out differently but blah blah blah...'

Yeah.  I've read a couple of those in my life. 

I have a feeling that this one is going to sting a bit more though.

I guess this isn't so much a rant as an odd observation.

I know she's looking again, I can't blame her.

I'm kinda half-assed looking myself (came across a craigslist post tonight that really sounded like her, maybe that's why I'm thinking of this).

Still, I wish things had gone differently.







Happy Yanksgiving y'all

Subtlety

So I've got a couple of people that I deal with in my life.

One I deal with regularly in a professional capacity, the other not so regularly anymore (though she use to be a large part of my existance).

I try to be an easy going guy, I really do.

But the one I deal with in a professional capacity keeps dropping not-so-subtile hints that he had more than the usuall amount of friendly contact with the one who use to be a large part of my existance (while she was, in fact, a large part of my existance).

Now I usually try to give folks the benefit of the doubt, but when the same person takes unplanned three or four day weekends at least once a month and calls in sick every time I try to take a long weekend to spend with someone outside of work, well I get suspicious. 

But I try to be a good guy and not be too jealous.

And when this same co-worker gives me a snotty little wink while bragging about how great he is at noticing patterns, well I bite my tongue and try very hard not to notice.

And when I announce (now that I'm no longer really a part of the other individuals life) that I'm taking a long weekend, and said individual comes to me in a panic and wants to know why...  Well let's just call it a confirmation of sorts.


Now some of you are probably asking "why are you putting up with this?"  "Why don't you just grow a pair and deal with him?"   Well, the answer is simple. 

I'm his boss and I'm twice his size.

I'm twice his size, several years younger, many many times stronger (he's never done any actual labor in his life) and far more experienced when it comes to physical confrontation.

In short I'm fairly sure that if I let myself lose control I wouldn't be able to keep both of us alive and out of jail.

Just that simple.

I'm not willing to spend the next two dozen years in prison because of the behavior of a couple of folks who hold me in such low regard.

Their little game is not worth my freedom.

So I have to be the butt of their little joke.  Talk their little shit about what a sucker I am, and silently smirk about how much smarter and more clever they are, and how stupid and oblivious I must be (as I've not confronted them about this for the aforementioned reasons). 

All the same though, I wish he'd learn to shut the fuck up.

My outwardly calm demeanor is not a sign of idiocy.

And I am not a man of infinite patience.






All life is a test.
Some days we pass, some days we fail.
The only thing you can do is give it your best and try to be ready for the day when that won't be enough.

- Murph -

Conspiracy

(kn-spîr-s)   noun

pl.con·spir·a·cies

 

1. An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.

2. A group of conspirators.

3. Law An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.

4. A joining or acting together, as if by sinister design

So the official story goes like this.

50 years ago, a guy I never met was killed by another guy I never met.

Now this other guy (after pulling off a couple of minor miracles, one involving time and another involving basic physics) was killed by yet another guy I never met.

Now this last guy (a guy with some interesting connections, and more than his fair share of friends in useful places) officially died in custody of a pulmonary embolism as a complication of lung cancer about four years after killing the guy who killed the first guy (and a few years before I was born).

The question that I can't find an answer to at this point is 'why should I care?'.

Yes, I said it.

Why should I care that these people died?

Why should I care that official version of events might not be accurate?

Why should I care whether or not the Warren Commission acted to obscure the truth about the Kennedy assassination?

Before you stop reading hear me out.

We now live in a world where our government openly admits to kidnapping and torturing people. 

Not clandestinely, openly. 

We're not even all that ashamed about it. (watch some of our movies and tv shows, we're actually kinda proud of the fact... at least those of us who aren't scared shitless by it)

We are part of a society that embraces the idea that anyone who is targeted by their government is deserving of their treatment.  And when our friends and neighbors run afoul of this new system, instead of re-examining whether the system might be flawed, we choose to assume that 'they must've had it coming' and lock our doors tighter, bury our heads deeper, voice our condemnation louder and either delude ourselves into thinking that it could never happen to us, or secretly pray that it doesn't.

