Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
The barista yesterday asked, “How’s it going?”
“Going well, thanks. You?”
“I’m looking forward to lunch. I have leftover mashed potatoes and chicken.”
“Ah, comfort food,” I responded.
She grinned. “Exactly!”
Well, you can imagine what I ended up having for dinner: mashed potatoes, chicken, and brussies. Comfort food.
Right on.
Mood: Precipitized
Autumn was hulking against the house by the back door, sometimes gently tapping to come in. I opened the door. A lush gush waltzed in and danced around the room.
I’ve decided that I like autumn better than summer and winter. Winter and summer are fickle about their temperatures and weather offerings. Autumn seems more relaxed and straightforward about it. Yes, warm days will come, with some soaring temperatures which somehow complements a view of autumnal foliage against a blue sky. Mostly, though, memories of autumn has me anticipated a level stream of gently declining temperatures as tree shed their leaves and winter begins gracing us.
It’s Wednesday, 9/11/2024. A moment to remember that morning, seared into so many of our brains, sharp-edged memories formed as our daily routines were put on hold and we watched our televisions.
It’s 55 F at my house. My wife was up early to get ready for her exercise class. She told me after I got up that she came in and whispered to me, “It’s raining,” but I was deeply asleep and did not hear.
A little later, Tucker (pronounced Tuck-ah), shouted, “It’s raining and I’m hungry and get up and feed me.” Which I did.
Ah, rain. Small drops, lighty falling, wetting everything, and releasing gases that waft up to us and awakens rain memories. The smell is so rich.
Our air is so clear and fresh this morning. Purple has the readings around me in single digits. Airnow.gov has us at 25.
Today’s high will be in the upper sixties.
I’m looking forward to having something done about my injured foot. Although I wear my brace when I’m out and about, strange complaints and sharp pains will jump out. “Hey, don’t bend me that way,” it yells. “Watch where you’re stepping. You want pain, I’ll give you pain.” I know, it’s a very small thing to endure compare to what many others suffer. I’m just a whiner.
I’m not going to comment much on the debate last night. I will say that my personal confidence and hope that Kamala Harris becomes POTUS number 47 pole-vaulted into new levels.
With the debate and the rain and season shift, The Neurons have plugged a Steve Perry song into the morning mental music stream (Trademark gone). “Oh Sherrie” was released in 1984. I don’t know why it’s in my head this morning. I can’t trace a relationship to anything that I thought, did, or dreamed. It’s just there as I walked into the office, coffee cup in hand, swallowing the last of a fig, and gazed out the window at the green mountains, flat gray sky, and cautiously falling rain. The Neurons work in mysterious ways.
Stay positive, be strong, and vote blue in 2024. Coffee is half gone. Here’s the music video — Steve Perry with Journey playing his hit single. Cheers
Trump’s latest is — hold up.
This is Donald J. Trump. Felon. Just to verify who I’m writing about. He’s the Republican nominee for President of the United States in 2024. One-time POTUS, elected back in 2016, he failed to hold onto the office in 2020, but he refuses to go away.
Trump’s latest declaration is that children are getting sex change operations at school. Going in as one sex, coming home as another.
“Kamala supports states being able to take minor children and perform sex change operations, take them away from their parents, perform sex change operations, and send them back home,” Trump said in a Mosinee, Wisconsin speech.
That’s one of the greatest most out of touch things I’ve heard of him saying. Crazier than his speculation about getting killed by sharks versus being electrocuted if your electric boat sank.
Crazier than his declaration that Mexico will pay for a border wall. Crazier than his lies that wasn’t what he said.
Crazier than windmills causing cancer.
Crazier than his recounting of how the American military took the airports during the American Revolutionary war.
Crazier than his idea that raking forests may help prevent forest fires.
Crazier than his assertion that he actually won the 2020 election, even though he also admits that he lost it. Crazier than his assertion that he has ‘every right’ to interfere in the election results. Crazier than his declaration that he’d been dictator on day one. Crazier than his insistence he knows nothing about Project 2025, despite the evidence of him bragging about it.
Do you realize how crazy and out of touch this latest is? Schools don’t have the money to buy school supplies, and he thinks they have enough money for surgical operations?
