Tag: rant

Out Shopping

Get ready for an old man rant. That’s how it sounds in retrospect. Let it fly.

“Let’s go shopping,” my wife said. “Plan a day when we go out so I can get new exercise clothes. I want to go to my exercise class in person on April first, and I’d like to do it in something other than the clothes I was wearing two years ago.”

Yes, I agreed, because I knew what she was talking about. We’ve been strong isolationists, social distancing, zooming, vaccinated, masking, almost living like recluses. Well, recluses who have television and streaming services, computers, telephones, and safe friend pods. Maybe not quite recluses. Maybe, that’s an exaggeration. Maybe.

But we went through this before, where mandates were lifted, places partially opened. We took advantage of that. Our concern is that there will be some sort of new worrying spike and mandates and shutdowns will roll in anew. So we went out shopping and ate in a restaurant. Masks were worn while shopping. We wore masks until we were seated in our isolated, plastic walled table at the restaurant. We went early, to avoid crowds, but risks remain. The masked were the minority by far.

It’s been a while since I went shopping. I think it’s been a year. I saw some blue jeans. Levi’s. I thought, hey, they’re nice. Maybe I’ll buy a pair of denim pantaloons. The price stopped me: $69.50. For jeans? Off the shelf jeans? Levi’s? I remember when they were the jeans of the poor and downtrodden. And that at J.C. Penney’s.

Looking at shoes, I was appalled about how ugly and clunky men’s shoes have become during the pandemic. Lot of red, white, and blue stuff, too. I thought, I’ll have to watch people, see how many are actually wearing these. I suppose I’ll need to focus on the young, those who have not yet counted past forty years.

Wrigley’s gums come in Peppermint ‘Cobalt’ and Spearmint ‘Rain’. WTF? I read their ingredients: they looked like gum with a new name.

My superpower held solid, so I managed to find the worst checkout line possible at Target. It’s good to know that I can depend on that power. I perused magazines at hand. Know how much a magazine costs? $12.99 USD. What? Why, that’s how much a book used to cost. Now, of course, a book is $26.00 for a hardback, $16.00 for a softback. That’s why I buy used books or go to the library. Of course, many used books are now over $10.00

Then there was my beer: $7.25 for 16 ounces of Blue Moon. My entree was $11.99. My drink was over 50% of the price of my meal. That’s frigging stunning. They asked me if I wanted a 22 oz beer, but that would’ve probably topped my credit card’s limit. It only goes into five digits.

I guess it was all a shocker. I’ve seen food prices. We laughed about paying $50 at grocery stores and walking out with two light bags. Filling the gas tank on the Mazda was $45.

Stunning. I feel for the people on the edge. I remember when I had people working for me in the military thirty years ago, and the cost of childcare. It basically almost equaled those young people’s take home pay. I hear it’s become worse. Looking at the small sampling which I experienced, I believe it.

1

The Healthy Stuff

Sickening, you know?

I was grocery shopping in a store during the ‘vulnerable hours’. Walking down the frozen food aisle as my wife shopped for baking supplies, I spied ‘healthy’ meals. You probably know of these. They proudly proclaim, ‘Organic!’ ‘Low Fat’ (or Lo Fat). ‘Gluten Free’. They like to tell about how little sugar they have and how much protein they have.

That’s all great. Checking out the sodium levels on the nutrition panels always leaves me shaking my head. Rare is the one that lists sodium levels that are in the twenty-thirty percent range of the recommended daily levels. Most are forty to fifty percent. That’s because sodium is not just for flavor, but is also a stabilizing and binding influence, and also helps extend the shelf life.

Well, how is it healthy?

We know that it isn’t don’t we? But, here in the United States, we play these games about what is healthy and safe, what’s a ‘good value’, and what’s nutritional. It’s been going on (and escalating) for decades. Remember when ketchup was classified as a vegetable under the Reagan Administration back in the 1980s?