We accept this world, hell we embrace it.

We accept a world where a certain select class of people is above the law.

We accept a world where basic humanity is a liability.

Where critical thought is something to be ashamed of.

Where loud and emotional argument, and knee-jerk reaction are of greater value than common sense assessment and measured response.

We accept, even demand more laws, more intrusion, more abuse.

Every time something happens to spook us the response is "that should be illegal!", or "We need to toughen the penalty for that!", or "think of the children!".

So with that in mind, why the fuck should I care if three guys I never met are dead?

Don't say it's because one of them was 'important'.  By doing so you embrace the notion that there is a superior class of people who are somehow entitled to a more comfortable standard of living than the rest of us (and don't feed me that crap about 'their lives are in constant danger'.  You want to see someone who's life is in constant danger, go strike up a conversation with the jittery, high strung, bug eyed kid behind the counter of your local all night convenience store).

Don't tell me I should care because 'the American people were lied to'.  The American people demand to be lied to.  We have proven time and again that we don't want the truth, we flee from it, we embrace the lies of our keepers and owners.

And don't expect me to believe that it was a tragedy because 'a good man died for no good reason'. 

Good men die every day. 
Good women die every day.
None of them are professional politicians.
None of them are wealthy, or come from wealthy families.  
Very few of them would be included in societies list of 'beautiful people'. 
Very few of them are well connected.
And none of them are mourned and remembered by an entire nation for decades.

Them's the breaks.

So don't expect me to mourn a guy I never met, that's his family's job. 

Don't expect me to mourn the death of our great social experiment, we are all complaisant in that.

And don't tell me it was the 'end of innocence'.
Innocence is for children, and if you're still clinging to it at the end of your first decade then you are either too sheltered or dangerously delusional. 

Instead of a moment of silence to honor a dead prince, why don't we have a moment of awakening?

A moment of saying 'fuck you' to the corporate mouthpieces and shit merchants, to the professional liars and established cheats, to the ass kissers, to pundits, the thought peddlers and theologists, the public thieves and paid assassins, to the sobbing rheumy eyed fame junky spinning yarns of a long forgotten and fictional golden age;  to the N.I.M.B.Y.'s and yippees, to the self-righteous and the self important; to all those who have conspired, whether knowingly or unknowingly, to the obvious decay of our society.

Fuck the twitching twerking youth of today.

Fuck the boomers and their incessant greed.

Fuck the millennial generation and their unearned, unwarranted self esteem.

Fuck the Gen-X'ers and their whiny apathy.

Fuck the crooked government.

Fuck the corporate owners.

Fuck the know-it-all entertainers who think their job gives them the right to have their opinion listened to.

Fuck Rush Limbaugh and his rich boy entitled self righteous ranting.

Fuck Tom Brokaw and his sanctimonious folksy liberal bullshit.

Fuck the mindless drone consumers.

Fuck the holier than thou.

Fuck the old school.

Fuck the new generation.

Fuck the armchair experts and the high paid incompetents.

Fuck the players and the martyrs.

Fuck the elitist jackoffs for thinking that their high station and good luck makes them somehow superior, and gives them the right to inflict their beliefs on their fellow humans.

Fuck the knuckle dragging anti-intellectuals for making intelligence, common sense, and independent thought something to be ridiculed instead of embraced.


And most of all fuck you and fuck me.


We've let it come to this.

If we didn't see where things were going then we should have been more vigilant.

And if we did see where things were going we should have done more.

We're all complacent. 

All guilty of conspiring to create this wide wonderful wicked and worthless world of ours.

At least that's my theory.






I am as innocent regarding any conspiracy as any of you gentlemen in the room.
― Jack Ruby ―

Fatigue

No rants today,
no poetry,
no pathos,
no proselytizing,
no pontification,
no whining.

Just tired.