C’mon, man. Where are the operating rooms? Are teachers doing this surgery or are they hiring surgeons on the sly? Maybe he thinks the surgeons are volunteers, right?
Seriously, though, this is the best the GOP has to offer the nation, the world, and themselves, a man claiming without any evidence that children are being operated on in schools?
That party has lost its way.
Vote blue in 2024. Please, please, please. Are you seriously willing to accept a person who makes such baseless claims?
If so, I have an airport to sell you. It’s secret, though, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Trump goes there all the time. You’ll love it.
Mood: Anticipedged
It’s Tuesday, September 10, 2024. The national elections are 56 days away. Vice President Kamala Harris and felon Donald Trump will debate policies and positions tonight to sway undecided voters. I expect Donald Trump to lie…a lot. I expect him to act like a little and put on an entertaining act for his base. He is all low-style and little substance. I don’t expect him to say anything about Project 2025; if he does, he’ll probably deny having anything to do with it.
I expect Kamala Harris to be well-spoken, intelligent, and upbeat.
We’ll see what happens. Kinda holding my breath. The Harris – Walz campaign has demonstrated a lot of positive energy IMO. My wife and friends are also pretty stoked. But the media casts the race as being a dead heat. While we scratch our heads and ask WTF, we wonder what people are seeing and thinking in the nation’s other regions.
Second point to that, I thought President Biden was going to be strong at his debate with Trump. Instead, President Biden’s performance ended with him stepping aside for Veep Harris a few weeks. Not a bad move in the end, but the debate night performance undermined my confidence about my perceptions and thinking. So I’m leery about tonight.
It’s 62 degrees F outside of my Ashlandia home. Today’s high will be a comfortable 83 F. The air is fresher again today, with little hint of smoke. I’ve watched people walking — with and without dogs, alone and in pairs — and runners, taking advantage of the temperature and clean air. Airnow.gov pegs the air quality for Ashlandia overall at 52, just above ‘good’. Purpleair shows the air quality is 33 down the street and 75 up the street. We’ll see how it flows.
We’re pretty excited at my house. Rain is in the forecast for tomorrow. Rain, with a high in the 60s. Giddyup.
I’m anxious about the elections. I tell myself I need patience and to be positive. The Neurons responded this morning by springing the 1989 Guns N’ Roses “Patience” on the morning mental music stream (Trademark worn). Yes, a little patience to get through this is mo def needed for this era. I’m a person who struggles to be patient at times. That’s what led to me into taking transcendental meditation instructions in the Philippines in the mid 1970s. That helped a great deal, as does my continued meditation, but impatience still gets the better of me too often.
Gotta go close the windows. Smoke smells are curling in and congestion is rising in my nose and sinuses. Purpleair has the reading at 129 up the street.
Stay positive, be strong, and vote blue in 2024. Coffee is being sucked down. Here is the music video. Cheers
Each morning, I post to WordPress. The first time each day, WP usually suggests tags to add. I click to add them. And every day it tells me, ‘No tags added’.
It amuses and dissatisfies me.
Amuses me because it’s so consistent. Dissatisfies me for the same reason. See, it’s offering something, and then it’s failing. Every day, without fail.
For me, it’s part of a much longer list of small tech failures encountered on a daily basis. Little things. Buttons and widgets not working. Apps crashing.
We see it on a larger scale. One is quiet, like how fucked up deliveries with the post office have become. I tracked a package last week from Newark, California, to Roseburg, Oregon, to Portland, Oregon, to Roseburg, Oregon, to Medord, before it reached me in Ashland. Ashland, BTW, is closer to Newark than Roseburg, Portland, or Medford.
This week, I tracked a package to Fife, Washington. Where the package entered another dimension and the system has no idea where it is.
We all figure it’s a one-off, so we don’t complain about it. Then, when we do, we often discover the problem is affecting more of us than we realized. It’s a larger problem than realized.
But sometimes, the tech failure is so visible, we can’t look away. Take the Boeing aircraft failures. Or the Boeing Starliner failure that has stranded two astronauts at the space station.
The United States is steadily spiraling downward in many ways. We can’t deal with our gun violence; the GOP stops actions. We can’t deal with climate change and wildfires and the extreme weather it causes: the GOP stops it. We can’t deal with quality failures…well, that’s more about money.