Just a mid-morning mini-rant. Sorry. Do carry on. We’ll now return to our normal activities already in progress.

1

Just Sayin’

I think some people miss the point behind cutting the cable.

Cutting the cable has been around for a while. It’s an expression used when you decide to terminate cable service. That would’ve once been unthinkable. When I was a child — yeah, here we go.

I’m a boomer, in my sixties. I’ve seen the rise of the microwave and electronics. Cable television came to my neighborhood while I was in high school. Before cable, we were dependent on ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. One of those networks had two channels in our area.

Reruns were the norm. “Bonanza”, “Gunsmoke”, “Gilligan’s Island”, and “Perry Mason” came on throughout the day, along with every version of a Lucille Ball’s offerings, game shows like “Jeopardy” and “Password”, and talks shows like “The Merv Griffin Show”. As this was a rural, churchy area, so we also had a lot of gospel music sang off-key with with a twang, and plenty of Bible thumping.

Cable, then, expanded our ability to watch different reruns on other channels. We had, I think, thirty-two channels and we paid about twenty dollars a month. None were ‘premium’ channels; HBO, Showtime, and offerings like that were just being thought of and begun in those days. It didn’t come to my area until I’d left the area in 1974.

Still, cable offered us more. That was the point. Then, the point became, cable is offering the same thing over and over, or offering us things that doesn’t interest us. Upon returning to the United States after some overseas assignment, my wife and I subscribed to cable television. It was pretty good for a while. A&E was delivering fresh BBC television shows like “Ballykissangel” and “Doctor Who”. TBS provided reruns. “Original” programming was still a number of years away, along with reality shows.

Off we went to somewhere else outside the U.S. This time, upon returning, we signed up for cable, with some premium offerings.

It was no longer a sweet deal. The price had jumped to over fifty dollars a month. Pausing to put that into perspective, my income was about twenty-five thousand. Our new sports car cost fifteen thousand. Our phone bill (cell phones weren’t on the scene yet) was about twenty-five dollars a month. So fifty a month was a chunk.

Back to cable. Premium movies had already been seen, so I was paying for movie reruns, and they showed them over and over and over. The cable company boasted that we had one hundred channels. Our point was, there was nothing on that we wanted to watch.

That trend worsened, in my mind. We went to a hundred and forty plus channels, two hundred channels, dozens of premium offerings. Prices climbed, but nothing was on. By the time I cut the cable, we’d curtailed the premium offerings. No reason to subscribe because they offered so little. By then, we could rent videos, and then discs at Blockbusters and other places. Eventually, Netflix evolved.

We cut the cable ten years ago. I went with Roku and subscribed to Netflix. I remain a Netflix subscriber. I also subscribe to Hulu basic and Amazon Prime. Others come and go, usually for a month at a time. I’m not the demographic target, though; I have no interest in watching television on my phone.

I monitor streaming offerings, and frequently try them out on a trial basis. They’ve become bloated and useless. Let’s talk SlingTV as an example. They’re offering over a hundred channels for just $65 a month. But looking at them, I know that I’ll end up watching very little of that.

The same happens with countless offerings. They think signing on to more channels is a big deal. It’s not; it goes back to the same problem that plagued us when we had four channels: nothing was on that we wanted to watch.

Original programming helps the situation these days. So does stealing ideas from other countries or importing television series and movies from other countries. As we discovered with A&E, and then BBC America, the rest of the world has fantastic stuff. In example, one show that’s currently doing well in the U.S. in “The Masked Singer”. Just as “Survivor” was an import, so is “The Masked Singer”; it came from Korea.

In the end, this is another rant, innit? Just an aging American musing about the ways that the world does and doesn’t change.

At least with remotes, it’s easier to change the channel. You know what we had to do when I was in high school?

0

Mysterious Ol’ Facebook

A small mid-morning rant, category: technology.

Facebook notifications won’t load/display this morning. After playin’ with it five minutes as I sipped coffee and doing a few searches for fixes, I shrugged it away and reported it. Not a big deal, really.