Out of steam,

shot to shit,

knackered,

round the bend,

tuckered out,

pooped,

piled,

flat busted,

crashed and smashed,

burned and churned,

worn the fuck out, and not in the fun way,

Tired.

Islands

Drifting,
flowing,
twisting,
rampaging,
cataracts of time.

Days grow shorter,
nights grow colder,
laughter grows quieter,
memories grow lonelier.

Safe havens,
warmth,
camaraderie,
friendship,
love.

Islands passing in fog,
trailing long years in tow,
growing fewer,
rarer,
further between,
more precious in their absence.

The long evening closes in.


I miss my friend.

Dumping Sugar down the Shitter.

The story so far...

Ok, to the best of our knowledge the center of our galaxy is a largish black hole which is slowly (or rapidly depending on your proximity to it, your speed in relation to it, or your perception of time) eating everything around it. 

Everything (at least in the context of this situation) is stars, dust, comets, solar systems, rogue planets, and even light...  Ultimately us, or at least this speck of galactic dust we inhabit.

There are theories that state that every galaxy we've ever observed is/has been nothing more than space debris that has been caught in the gravitational tide of a large black hole.

In addition, there are some theories which state that smaller 'rogue' black holes may be drifting through space, invisible to us (they suck in light too, remember, and radio waves)

Ok, so lets assume for a moment that this process has been going on for a few billion years, and is accelerating as gravitational power is consolidated (it stands to reason that the more matter a black hole absorbs, the greater it's gravitational influence, and the more it can absorb).

Now high school physics teaches us that every speck of matter in the universe exerts a gravitational pull on every other speck of matter.  Distance is irrelevant (given sufficient time).

Now leaving off for the moment that observational data seems to indicate that the universe is expanding (perspective is tricky without a stationary reference), this seems to indicate that eventually all matter will consolidate itself into a few massive singularities, which will eventually gravitate toward each other...

This means that the entire universe will eventually (theoretically) occupy the same space at the same time.

A space where time no longer really exists (at least according to certain theories concerning relativity of time in relation to speed and mass).

Ok. 

So the whole of creation is compressed into a giant static (there can be no motion if there is nothing to use as a reference and no space left to travel through) bubble of super condensed mass...

Now if you've ever used a diesel engine, or cut metal with a pair of hydraulic shears, or done anything that involved compressing something rapidly (or with great pressure) then you know that that amount of matter forced into itself would have to be insanely infinitely hot.

Hot enough that it would certainly release huge amounts of energy (say possibly in the form of a gigantic explosion that would spew random matter as far as possible into the non-space void that will exist when all matter is consolidated into the same point).

So let's, for the sake of argument, call this a big bang.

Not THE big bang, but A big bang.

Because if this is a logical progression, then it stands to reason this has all happened before (at least the big parts).  The minutiae of our individual lives may not have happened, or maybe it has happened exactly as it is happening now, at least once before that is.  A model like this allows for an infinite number of universes creating themselves, collapsing, and being re-created...  And in such a model all outcomes (including exact duplicates of previous existances) would be theoretically possible.

Ok.  So if the universe has happened before, will happen again, is constantly forming and destroying itself...

Where the fuck did it come from?

I'm not asking this as part of some religious implication.

That answer brings nothing nothing to the table, it just adds another possible layer to the question.  If you answer 'it all came from God' then I have to ask 'where did he/she/it come from?'

This is the ultimate question.

Now somehow I have to find a way to make the answer equal forty two...






Circling,
pacing,
ever hungry,
eternal combatants sizing each other up.

Feeding,
fortifying,
feeding again.

All matter, energy, time and thought.

All Hail the Singularity!

Pinprick of the universe.

Politics

I can't help but think of this every time one of our elected employees starts spouting on.

Meanwhile, in the Pacific

For people who aren't so concerned about whiny first world problems, these folks are fairly reputable and traditionally absorb a smaller percentage of their donations for 'operating expenses' than some of the other charities. I don't necessarily buy into the dogma, but they do some good work. And (as I've mentioned a few hundred times on here in recent years) I'll take actions over words any day.