People can’t afford houses. Meanwhile, college students are drowning in debt. Do you think that’s not related?
As always, as these things happen, the GOP is pointing at other things as problems that aren’t problems. Books in schools. DEI. Declining church attendance. Voter fraud.
Yes, there’s a pattern here. We as a nation are stagnating. As a small group gets wealthier and achieve a better life, the rest of us are left dealing with small problems. Problem with small problems is that they add up.
Just ask Boeing.
Mood: angrified
8 AM. My wife has left for her exercise class, Tucker (pronounced Tuck-ah) is talking to me about breakfast, sunshine is streaming in through the windows, and I need to pee. Time to rise and stalk coffee, I decide.
I step onto the back patio with the cats. Papi is chatting up a storm. Tucker (pronounced Tuck-ah) is more reserved. Sunshine baths us but smoke lingers in the air. Not as bad as yesterday. The air worsened yesterday as the sun arced over the sky. The air quality plummeted, skating through 190. Forests and mountains disappeared behind the smoky curtain. Fortunately, the curtain rose lost night for a while and we had a night of relatively fresh air. Looks like it’s getting pulled down again.
This is Monday, September 9, 2024.
It’s just under 60 F right now. We expect a high of about 92 F.
BTW, the MAGA answer to wildfires and its smoke pollution is to cut down all the forests. Short-sighted as hell, but that’s them: intellectually bankrupt.
I have “Good Thing” from Fine Young Cannibals ringing in the morning mental music stream (Trademark hazy). It’s because I was singing to that 1989 melody with a word substitution. “Good air, where have you gone,” was my lament.
I shifted from good air to good things as the song played. Good things like the efficient post office and delivery systems we knew for a while. Good things like safe schools.
Which triggered reflections on Vance’s comments about school shootings being a way of life because schools are soft targets, which are attractive to a ‘psycho’, as he delicately phrased it.
“And again, as a parent, do I want my school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t,” he concluded. “I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like they’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”
Vance’s memory is not impressive. People have been killed in churches. Most people passing a church will note the lack of security. And a Pittsburgh syngagogue was found to be a soft target. Malls and shopping centers are soft targets. Grocery stores. Paint stores, hardware stores.
Remember the shooting from a hotel room in Las Vegas? So a concert is a soft target.
What about the college campuses? They’ve been shown to be soft targets.
Police officers being ambushed are not soft targets, yet we read about that numerous times a year.
I remember that several work places, post offices, and a McDonald’s restaurant have been a soft target through the years.
Beyond them, we had vigilante types like Kyle Rittenhouser out looking for targets, or Trayvon Martin’s killer, who thought the kid going for skittles was a threat.
And let’s not overlooked the people shooting others knocking on their door because they’re afraid, a fear the GOP actively stokes to harvest votes. Or the man who shot a woman because he thought she was part of a scam.
As long as you dance around the obvious and pretend it’s something else, nothing will get done and the problem won’t be fixed. And the problem is America’s worsening gun culture.
Congress sort of addressed it for themselves: they’re made themselves a hard target, surrounded by security forces, a place where guns are not permitted.
Funny how that works.
Stay positive, be strong, and vote blue in 2024. Coffee has broached my system. Here’s the music video. Cheers
I’m at the coffee shop. For a period, I was the sole customer sitting at a table. Seeing the empty chairs reminded me of regulars who I haven’t seen in a while.
I wonder, what happened to Patty? She was homeless but welcomed here. She kept to herself but I know from overheard conversations that she had a support group helping her, and she’d gotten a job. I hope she’s off the streets and okay.
Austin is another I wonder about. I haven’t seen him since my return at the end of May. He disappeared for a while last year. Always sporting his backpack, I used to see him wandering the city. There’s been no recent sightings.
The third missing regular is Bob. Bob, older, retired teacher and athlete, was succumbing to hip and knee problems. He was nearing 80, I think, and looking tired when I last saw him. Maybe he’s just recovering somewhere.
That’s the thing about seeing regulars and becoming familiar with a small slice of their habits. They’re not an open book. Their story is rarely fully learned by casual observers like me.
But then, that’s true with most of the people we regularly encounter, isn’t it? Cashiers and servers, students and coffee drinkers, we’re a momentary presence in others’ lives.
Michael Seidel, writer 