After reporting it and sending a screen shot, I noticed my FB support inbox was showing four new messages. I opened it.

None were new. One was over sixteen months old. They were all about my violations of their community standards. They’re a laugh.

One was a Bored Panda post I’d shared about people working from home and dealing with their dogs. This affronted Facebook’s spam standards.

Whaaat? They don’t want me to share humorous animal stories because they’re ‘spam’? Geez, I think I’ve been using FB wrong lo’ these many years.

Two others were messages updating me about my protests. They’d blocked two others because they violated their community standards. I’d appealed. These were notices that they were wrong, and had restored the posts. Well, good for me. Good for FB.

The fourth was an appeal I’d put in about another post they’d removed. They were reviewing it and would get back to me soon. Dated June 12, 2019, I figured their idea of ‘soon’ and mine doesn’t match.

Now, the most interesting thing is that the notifications that I can’t see on FB, I can see when I’m in my FB support inbox. Intrigued, I went back to FB and attempted to see the notifications through various feeds. No go. But the push notifications still pop up and load.

Well, it’s modern technology, innit? When it works, it’s great. When it fails, it’s a big friggin’ mystery. In the ol’ days, we’d clean the cache, or reboot, or sumpin’. I’m going to have more coffee, and see if that takes care of it.

2

Are You Outraged?

Someone else wrote a blog titled, “Are You Outraged?” And I thought, am I outraged?

Let’s see. I was born in 1956, eleven years after WW II, but while the conflict in Korea was happening, and as the U.S. was getting drawn into Vietnam.

The Cold War was going strong. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. were ready to launch nukes and drop nukes at the slightest provocation.

1960 began strong, with John F. Kennedy getting elected. He promised to put a man on the moon. Meanwhile, protests and riots began. The 1960s were full of blood and smoke. Kennedy was assassinated; so was his brother. And Martin Luther King, Jr. Many blacks were lynched and murdered. Battles were fought over segregation, “Separate but equal”, and desegregation.

As races fought for equality, so did women, but the Equal Rights Amendment stalled.

The arms race sucked up resources and attention. Korean and Vietnam were ‘ended’ as conflicts, but more conflicts sprang up. War has not ceased in my lifetime, despite the fall of the U.S.S.R. Instead, it’s intensified.

As has the battle for equal rights and the ideal that skin color, sexual orientation, religious preferences, and genders should not matter, that we, as a nation, are only as strong as the weakest among us, so we must protect them.

The battle for the environment has intensified, too, and with it, the understanding that this is one world, and once again, in order to survive, we must survive together, and protect our planet, or we may all suffer, and many of us will perish, bringing our civilization to our knees.

These seem like self-evident truths, but instead, another war has arisen, this one about what constitutes truths, facts, science, and evidence. The way that numbers and words are spun to create division and distraction spins my head.

Am I outraged? Fucking yes. After a lifetime of this, I thought we’d be further advanced. But as I watch the police brutality and government response to the murders and protests, echoes of history reverberate. I’m reminded of the tanks in Hungary in 1956 as the Soviet Union crushed an uprising.

I’m reminded of the Watts riots.

I’m reminded of Tienanmen Square in 1989.

I’m reminded of the Berlin Wall.

I’m reminded of Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, and Detroit, Michigan.

I’m reminded of the American Civil War.

I’m reminded of the rise of Solidarity in Poland.

I’m reminded of Ferguson.

I’m reminded of the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

I’m reminded of Kent State in 1970.

I’m reminded of countless sit-ins and marches against war and for peace, against injustice and for equality.

I’m reminded of so many events that I’ve seen and read of in the narrow focus of my short life, and I’m reminded of so many who live in fear and suffer at the hands of those who are supposed to serve and protect.

Am I outraged?

I watch the news, play the viral videos, and read the articles this week and wonder why so many fight against others’ equality. I wonder how so many can be so cruel to fellow humans. The outright cruelty and disregard demonstrated as police officers spray, beat, shoot, and mistreat their fellow citizens, their fellow humans, horrifies me.