The Salvation Army
https://donate.salvationarmyusa.org/TyphoonHaiyan

These others are old standbys but I've done very little work with them in person so I don't vouch for them personally (do your own research dammit, that's why you have the internet).

Save the Children
http://www.savethechildren.org/Philippines

World Vision
http://www.worldvision.org/Haiyan
(the link says it's broken but pops up anyway.  Hell if I know why)

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP)
http://www.wfp.org/countries/philippines


And while I know they don't have the most sterling reputation in some parts of this country, I'll post them anyway because they have name recognition and resources.

The Red Cross (Philippines)
http://www.redcross.org.ph/donate

Disposable

disˈpōzəbəl

adjective

adjective: disposable

1. (of an article) intended to be used once, or until no longer useful, and then thrown away.

   • (of a person or idea) able to be dispensed with; easily dismissed.
2. (chiefly of financial assets) readily available for the owner's use as required.

noun

noun: disposable; plural noun: disposables

1. an article designed to be thrown away after use.

Oh Boy!  Time to whine on the internet! 

 

 

I don't think I've ever really understood people. 

Why they do the things they do. 

Act the way they act.

 

I don't understand this deep seated need in some folks to try to hide their motivations, attitudes, core values (the ones they actually live by, not the ones they publicly endorse).

 

I mean, if a friend were to walk up to me one day and say 'dude, you know you're a dick and I'm only hanging around because I want to nail your girlfriend', or a lover were to say out of the blue 'you know what,  I was only sticking around because I thought you could pay off my debts and give me a comfortable life, but I really just can't stand the sight of you anymore, leave me alone'.  It would be very painful.  It would hurt like hell, but I would at least know where I stood with that person, and I could remove myself from their sphere of awareness, quit wasting my efforts  and move on.

 

I understand, have always understood that the vast majority of people view each other as disposable assets. 

It stung learning that at first, but age has lead to acceptance (even at times a certain pride in the fact that I can survive, have survived this long in a world where sometimes the only thing that kept me alive was someone elses unwillingness to deal with the minor inconvenience that could be caused by my ceasing to exist). 

And acceptance has led me to a point where I can accept the possibility that I may someday view other people as disposable assets without feeling that I'm violating some personal version of morality. 

 

I've yet to make full use of this, but I'm learning.  In time I figure I'll work it into my repertoire of human interaction techniques, but until then I can at least accept that this is the way the majority of people view each other, and plan accordingly.

 

What I don't understand are the ones who hold this very common view, but want so desperately for me to believe that they don't.

 

I'm not even talking about the ones who are trying to sucker a response out of me.  I'm talking about the ones who, when I call them on their bullshit, and ask for a clear concise list of what they want from the interaction so that we can hopefully reach some amicable middle ground, insist that they truly care, that they're oh so honest, oh so loyal, oh so caring... 

Pure unadulterated 100% USDA Grade AA Bullshit.

 

I know it's bullshit.

 

They know it's bullshit.

 

Why do they keep doing it?

 

 

Is it to spare my feelings?

 

I don't see why.  If someone wanted to spare my feelings they wouldn't screw with them in the first place.

 

Is it because they think honesty will put them in a weaker position at some point in the future?

 

Do they think that I'm foolish enough to equate what a person says with their actual motives? (especially when their behavior does not seem consistent with their espoused beliefs)

 

Fuck if I know.

 

I suck at dealing with people, that's why I try not to if it can be avoided.

 

That's why I post my own whiny bullshit on the internet where it won't draw any attention.

 

That's why I figure it's a good thing I have no children, and no real plans on having them... 

 

No need to pass this level of social ineptitude on to another generation.

 

 

 

 

Or, to put it more succinctly...

Tempus Fuckit

A long day,
middle of a long week,
at the start of a long season,
at the end of this long-ass year,
the most recent in a decade of long-ass years.

Where did the time go?