Am I outraged?

I am sickened. I am saddened. I am furious.

Yes, I am outraged.

1

Who We Are

Yet another rant, a vent of frustration to try to reconcile an experience. One side of me — the spoiled, arrogant, take-everything-for-granted white male, first world side of me – continues responding to the coronavirus actions as though everything is alright with the world and is thus annoyed, I tell you, peeved, even, about things like one day delivery requiring six days. “What in the world is with that?” that side cries in anger and despair.

The other side of me replies, “Dude, you are a jackass.”

The event in focus is my pecker meds (Tamsulosin). I always get it locally, thirty day supply. But with shit going down, I thought it prudent to get a larger supply.

First, I tried ordering it ahead of time at my regular place, Ashland Drugs. Nope, it was too soon, the system said. By then, shutdowns were announced, so I shifted to Express Scripts.

Well, there were delays. My prescription was for thirty days and I was asking for a supply of ninety days. ES contacted my prescribing urologist for approval. He, they said, in updates on their website, didn’t respond. A day passed. Two. I shifted the order to one day shipping, because I could see that this was gonna take more time than planned. Then I called the urologist’s office and explained what was going on and what needed to be done.

That worked. Presto, order was being processed.

The next day, the order continued being processed.

Ship, damn it, ship, I urged.

Yes, it shipped, on 3/31. Hoorah! Here was the tracking number. They didn’t know when it would be delivered.

Have I mentioned that the requested one day shipping cost twice as much as the prescription?

For some reason, “The Wells Fargo Wagon” song from from The Music Man began providing me background music.

I faithfully tracked the shipment from Arizona to California, and then, by truck, from California up to Washington via DHL. The road from California to Washington is a little trail that we locals call I-5. It goes past my house by a few miles.

That irrational, crazy part of me screamed, “Why can’t they just pull over and toss it to me as they’re passing Ashland?” Yes, even the irrational part of me knows how dumb that suggestion is.

By April 2 I learned that my Tamsulosin would arrive on April 6. The plan was for DHL to truck it to Washington. DHL would hand it over to the USPS up there (I imagined a furtive, midnight exchange). Then the USPS would drive it down to Ashland (probably on I-5) and sneak it to a local carrier and deliver it to me.

Okay, a plan. I like having plans. Plans are good. Problem with this plan was that I’d run out of Tamsulosin on Friday, April 3. That was my last dose.

Well, damn. Not much could be done at that point. I’d tried, I consoled myself. Now my body would just need to endure without the med.

Meanwhile, the reasonable side of me said, “You prick.”

(It seems like an appropriate noun for the situation.)

“You should be thankful that there are people out there risking their health so that you can sit on your ass in the safety of your personal space. And be thankful that someone like Express Scripts exists and that you have a computer and Internet to place the order and follow the tracking information. Be thankful, you cretin, that the drugs are there, are so affordable, and that you have a urologist to help you. Stop looking at the dark side of this, you pessimistic, selfish, jerk, and think of the bigger picture and be fucking grateful.”

To which the other side of me said, “Wow. Mean.”

So, seriously, thanks to all the USPS, DHL, and Express Scripts drivers and people working and all they’re doing to help the rest of us survive. Let me not overlook all those healthcare professionals and government employees. We do appreciate it, even if some of us act like jerks.

Please forgive us for being who we are. We are trying to change. At least, one side of me is.

0

Political Rant

Sorry, but I’ve reached a saturation point with the POTUS and the coronavirus. I need to vent before I bust a spleen (yes, a new phrase that I just made up). (Yeah, that’s a lie; it’s an old expression.) (And I’m not going to bust a spleen.)

See? Consistent. Exaggerate; I own up to it. Lie, same. Consistent.

But, here in the last two days, we have Trump telling the states that they don’t need as many ventilators as they claim.

Trump downplays need for ventilators as New York begs to differ

Meanwhile, he’s berating (and threatening) Ford and GM for not making more ventilators, fast. (Side irritation, as part of that, he’s demanding that GM open their Lordstown, Ohio plant, a plant that GM sold in 2019. Always on top of things, that dithering Donald.)

Trump lashes out at GM, Ford over ventilators

Even as he’s claiming that too many ventilators are being requested and that GM and Ford must make more faster (and sooner), he’s telling states that he won’t give them more unless they’re nice to him.

‘It’s a two-way street’: Trump suggests federal coronavirus aid will be given to governors who ‘treat us well’

Yet, even as he says these things, he said a few weeks ago, “And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” (March 10, 2020)

Prepared? Doesn’t sound like it. Doesn’t look like it.

These statements do not align; they are not consistent. Some might claim that it’s part of a dog and pony show for the public’s consumption, but the inconsistencies don’t strike me as such.

Today, the United States took the lead in total number of cases, almost reaching 97,000 as I write this, surpassing the totals in China and Italy. We’re fortunate to have not met their death totals, but with this administration acting in its mercurial, disorganized ways, it feels like that’s just a matter of time.

The rant is over. That is all.

5

The Quest

Like many, I awoke this morning and began pondering the eternal questions, like, is my head getting smaller?

I wasn’t being facetious. My new Tilley hat had arrived. When I put it on, I discovered it was much larger than my other hat. I confirmed the other was a seven and a half, so the two hats were the same size.* Ergo, my head must be shrinking.

Walking about with my oversized hat on, I entertained the other questions that often plague modern humans.

1. Am I gaining weight or are my pants shrinking?

2. Are my pants getting longer, or am I getting shorter?

3. Is it possible for me to be both gaining weight and getting shorter?

4. Can my pant legs be getting longer while my pants waist is shrinking?

5. If something really had 1/4 the fat of the regular stuff, can I really eat four times as much?

6. How much beer can a beer drinker drink if a beer drinker only drank beer?

These are serious questions. The one about my shrinking head especially worries me. I can see myself as a man walking around without a head. People would probably soon start head-shaming me, shouting, “Hey, there’s little head,” whenever I pass.

There’s family precedence. My mother, who was much taller than me when I was a child, now seems to be about the size of a garden gnome. She appears to be shrinking more in every dimension every time that I see her. I figure that soon, we’ll be able to hear her, but not see her, unless she stands at the right angle and in the right light. It’s like, “Okay, I see her shadow. Let me just trace that back to her.”

Alas, like others, I found no easy answers to these questions. That’s probably why they plague us.

The quest goes on.

*Editing note: Yes, I know that not all sizes are equal sizes during the modern industrial age. Most people must try on several sets of garments or shoes of the same size before finding one that fits right. Hence, there was one shortcoming to the Tilley replacement hat process: it’s predicated on the idea that all of their hats are the same size.

4

The Madness

Yeah, here we go, a first-world rant.

I’m in ‘my’ coffee shop this morning. It’s about fifty degrees and sunny outside. In here, they have the air-conditioning running. Whaaat? But worse, they’re playing Christmas lullabies. You know what I mean. A Christmas lullaby is one of those old chestnuts being played at a slooow, mellooow speeed, so slow that the singer sounds like they’re on the verge of going to sleep themselves.

I think, the madness, technology, calendar, holidays, and expectations clashing. Oh, the horror, the horror.

Remember, only two million years till Christmas. Make it count.

4

Spoiled

I know it’s another Princess and the Pea complaint, but don’t you hate it when the ‘net is so slow that you can click a link, go make a cuppa coffee, drink half of it, select new music, peruse the newspaper, and then return to the computer in time to see the page load?

These things always trigger corollary suspicions: is it just my provider, or this location, a flawed router or modem, a computer issue, DDoS attack or virus, the web site, the browser…?

Bah. Too damned spoiled, aren’t I?

0

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